Dualism Is Making A Comeback Among The Secular

For centuries, philosophers and scientists have been trying to kill dualism - the idea that mind and matter are fundamentally different substances. The materialist worldview, which sees consciousness as emerging purely from physical processes, has dominated modern secular thinking. But something interesting is happening: dualism is making a stealth comeback, not through religion or metaphysics, but through our lived experience with technology.

The New Digital Divide

When I look at my teenage nephew using VR, I see someone whose consciousness effortlessly inhabits two realms. In the physical world, he's awkwardly waving his arms around my living room. But in his subjective reality, he's scaling mountains and battling dragons. This duality isn't just superficial - it's becoming fundamental to how younger generations experience existence.

We're all increasingly living dual lives: one in atoms, one in bits. Our physical selves eat, sleep, and decay according to the laws of biology. Our digital selves float through infinite spaces, unconstrained by physical laws, immortalized in clouds of data. This isn't just metaphorical anymore - it's how we actually experience daily life.

The Return of the Ghost in the Machine

The materialist view says consciousness is just what brains do, like digestion is what stomachs do. But our experience with AI is challenging this simple equation. When ChatGPT produces consciousness-like behaviors without anything resembling a human brain, we're forced to confront an uncomfortable question: what if consciousness isn't tied to specific physical substrates?

This question becomes even more pressing as we develop brain-computer interfaces and digital consciousness experiments. The clean materialist story - that mind is just what happens when you arrange matter in certain ways - starts feeling insufficient to capture our lived reality.

Practical Dualism

I'm not arguing for metaphysical dualism here - I'm pointing out that functional dualism is becoming unavoidable in practice. Consider:

• We increasingly treat our digital identities as distinct from but interrelated with our physical selves
• We're developing different rules and norms for physical vs digital spaces
• We're creating technologies that explicitly aim to transfer consciousness between substrates
• Our legal systems are struggling to define personhood in an age of digital entities

This new dualism isn't about souls vs bodies - it's about the pragmatic reality of navigating between physical and digital modes of existence. It's about recognizing that the rules and properties of these domains are fundamentally different, even if they ultimately arise from the same underlying reality.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Digital

There's something liberating about this new dualism. Just as the original mind-body dualism offered hope of transcending physical limitations through spiritual means, digital dualism offers the promise of transcending physical constraints through technological means.

But there's also something unsettling about it. The more we invest in our digital selves, the more we risk becoming disconnected from our biological reality. I see this in myself - sometimes I feel more "real" in digital spaces than in physical ones. My thoughts and relationships increasingly exist in a realm that has no physical location.

Beyond the Binary

The irony here is delicious: in trying to build purely materialist explanations for consciousness, we've ended up creating technologies that make dualism practically inevitable. But perhaps this new dualism isn't a step backward - maybe it's an evolution in how we understand consciousness and reality.

The old philosophical debate about mind vs matter might have been asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to reduce one to the other, maybe we need to embrace the reality that consciousness operates across multiple domains with different properties and rules. Just as quantum mechanics forced us to accept wave-particle duality, our new technological reality is forcing us to accept a kind of consciousness duality.

Living in Multiple Worlds

This has practical implications for how we design technologies and organize society. If we accept that we're increasingly dual beings, we need to:

• Design interfaces that acknowledge and support smooth transitions between physical and digital modes
• Develop ethical frameworks that account for actions and consequences in both domains
• Create social structures that allow for meaningful existence in multiple realms
• Maintain connection to our biological reality while exploring digital possibilities

The challenge isn't to resolve the dualism, but to learn to live productively with it. Like my nephew in VR, we need to become adept at inhabiting multiple realities simultaneously, without losing our grip on either.

Perhaps this is the next stage in human evolution - not transcending our physical nature entirely, but learning to exist authentically across multiple domains of reality. The secular dualists of the future won't be arguing about souls and bodies, but they will be navigating an increasingly complex relationship between physical and digital modes of being.

And maybe that's okay. Maybe the real wisdom lies not in reducing everything to a single substance or explanation, but in embracing the practical reality that consciousness now operates in multiple domains with different properties and possibilities. The ghost isn't in the machine anymore - it's in the network, and we're all learning to be ghosts.