Dualism
Hasker's Unified Experience, Conscious Self, Causal Mind Requires a Brain-Generated Nonphysical Substance
Consciousness as an Emergent Self Generated by the Brain
William Hasker argues that a unified conscious experience cannot be spread across the parts of a composite object, so the subject of experience cannot be the brain. Instead the developing brain naturally generates a new, non-composite, nonphysical individual, a ‘field of consciousness’ standing to the brain roughly as a magnetic field stands to a magnet. He calls this emergent dualism: the self depends closely on its brain yet has its own causal powers, including rational inference and libertarian free will.
William Hasker
What consciousness is
Consciousness belongs to an emergent individual, a unified nonphysical field generated by the brain that is the subject of experience, thought, and choice.
Mind and body
The brain generates and sustains the mind, which is ontologically distinct from it and acts back on it. The mind is tethered to its particular brain, so there is no pairing problem and no need for God to create each soul separately.
Mechanism
Emergence of an individual: when biological organization reaches the right level, the brain generates a field of consciousness that is qualitatively unlike its parts and exerts causal influence back on them.
Core claims
- A complex state of consciousness cannot exist distributed among the parts of a complex object, so the brain cannot be the subject.
- Unified conscious properties need a unified bearer, so what emerges must be an individual.
- If mental states act only through their physical properties, rational inference is not what it appears to be.
- Libertarian free will requires a unitary agent, which an aggregate of parts is not.
- The brain’s constituents are in constant flux, so materialism makes a person a series of distinct individuals.
Criticisms
Rickabaugh argues the unity argument backfires: if a composite brain cannot ground unified consciousness, it is equally unclear how it could generate a simple substance, so emergent dualism faces a combination problem as hard as panpsychism’s. Kim’s critique of emergence implies that downward causal powers violate the causal closure of the physical, and Shrader holds that a key premise about explanatory relations is unmotivated. The magnet analogy breaks down because magnetic fields are not simple and are fully described by the physics of their sources.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Uncertain
- The self emerges from the potential of suitably organized matter, but Hasker gives no account of which organizations generate it, so whether an artificial system could is open.
- Survival beyond death: Conditional
- Hasker holds that the self would naturally dissipate when the brain is destroyed, so survival requires God to sustain it directly or provide a resurrection body to generate it.
- Meaning and purpose: Cosmic/Ultimate
- Hasker offers emergent dualism as the Christian anthropology best fitted to science, allowing for resurrection and a God-given future.
- Virtual immortality: Uncertain
- The self is tethered to the particular brain that generates it, and the theory does not say whether a copy would generate the same self or a new one.
Related theories
- Emergent Dualism (Overlap)
- Descartes’s Substance Dualism (Critique)
- Stump's Thomistic Dualism (Critique)
- van Inwagen's Christian Materialism and Resurrection of the Dead (Contrast)
Sources
- The Emergent Self, William Hasker (1999)
- Persons and the Unity of Consciousness, William Hasker (2010)
- Emergent Dualism: A Challenge to a Materialist Consensus, William Hasker (2004)
- Materialism and the Resurrection: Are the Prospects Improving?, William Hasker (2011)
- Against Emergent Dualism, B. Rickabaugh (2018)
- Emergent Individuals, T. O’Connor and J. D. Jacobs (2003)
- Hasker on the Unity of Consciousness, W. Shrader (2005)