DISEMBODIED EXISTENCE, PHYSICALISM AND
THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
Douglas C. Long
Philosophical Studies, 31 (1977), 307-316
[p. 307]
The idea that we may continue to exist in a bodiless condition after our death has long
played an important role in beliefs about immortality, ultimate rewards and punishments,
the transmigration of souls, and the like. There has also been long and heated
disagreement about whether the idea of disembodied existence even makes sense, let
alone whether anybody can or does survive dissolution of his material form. It may seem
doubtful that anything new could be added to the debate at this late date, but I hope to
show that this is not so. I will explore the problem of disembodiment from a somewhat
different direction than has been tried before, one that leads to what seem to me more
interesting and more definite conclusions about its unintelligibility. Furthermore, the
approach I will be taking puts both the traditional mind-body problem and the competing
claims of dualism and physicalism in a fresh light that can help us to understand better
the nature of our embodied existence.
The apparent ease with which the experience of disembodied existence can be
imagined is neatly expressed by P. F. Strawson in his well-known essay on persons.
2
One has simply to think of oneself as having thoughts and memories as at
present, visual and auditory experiences largely as at present, even, perhaps though this involves certain complications some quasi-tactual and organic
sensations as at present, whilst (a) having no perceptions of a body related to
one's experience as one's own body is, and (b) having no power of initiating
changes in the physical condition of the world, such as one at present does
with one's hands, shoulders, feet and vocal chords. Condition (a) must be
expanded by adding that no one else exhibits reactions indicating that he
perceives a body at the point which one's body would be occupying if one
were seeing and hearing in an embodied state from the point from which one
is seeing and hearing in a disembodied state.1
On the basis of this description of apparently disembodied experience Strawson
concludes that we can conceive of a “pure individual consciousness,” [p. 308] a
nonbodily entity which has psychological but no physical properties. I will refer to this
conception as Philosophical Disembodiment to distinguish it from another form of
nonsubstantial existence to be described presently.
It seems so easy to imagine ourselves continuing to be conscious after dissolution
of our bodies in the way Strawson describes that it is difficult to believe that any
philosophical objections to this conception could ever be convincing. Nonetheless, there
is a fatal error in the Strawsonian argument for the intelligibility of nonphysical
existence, and exploitation of this error leads us ultimately to a clearer understanding of
the emptiness of what I have called the philosophical conception of disembodiment.
Strawson apparently assumes that to give a coherent description of an experience
3
which does not include the usual perceptions of a body of one's own is, in itself, to give
coherent expression to the hypothesis of Philosophical Disembodiment. But this
assumption is not justified because someone's having the experience Strawson describes
is compatible with his being in conditions other than Philosophical Disembodiment. It is
possible, for instance, that the subject of the experience in question has a body but is
prevented from having perceptions of it, perhaps by an especially disconcerting form of
hysteria.2 Another much more important alternative, however, is that the “self” having
the experience in question, far from being a “purely mental” subject of consciousness, is
a physical structure having a spatial location but whose constituent elements either are
too small or are of insufficient energy or have the wrong kind of energy to register upon
the senses of human beings or animals. Instead of being a Platonic nonphysical soul, a
person might exist as a 'diaphanous' entity, as some kind of electromagnetic phenomenon,
for instance, or as a field of energy or a sentient cloud of hitherto unknown particles.
Anthony Flew calls this 'the Shadowman doctrine' of a 'corporeal' but 'ethereal and an
elusive' soul.3 I will refer to this view as the hypothesis of Diaphanous Existence since,
although the conscious subject is a physical entity, it is not in the ordinary sense solid or
material as are human beings and other animals.
