Dr. Vallicella has a Substack article out about neuroscience's exploration of prayer and meditation, and what Dr. V sees as confusions that people who talk and think about this subject are prey to. Here's a little sampler:
What I am objecting to is not neuroscience, which is a wonderful subject worth pursuing to the hilt. What I am objecting [to] is scientism, in the present case neuroscientism, the silly notion that learning more and more about a hunk of meat is going to give us real insight into the mind and is operations and is going to solve the philosophical problems in the vicinity.
Dr. V has long been a substance dualist.* I am not. I'm probably closer to the "supervenience" camp when it comes to mind, consciousness, etc.: mind is something that arises out a certain arrangement of matter. Dr. V will find my view too reductionist for his taste since it's basically a form of materialism or physicalism (not to be confused with Marxist dialectical materialism). But I think it's fair to ask a substance dualist why a person whose brain is ravaged by cancer, or who gets shot in the head, evinces a change in mental status that corresponds to a change in the brain's physical status. If the mind (or, hey, the soul) is so radically separate from my mortal body, being shot in the head or getting brain cancer should affect me—the essential me—not at all. And yet it seems clear to me that there's a tight linkage, an undeniable connection, between the mind and the brain. No brain, no mind. Substance dualism doesn't explain how this is possible. If anything, I get the impression that substance dualism denies there's any connection at all.
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*Going back at least to Descartes if not before, substance dualism splits reality into two things: res cogitans (mental things) and res extensa ("extended," i.e., physically dimensional and material things). These two things exist, but they are different at the level of substance, i.e., substantially different. Hence the term substance dualism: two things that are fundamentally different from one another.
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