With all the discussion surrounding chatbots and consciousness, you might think there are good reasons to affirm that machines will someday be conscious in the way that you and I are conscious. To affirm this would be to deny that ancient belief that we, as persons, are souls or spirits that could exist apart from our bodies. This notion would certainly be out of place in our scientific discussions today as low-level animals and machines are perceived, by some, as meeting all the necessary conditions for becoming conscious, rational agents who can enter into deep and meaningful relationships upon rational deliberation.

But this assumption would be too quick. If we humans are souls (or spirits) and the soul is the grounds for consciousness, rational deliberation, and free will, then it would probably rule out the possibility that low-level animals and machines could become conscious like you or me.

That said, there have been several objections raised against the view that we are souls or spirits (as Descartes put it, minds that are the proper seats of consciousness). There in fact 10 common objections raised against this view — often called substance dualism (i.e., that we are comprised of two fundamental parts, mind (or soul) and body, and each has its respective characteristics: minds/souls are the bearers of consciousness, moral awareness, and freedom, while bodies are complex and the bearers of quantities that are mathematically measurable and spatially extended. It’s called dualism for short because there are two fundamentally distinct types of things, properties, and parts that explain the world.

In a recent video, I respond to the most common objections to dualism in short, rapid-fire succession. By responding to these objections, I suggest the plausibility of the view of dualism that we are souls/minds and bodies. In the end, if something like dualism is true, then it goes a long way to showing the implausibility of the idea that we are solely meat machines, robots, or complex things that can be adequately explained through limiting empirical means of physics, biology, or chemistry. Instead, we will need to look elsewhere to understand what it means to be truly human, as a mind/soul that exists as distinct from his/her body.