The significance of this hypothesis of Diaphanous Existence for our critique of
Strawson's defense of the intelligibility of disembodied existence is that an invisible,
intangible, but physical subject of conscious experiences might well have exactly the sort
of 'bodiless' experience Strawson describes. Like a magnetic field, such a subject's
structure would be detectable with the right equipment; but in the absence of such
equipment its presence would go [p. 309] unnoticed. A diaphanous person's sense
4
perceptors, therefore, might be unable to perceive his own subtle substance even where
they could detect other 'solid' objects and persons. Hence, the occurrence of the 'bodiless'
experience Strawson so readily imagines could be explained either by the hypothesis of
Philosophical Disembodiment or by that of Diaphanous Existence. From this it follows
that he is not justified in concluding that the first hypothesis is intelligible simply on the
grounds that the extraordinary experience in question can be coherently described. The
coherence of that description is one thing; the coherence of a particular hypothesis
explaining why the experience has the character it does is another.
II
Having argued that Strawson's remarks do not establish the intelligibility of Philosophical
Disembodiment, I will now begin constructing my case for the stronger claim that such a
conception of bodiless existence is hopelessly confused. Ironically it will first be
necessary to bring the notion into focus as sharply as possible, a task which is greatly
facilitated by comparing it closely with the idea of a diaphanous entity outlined in the
previous section. We have already noted, for example, that such an entity might be
invisible and intangible because its constituents are too small to register upon our sense
organs. How does this differ from the invisibility and intangibility of a disembodied
spirit? One important difference is suggested by P. T. Geach's test for the existence of
'subtle' physical bodies.
The existence of subtle bodies is a matter within the purview of physical
science; evidence for it should satisfy such criteria of existence as physicists
use, and should refer not only to what people say they have seen, heard, and
felt, but also to effects produced by subtle bodies on physicists' apparatus.
5
The believer in 'subtle bodies' must, I think accept the physicist's criteria of
existence; there would surely be a conceptual muddle in speaking of 'bodies'
but saying they might be incapable of affecting any physical apparatus. For
what distinguishes real physical objects from hallucinations, even collective
hallucinations, is that physical objects act on one another. ... If, therefore,
'subtle bodies' produce no physical effects, they are not bodies at all.4
There is a serious ambiguity, however, in the necessary condition Geach suggests for an
entity's being a physical object. He cannot mean that a genuine, albeit 'subtle', body must
be capable of affecting the instruments available to physicists at the present time, for it is
conceivable that there are physical entities in existence that are not detectable by even the
most sophisticated and sensitive instruments available. Nor can this condition on what is
physical [p. 310] be restricted to what physicists here on earth will encounter in their
investigations. A 'black hole' far beyond our causal horizon certainly counts as a physical
entity. So does any entity whose structure eludes detection for reasons that have a
scientific explanation, whether or not we happen to know what that explanation is.
Therefore, if the conception of a nonphysical particular is to be distinguished from that of
a merely undetected or contingently undetectable phenomenon, such a particular must be
somehow in principle undetectable and incapable of influencing scientific instruments no
matter how sensitive they become through future technological development and it must
have this character for reasons that it is not the business of science to provide.
The absolutely crucial importance of this radical distinction between a 'subtle
body' and a truly nonphysical conscious subject is easily overlooked when we try to
imagine disembodied existence. It is tempting to think of the soul as an invisible and
6
intangible locus of consciousness which, though elusive, may also influence material
objects directly, as in psychokinesis or in the misbehavior of poltergeists. In our casual
and unsophisticated talk of the soul no serious doubts are likely to be raised about the
assumption that spirits can affect objects in 'this' world while being themselves utterly
beyond discovery and detailed examination by science. Even Strawson permits himself to
think that a disembodied person could have the power of initiating changes in the
physical condition of the world, although he dismisses this possibility as a 'rather vulgar
fancy, in the class of the table tapping spirits with familiar voices'.5 Yet, robust worldly
activity by an entity would cast doubt upon its alleged nonphysical character, for if it can
alter physical states of affairs, this indicates that it is open to science to try to detect and
measure such effects and to draw inferences concerning the location and nature of the
being producing them. If the presence of a conscious entity could so much as deflect the
pointer needle of a meter, we could no longer pretend that we understood what was meant
by denying that such an entity was a species of physical phenomena. The mere fact that it
had psychological properties and was in this sense a 'subject' or 'personality' would not
support such a denial. Nor would the fact that its substance was so attenuated as to be
very difficult to detect. Such explanations are appropriate to account for the ‘hiddenness’
of diaphanous entities, but not "genuinely" disembodied spirits. The substance of an
individual that is not physical in a philosophically interesting sense must represent an
alternative, not merely to grosser forms of matter, [p. 311] like that comprising our
bodies, but to the most finely attenuated substances, to gases, to energy, to fields, and to
any other kind of 'content' that science might postulate and incorporate into its
intersubjective systems of explanation.
