Asking both the user’s heart and its owner: Empirical evidence for substance dualism

Abstract

Mind-body physicalism is the metaphysical view that all mental phenomena are ultimately physical phenomena, or are necessitated by physical phenomena. Mind-body dualism is the view that at least some mental phenomena are non-physical. While mind-related concepts are usually measured using questionnaires, body-related concepts are measured using physiological instruments. We breakdown the narrowed measuring approaches within the simplified mind-body discussion to all four possible substance-measuring pairs and evaluate the mind-body substance dualism theory versus the physicalism theory applying perceived and physiological measured stress data using a wearable long-term electrocardiogram recorder. As a result we derive empirical evidence and strong arguments against physicalism, and assess the overall strength of the benefits of NeuroIS instruments as complementary measures.