Author: Anisha Deon
When I was completing the HZB3M Philosophy course through Virtual High School, I enjoyed many of its assignments. The course challenged my critical thinking and personal perspectives in ways that continued beyond the classroom. More significantly, it became one of the primary reasons I developed an interest in academic writing. My teacher, Miss Joanne Robar, was consistently encouraging in her assignment comments and stated several times that she enjoyed reading my written work. Therefore, this post is dedicated to her.
Of all the assignments I completed during that course, “What Is a Person?” was the one I most enjoyed writing even though I clearly remember becoming frustrated with it. The question seemed approachable at first. Once I began comparing materialism, idealism and Cartesian dualism, however, it became increasingly difficult to decide what evidence could establish and where philosophical interpretation began. That tension was probably part of what made the assignment memorable.
I have recently produced a revised version after gaining more academic writing experience and beginning my master’s studies. The new edition does not exist to erase or ridicule the high-school paper. It allows me to examine how my reasoning, research and writing have changed throughout the years. I still acknowledge the writer who wanted to connect metaphysics, psychology and science. The difference now is that I am now more cautious about how those connections are made, more willing to represent opposing positions fairly and less likely to treat an unanswered question as proof of my preferred conclusion.
The revised edition is placed first. The original high school version follows it with its wording, arguments and references preserved. Only the formatting has been adjusted for this post.
Revised Edition
The question of what constitutes a person lies at the intersection of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, psychology and neuroscience. A biological account can describe the human organism whereas psychology can examine cognition, emotion and behaviour. However, Neither discipline independently settles whether the conscious subject is identical to the physical body or whether mental existence possesses characteristics that cannot be reduced to matter. The principal metaphysical responses have traditionally included materialism, idealism and dualism. Materialism states that reality is fundamentally physical, idealism gives priority to mental reality and dualism maintains that the mental and physical are fundamentally distinct in some respect (Robinson & Weir, 2026). Each position identifies a genuine aspect of personhood although none is free from explanatory difficulty. This essay argues that a person is best understood through a qualified form of dualism: human beings are embodied conscious subjects whose mental lives depend upon physical conditions but cannot presently be exhausted by third-person descriptions of those conditions. This position preserves the distinction between mental and physical properties without assuming that the mind and body are two isolated substances.
A fair comparison must first avoid reducing materialism and idealism to their most extreme interpretations. Contemporary physicalism does not usually deny that thoughts, emotions or social realities exist. Instead, it maintains that everything within the actual world is physical or bears a fundamental relationship to the physical (Stoljar, 2026). The mind–brain identity theory advances a stronger claim by proposing that mental states and processes are identical to states and processes of the brain, not merely correlated with them (Smart, 2022). Idealism approaches reality from the opposite direction. Berkeley’s metaphysical idealism holds that reality consists of minds and ideas although his theory does not claim that perceived objects vanish whenever one individual stops observing them. His broader system attempts to explain the stability of the experienced world through its continued relation to mind (Downing & Hilbert, 2026). Dualism rejects both forms of reduction by maintaining that mental and physical reality are fundamentally distinct. Consequently, the debate concerns more than whether people possess brains or conscious experiences. The central issue is whether one category can provide a complete account of the other.
Physicalism possesses substantial empirical strength because changes in conscious awareness are systematically associated with physical changes in the brain. Research into the neural correlates of consciousness seeks to identify the minimum neural mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious experience (Koch et al., 2016). Anaesthesia, neurological disorders and variations in cortical activity demonstrate that consciousness does not operate independently of the condition of the brain during embodied life. Memory also provides no simple escape from this evidence. Memory storage is a metaphor for a complex capacity; it does not require a literal warehouse hidden within an immaterial mind. Therefore, the physicalist can explain memory through the acquisition, retention and retrieval of information within changing neural systems. These findings make it unreasonable to treat the body as an incidental container that contributes nothing to personal existence. Embodiment affects perception, emotion, agency and the continuity through which a person participates in the world. Thus any defensible account of personhood must recognise that conscious life is deeply dependent upon physical organisation.
