Materialism versus Dualism

Abstract Materialism is the doctrine that the world is entirely physical, whereas dualism is the doctrine that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world: mind and bodies. Dualists say that minds are not made out of physical stuff, and they are not subject to the laws of nature. There are a number of arguments for dualism, ranging from concerns about free will, to religious concerns about life after death, to the difficulty of explaining consciousness in physical terms. However, there are also serious problems with dualism, including the problem of explaining how the mind and body interact, and the fact that materialism seems, overall, the simpler theory.