7
Our central question then, is whether we can in the end make sense of the attempt
to set limits to what counts as physical so as to define by contrast conceptual room for
'nonphysical' individuals. Is it intelligible to suppose that a conscious being could be
incapable of interaction with anything we might regard as physical, not because it is too
small or too remote but because it is too small or too remote but because… Here words
seem to fail us. A materialist will at once insist that the emptiness of the idea of
something existing not merely beyond our physics but beyond the physical is only too
apparent. We can conceive of no such limits to the physical.
There is, however, one class of items which have traditionally been regarded as
'nonphysical'. Mental phenomena are said to be 'private', in the sense that they can be
experienced only by the subject having them, unlike physical objects. Moreover, spatial
locations do not seem to be assignable to thoughts and feelings, except insofar as the
person having them has a location. Bodily sensations have a phenomenal place within
one's body, but this does not count as an independently assignable location in space. For
instance, the spatial location of a thorn in my finger can be given independently of its
location in my finger, but the pain the thorn causes cannot be located in space
independently of determining the bodily place where it hurts. Given these differences
between ordinary objects and 'experiences' it is understandable that philosophers should
mark the contrast by classing the latter as 'nonphysical' items.
If such experiences are to pass all of the tests for counting as nonphysical,
however, they must also differ from physical phenomena in being in principle
undetectable by scientific instruments. Putting the point more generally, conscious
experiences must be incapable of affecting any physical system if collections of them are
8
to constitute genuinely disembodied personalities. If, like magnetic fields, for example,
experiences could affect physical things, then their alleged epistemological privacy and
lack of assignable location would be called into question.
But can it be plausibly maintained that interaction between thoughts and feelings,
on the one hand, and physical objects, on the other, is impossible? In what follows I will
try to explain on behalf of the concept of Philosophical Disembodiment [p. 312] that this
can be argued. It should be kept in mind, however, that I do this in order to be as
generous as possible to the friends of 'nonphysical particulars'. Subsequently I will offer
reasons for rejecting the assumption that experiences could conceivably constitute a
personal subject.
How then might one set about arguing that mental phenomena cannot act upon
physical bodies and are therefore, in the required sense, 'nonphysical'? Consider some
examples. It will be recalled that Geach draws a contrast between nonexistent objects
represented in hallucinations and physical bodies, on the grounds that bodies act upon
one another. Presumably what he means is that hallucinated objects, such as the dagger
that appeared before Macbeth's eyes, do not interact with tangible, space-occupying
bodies. Duncan's blood could not have been shed by means of that dagger. The point can
be generalized in the following way. Not only are thoughts, feelings, and perceptions
experienced exclusively by their respective subjects; they can affect directly only such
subjects, not mere objects. For example, the only direct effect that a sensation can have is
that of being felt by a particular subject. I can say that I feel a pain in my arm but not that
my arm feels pain, since the arm is not properly regarded as a subject of experience.
Again, it has been standard doctrine that another subject, say, my physician, cannot feel
9
the pain I have in my arm, but it seems even more certain that nonsubjects such as his
instruments cannot feel it either. Nor is there any other effect that pain, qua pain, could
be said to have upon mere physical devices. The most the doctor's instruments can do is
register the occurrences of certain electrical and chemical events that are correlated with
my-feeling-pain, or, if physicalism is correct, they would detect events which constitute
my-feeling-pain.