Despite this, evidence of dependence does not automatically establish identity. A conscious experience may require neural activity without being fully described by an account of that activity. Koch et al. (2016) define neural correlates in terms of the mechanisms sufficient for particular conscious experiences, but identifying a correlate does not independently explain why those mechanisms are accompanied by subjective awareness. Chalmers (1995) describes this as the hard problem of consciousness. Cognitive science may explain discrimination, attention, information integration and the ability to report internal states yet a further question remains: why does the performance of these functions feel like anything from the subject’s perspective? A neurological account can record what occurs when a person experiences anger, grief or feels pain. The record does not provide another observer with the person’s precise experience. This explanatory gap does not prove that consciousness belongs to a separate substance. It may expose a limitation in current concepts or methods. However, the gap gives reasonable grounds for rejecting the stronger conclusion that a complete physical description has already shown mental reality to be nothing beyond brain activity.
In contrast, idealism recognises the importance of consciousness but encounters a different difficulty. Human beings know physical objects through perception, and every observation is mediated by sensory and cognitive processes. Berkeley uses this dependence on experience to challenge the existence of mind-independent material substance (Downing & Hilbert, 2026). His position has greater philosophical force than the claim that an object disappears once nobody looks at it. It asks whether matter can be meaningfully described outside every possible relation to perception. Nevertheless, an epistemological fact about how people acquire knowledge does not by itself establish an ontological conclusion about what exists. The fact that a body is known through experience does not prove that the body consists only of experience. Furthermore, the persistence, regularity and resistance of the physical world require explanation. Bodies age, become injured and impose limits that personal preference cannot remove. Idealism can construct metaphysical explanations for this stability but it does not gain an automatic advantage merely by locating matter within a mental order. Its contribution lies in showing that the perceiving subject cannot be removed from an account of known reality, not in having conclusively reduced physical existence to perception.
Cartesian dualism directly addresses the distinction between the conscious subject and the material body. Descartes (1641/1996) characterises the mind as a thinking entity and the body as an extended entity occupying space. The mind doubts, understands, imagines, influences and experiences, while the body possesses measurable dimensions and divisible parts. This distinction remains philosophically significant because mental and physical properties are not described in the same terms. A thought does not have a measurable weight, and a belief is not located in the body in the same manner as an organ. Similarly, a person has direct access to their own conscious experience but encounters another person’s mind through speech, behaviour and other observable expressions. As a result, Descartes identifies a difference between first-person awareness and third-person observation that physical measurement has not erased. However, the ability to conceive of mind and body separately does not establish that they can exist independently. Conceptual distinction provides an argument for dualism but it does not serve as empirical confirmation of two substances.
The strongest objection to Cartesian substance dualism concerns mental causation. Decisions appear to influence bodily actions, while physical events produce sensations, emotions and changes in awareness. If an immaterial mind lacks spatial location and physical properties, it becomes difficult to explain how it enters a causal relationship with the body. Contemporary discussions of mental causation continue to examine how mental properties can produce physical consequences without competing with physical explanations of those same events (Robb et al., 2023). An unspecified connection between mind and body does not solve this problem; it merely gives the missing explanation a name. Additionally, scientific accounts increasingly explain behaviour through interactions among neural, biological and environmental conditions. Substance dualism must show where mental causation belongs within this account without treating consciousness as either causally powerless or an interruption of physical regularity. These objections do not demonstrate that every form of dualism is false but they do prevent the unexplained interaction between two substances from functioning as evidence in favour of Cartesian dualism.
A more complete account of personhood must also address personal identity. Locke (1689/1975) distinguishes the person from both the human organism and the substance in which thought occurs. He associates personal identity with consciousness and the capacity to recognise oneself across different times and places. This approach explains why memory, responsibility and self-awareness matter to personhood although memory alone is not responsible for the entire account. Memories may be incomplete, inaccessible or reconstructed, while the individual continues to exist within embodied and social relationships. Schechtman’s (2014) person-life view broadens the account by understanding a person’s life through interacting biological, psychological and social dimensions. This approach avoids reducing the person to an inventory of body parts or a collection of remembered information. The self develops through conscious experience, bodily continuity, agency, relationships and participation in a shared world. With that being said, mental life and physical embodiment can then remain distinguishable without being treated as separate lives which are accidentally fastened together.
