Dualism can be defended through proving Epiphenomenalism wrong. To do so, there are basically two arguments: the synchronic
and the diachronic argument.
The synchronic argument shows that some of the Epiphenomenalist premisses have to be logically false. This doctrine believes mental events have no material consequences but only the physical events can produce effects; the causal relation goes from matter to mind and never the other way around. Therefore the influence of the mind in the body is just an illusion. Even so we have good conceptions of the material world in our mind that can only be created through causal interaction. In this line of thought there must be some influence from intellect to matter. Epiphenomenalism does not accept this and does not give a contre-argument. so it makes their conception unacceptable.
The diachronic argument is based on the natural selection. If mental abilities have no influence in the actual world then they should change to facilitate and improve survivival and reproduction. If just the physical events have an impact in our life, then the mind’s characteristics have no reason to mutate. But they are not static, they do change according to natural seleccion. This shows that the mental properties must have some kind of effect unless the chages would be absurd because nature always have a cause, a reason for the phenomenons. Before this faults of Epiphenomenalism the only wise alternative is Dualism.
Lao Tzu (570-490 BC) lived in Luoyang, the ancient capital of China, where he founded the Taoism. He was the theme of several legends which even included meetings with Confucious. His writtings were very peculiar using a simple but almost musical way to choose words and write sentences.
Although Tzu’s teachings can be considered as being not part of the dualism, his theory seams to be supporting the main idea of Descartes. The “Old Philosopher” in his book, Tao Te Ching, talks about the “unvarying way” or “Tao”, comparing it to “a bellows: empty, but inexhaustible” (Lao Tzu, 5).
Tao is the junction of the invisible (we can not see it), the inaudible (we can not hear it) and the intangible (we can not touch it). In spite of this the unvarying way is what makes the world what it is; everything depends on it and it completes things. Te is the manifestation of Tao in the objective world. One can see some similarities between Lao’s philosophy and Dualism: Tao is the non-extensable, the spiritual entity factor of the world’s order, affecting it through non-action (mind); Te is the tool the unvarying way uses to reflect its effects in the material world (body); Tao controls Te and Te does what Tao orders.
Lao Tzu based Taoism in the Yin-Yang (duality of nature) conception: in the world there are two parts and neither of them is better than the other. Starting from the preconception that dualism represents any type of vision which divides the world in two, Tzu could also be in this way a dualist supporter. Although in Taoism it is only our perception that really changes as reality stays the same without belonging to Yin or Yang, it expresses some kind of dualistic view.
If we accept the existence of both body and mind, the first as extended and the second as not extended, and that they interact with each other, we are put before the problem of mental causation. According to De Homine, the body has no power to control the mind but the mind can influence the body. Although the body acts without an intervention of the soul, our spiritual part is sometimes able to rule the matter’s movement.
In spite of this causation bodies work in the way that movement is explained by: A forces B to do an action through C, being C the spatial contact. The mind needs to have some kind of link to the body in order to influence it. We can say that the pineal grandula provides this connection. Nervertheless the transference theories of causation also infer that for the cause to influence the effect it can not prevent the transference of some properties. This means that if the mind controls the matter through the pineal glandula in this process it, obviously and with no capacity to prevent it, gives the body some of the soul’s intrinsic characteristics. But Descartes says the soul is all thought and the body is all extention and regarding this the body can not have any property in common with the mind. Then according to Dualism the mind can not influence the body or else they would share some properties which is not possible in this line of perspective.
Once considering the mental causation’s theory as certain it becames difficult to accept dualism because it completely destroys the connection and interraction between mind and body and it is a problem to believe that there is not and never will be a soul/body relation. To overcome such a complex obstacle there was even the birth of the Property Dualism which defenders say that the soul’s properties are not reducable to scientific theories applied to other types of elements and properties. In anyways this is a difficult problem for Dualism to solve.