But do we not say that a pain can cause a wince or that a thought can increase the
pulse rate? Are these not cases of direct causal interactions between mental events and
physical events? Here a defender of genuine disembodiment must insist that these
examples rest on an elliptical description of the transaction. The pain is felt by me, a
personal subject, and my feeling it is said to make me wince. But the pain cannot be said
to trigger directly electrical and chemical events in my muscles independently of its
effect upon me, even where the wince is not attributed to me as an action but is thought
of as an involuntary muscle contraction. A sensation is not the kind of item that can bypass a subject's feeling it and enter directly into causal relations with purely nonconscious
physical items like muscle fibers, [p. 313] neurons, and chemical substances. If we trace
back the 'causal chains' from the neurological events leading to my wincing we may think
of ourselves as exploring the physical events 'underlying' my-feeling-a-pain-that-makesme-wince, but we cannot suppose that we might uncover a pain linked directly to a
succession of physical events.
We seem then to have found paradigms of the nonphysical which cannot
conceivably interact directly with physical systems, even where the system happens to be
a person. This impossibility is not due to a physical elusiveness but to the 'conceptual'
10
restriction that mental phenomena in their capacity as experiences can be said to affect
only subjects of experience and only in their capacity as subjects. A mind-body
transaction must be described as proceeding by way of the person qua subject. It is not
unreasonable to see this point as a vindication of the traditional objection to mind-body
interaction on the grounds that thoughts and feeling are 'too unlike' physical events for us
to find their interaction intelligible.6 If these claims are correct, then a 'bodiless' stream
of consciousness would seem to satisfy all the criteria for genuine disembodiment,
including its being inaccessible to scientific detection devices, however sensitive they
may be.
III
We are now in a position to assess the core thesis of the disembodiment hypothesis. We
have said that a 'stream of consciousness' satisfies the criteria of the nonphysical. The
question remaining is this: Can we use this concept of a stream of consciousness to make
intelligible the concept of a nonphysical subject of experience?
Two traditional philosophical views about the way persons are constituted are
relevant to this question. The first is the Humean idea that a disembodied individual is a
'bundle' of the sort of items we have singled out as paradigms of the nonphysical, i.e.
particular thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. It is reasonable to assume that if each
element of the bundle is nonphysical then the whole collection will be. But the Humean
account fails as a conception of a subject of experience for reasons that are by now
familiar. The thoughts and feelings which are candidates for the class of nonphysical
items are 'objects' of a subject's awareness and are not the kind of item to which the
subject itself can be reduced. If such mental phenomena were to constitute the subject
11
they would have to be independent particulars in their own right, [p. 314] which would
permit them to be contingently related to the group making up the subject. If they had
this status, however, it would make sense to say, for example, that the particular pain
Smith is suffering now might have afflicted Jones instead of Smith. But this kind of
remark does not make sense because we distinguish sensations of different persons by
identifying them as the experiences of different individuals, not by identifying them as
distinct particulars in their own right. Hence, the experiences of different persons are not
independent particulars that happen to come together to constitute a 'self'.
The second view we have to consider, the Cartesian conception of persons,
attempts to meet the foregoing objection to the Humean analysis by postulating a mental
substance that is a unifying subject of conscious states. But this addition harbors two fatal
difficulties. First, if there could be such a nonphysical substance, the dualistic conception
of disembodiment would require that it be incapable of interaction with physical systems,
including the human body. Thus a radical dualism of substances could distinguish
Philosophical Disembodiment from Diaphanous Existence only at the price of rendering
mind-body interaction and, hence, embodied existence, conceptually impossible. Second,
according to traditional dualism a person is a non-physical res cogitans that exists over
and above its thoughts and feelings. But this point neatly cancels the very feature that
made the Humean analysis appear to satisfy our criteria of the nonphysical. For if the
subject is not constituted by nonphysical mental phenomena then we have no way to
explain what it means to claim that it might be nonphysical. Perhaps it will be suggested
that what is meant is simply that it exists, not diaphanously, but beyond all conceivable
interaction with physical phenomena. But this will not do because the only way we have
12
been able to draw an intelligible contrast between what is physical and what is not has
been in terms of the salient features of thoughts and feelings. There is no reason
whatsoever to think that this contrast can be extrapolated so as to render comprehensible
a similar distinction between physical and nonphysical substances.
