How dualism might work.

[jone...@emporia.edu]

I should first admit that I am not a dualist. Rather, I tend to
believe that thought and mind are a combination of processes like
memory, generalization, comparison, deduction, organization,
induction, classification, feature detection, analogy, ect. performed
by computational machinery. (R. Jones, Transactions of the Kansas
Academy of Science, Vol. 109, # 3/4, 2006) However, it is better to
have two theories rather than one (Peter Cheeseman in The Mathematics
of Generalization, D. H. Wolpert, ed., 1995, pg 315) so I have
considered how dualism might work, including the mind-body interaction
problem.

How might dualism work? An answer is "Like quantum mechanics." The
quantum mechanical wave function is nonphysical; it exists in a 3N
space (for an N body system) not in (x,y,z,t) 4 space and does not
possess physical properties. But real physical things like energy
(which do exist in our world, 4 space) influence the wave function
(of, say, a particle in a well) and the wave function, in its turn,
influences real physical things like where the particle can be found
in 4 space.

The coupling between the spirit-like wave function and things found in
the real world (like energy) is via mathematical equations like the
Schrodinger equation and Born normalization. A dualist theory of
reality, then, might similarly be of a purely mathematical nature.
The problem becomes one of finding the right set of equations.