Mind-body dualism comes up next, and here's the clip.

When you talk to a person, they have thoughts and feelings and responses.

When you talk to a dead person, a corpse, I need I'd be morbid here but you don't get

those same responses those same thoughts and feelings it's very natural very common

sensical to think that a living person possesses something that a corpse does not some sort of spirit

some sort of animating soul or life force but this idea as it as it turns out, does not stand up to closer scrutiny. And a big step towards realizing this was made back in the 1600s by a remarkable woman named Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. They made princesses differently back in the 17th century. Elizabeth carried on a year's long correspondence with René Descartes, who famously tried to develop a theory of mind-body dualism.

And Elizabeth said, I don't understand what you're saying because if you really believe that the mind is in a separate realm from the body,

my mind makes a choice to lift my arm, but it's my body that does it. How does the immaterial mind that you say doesn't

exist at a location in space? How does it act causally on the body? How does it interact with the stuff

out of which you are made? And Descartes never came up with a reliable, believable response to this

objection. Of course, these days, the objection is enormously stronger. We would say,

you are made of atoms. You are made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms,

and as physicists, we know how atoms behave. The laws of physics governing the behavior of atoms

are completely understood. You put an atom in a certain set of circumstances. If you tell me what

those circumstances are, as a physicist, I will tell you what the atom will do. If you believe that the atoms that are inside your brain and your body act differently because they are in a living person than if they are in a rock or a crystal, then what you're saying is that the laws of physics are wrong, that they need to be altered because of the influence of a spirit or a soul or something like that.

That may be true. Science can't disprove that, but there is no evidence for it.

And you get a much stronger explanatory framework by assuming that it's just atoms obeying the laws of physics.

That kind of reasoning is a big step toward naturalism.

That's interesting about Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Descartes, Bill.

But Carol thinks we can pretty much rule out mind-body dualism, even if we can't totally disprove it.

I think that he's mistaken here. What's the objection to dualist interactionism supposed to be here?

He seems to think that the problem is that the soul is not located in its body and therefore

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