It’s literally like this:
Materialists/Physicalists: “The thoughts in your head come from your conditions and are ultimately the result of your organs and nervous system. Your consciousness is linked to your brain activity and other parts of your body interacting with the physical real world.”
Dualists: “Ok but what if there were an imaginary zombie that has the same organs and molecular structure as a living person but somehow isn’t alive on some metaphysical level. If this zombie is conceivable, that means it must be metaphysically true somehow.”
Materialists: “That’s circular and imaginary, isn’t it?”
Other dualists: “Ok but what if I were in a swamp and lightning strikes a tree and magically creates a copy of me but it’s not actually me because it doesn’t have my soul.”
Am I reading this stuff wrong or are these actually the best arguments for mind-body dualism
If you’re talking about Rene “uh ackually, the immaterial soul steers the material body through the pituitary gland despite being immaterial” Descartes dualism, yeah it’s pretty much garbage. They can never explain how something immaterial can not only interact but dominate something material. The idea of the immaterial dominating the material has insidious implications. This is why settlers constantly paint Indigenous people and Asians to a lesser extend as noble savages “close to nature.” Being close to nature is to say they’re more bestial and lower in the great chain of being compared with the cerebral European whose closer proximity to God means they are more distant from nature. Their alleged distance from God means the God given rights of life, liberty, and most importantly, property did not apply to them, giving settlers ideological carte blanche to steal land from the Indigenous and genocide Indigenous peoples in the same way you get rid of termites eating your house.
“Everything is possible with sheer infinite willpower” takes are also the basis of sigma grindset :brainworms: and lots of :libertarian-approaching: delusions in general.