This critique of Philosophical Disembodiment runs counter to the long acceptance
of its intelligibility even by those who think dualism is false. Superficially it seems
coherent to suppose that a mental substance might exist that is incapable of physical
influence because it can only think and feel. But the point is that while the phrase
“because it can only think and feel” is intended to explain why the substance is incapable
of physical effects, in [p. 315] reality it only repeats the claim that it is. That a substance
has psychological attributes, i.e. thoughts and feelings, tells us nothing whatever about
the ontological structure of the subject of those attributes. A subject of experience may
be visible and tangible as are human beings, for instance; and although it does not follow
from the fact that some subjects are physical that all must be, it does follow that the
concept of a subject of experience is too inclusive to mark off a distinct class of
nonphysical individuals.
The illusion that a subject could be a 'purely mental' individual, a thinking
substance that has no physical structure, arises out of a serious confusion concerning the
mental/physical dichotomy. At the level of personal ascriptions, the words 'mental' and
'physical' merely mark a contrast between two somewhat vaguely defined classes of
predicate that are applicable to persons, or between two aspects of persons which we talk
about in terms of the dummy subjects, mind and body.7 Unfortunately in the traditional
discussions of the mind-body problem this familiar contrast between classes of attributes
13
has come to be misguidedly applied at a deeper ontological level. Hence the invention of
the philosopher's myth – mental, nonphysical, or spiritual substance -- which is thought to
exist alongside 'physical substance'. The truth is, however, that there is no mental
alternative to physical individuals at this ontological level. A person, therefore, is not
merely contingently physical but must be physical, in the peculiar philosophical use of
that term which contrasts only with the utterly confused idea that persons might be
identified with one or more 'unobservable', 'private', 'undetectable' mental items that they
are said to have, i.e. visual images, sensation, and thoughts. Hence to be a 'physicalist' in
this sense is not to place persons in one ontological category open to individuals rather
than another, but is simply to reject the idea that persons might be something other than
relatively dense or relatively attenuated individuals.
This essential physicalism, though modest, is nonetheless important because it
eliminates some of the long-puzzling questions about mind-body interaction and personal
identity. It shows in addition that traditional 'materialism' is only in part an empirical
hypothesis. For instance, from what we have said it is clear that J. J. C. Smart's rejection
of what he much too loosely refers to as 'ghost stuff' has an a priori justification insofar as
he means by this to deny the existence of independent nonphysical (mental) particulars
alongside the atoms and molecules composing a person.8 On the other hand, the question
whether a person's being in a particular type of psychological [p. 316] state corresponds
to or can be helpfully explained by his being in this or that 'underlying' neurological
condition appears to be one that only science can attempt to answer.
14
ENDNOTES
1
Individuals, London, 1959, p. 115.
2
This point is made by O. Max Hocutt in 'Strawson on "Disembodied Existence"', read at
the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago, April 1973.
3
See Flew's article. Immortality', ed. by Paul Edwards, in The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy IV (1967), 140.
4
God and the Soul, London, 1969, p. 18.
5
Strawson, op. cit., p. 115.
6
C. D. Broad discusses this and similar objections to mind-body interaction in The Mind
and Its Place in Nature, New York, 1951, p. 98.
7
I discuss the status of mind and body as parallel aspects of a person in 'The Bodies of
Persons', The Journal of Philosophy LXXI (1974), 294-96.
8
‘Sensations and Brain Processes', The Philosophical Review LXVIII (1959), 153.