Ultimately, a person is neither a disembodied mind temporarily inhabiting matter nor a biological mechanism whose subjective existence can be dismissed as another name for neural activity. Physicalism explains the dependence of consciousness on the brain and provides the strongest framework for investigating its observable conditions. Idealism establishes that perception and consciousness are inseparable from human knowledge of reality. Cartesian dualism identifies genuine differences between thought and extension, first-person experience and third-person measurement. However, classical substance dualism does not adequately explain causal interaction, and the unresolved nature of consciousness cannot be treated as proof of an independent immaterial substance. The most defensible conclusion is that a qualified dualism in which mental and physical properties remain irreducible within one embodied person. This position does not settle whether consciousness can exist without a body. It establishes the narrower conclusion that a person cannot yet be adequately defined through either material structure or conscious awareness alone. Personhood emerges through their inseparable participation in one embodied, subjective and continuous life.
References
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219. https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
Descartes, R. (1996). Meditations on first philosophy: With selections from the objections and replies (J. Cottingham, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805028 (Original work published 1641)
Downing, L., & Hilbert, D. (2026). George Berkeley. In E. N. Zalta and U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2026 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2026/entries/berkeley/
Koch, C., Massimini, M., Boly, M., & Tononi, G. (2016). Neural correlates of consciousness: Progress and problems. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17, 307–321. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2016.22
Locke, J. (1975). An essay concerning human understanding (P. H. Nidditch, Ed.). Clarendon Press. (Original work published 1689)
Robb, D., Heil, J., & Gibb, S. (2023). Mental causation. In E. N. Zalta and U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2023 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/mental-causation/
Robinson, H., & Weir, R. (2026). Dualism. In E. N. Zalta and U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2026 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2026/entries/dualism/
Schechtman, M. (2014). Staying alive: Personal identity, practical concerns, and the unity of a life. Oxford University Press.
Smart, J. J. C. (2022). The mind/brain identity theory. In E. N. Zalta and U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2022 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/mind-identity/
Stoljar, D. (2026). Physicalism. In E. N. Zalta and U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2026 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2026/entries/physicalism/
Original High School Edition
Date: 19th December, 2020
Throughout the history of Philosophy and Science, the answer to the question of what is a person has been met with great difficulty. Today, philosophers and scientists are still faced with this complex and baffling question. However, a more approachable and simpler way of viewing this question is to consider the monistic and dualistic points of view even though they oppose each other on how the material (the body) and the immaterial (the mind) entities interact and correspond independently or dependently of one another. Although these perspectives oppose each other, it is both logical and empirical at the same time to support the dualistic viewpoint due to the supporting evidence that duality, psychology, physics and the mind-body disconnect provides than performing a magic trick to make the world disappear after not perceiving it or reducing or completely rejecting our thoughts and emotions as though they are not important to what makes up the human being.
In the case of the monistic point of view, the monist accepts that only one entity exists in the world and rejects the idea that two or more entities can exist independently or separate from each other. Like the material monist, Thomas Hobbes, who is known for his idea that free will is an illusion, other material monists rejects the idea that abstract or immaterial entities exist in the world. However, these thinkers share the belief that the only entity that exists is the material entity (the body) and argue that the brain and the mind are the same because of the biological and chemical processes that the brain performs in order for us to function as a material entity. On the other hand, idealist monists like George Berkeley, who says that we are only our mind, reduces or completely denies the independent existence of the material entity (the body). Opposite to the materialist monist, the idealist monist believes that the immaterial or abstract entity is the only real entity that exists in the world and the material body is dependent on the perception of the mind in order to exist.
Contrary to the monistic perspective of the world, Cartesian dualism recognizes both the existence of both the material and immaterial entities in the world as independent and separate from one another. The theory states that the material entity or the physical body extends in space and the immaterial entity or the mind does not extend in space and, therefore, this gives reason to why one can exist independently and separately from the other. According to Rene Descartes, a defender of dualism, a human being possesses both a material body and an immaterial mind so it is understandable and relatable to why the theory exists in the first place.
In support of Cartesian dualism, the mind-body problem presents a strong defense for the theory due to its lack of explanation or evidence to what exactly connects the material entity (the body) to the immaterial entity (the mind). No matter how much scientific or philosophical research has been done, there is still no proof or evidence to show what truly connects these two entities together in order for them to interact with one another even though they exist independently and separately from each other, therefore, the mind-body problem cannot be dismissed as a defense to the Cartesian dualism theory. Another reason for defending dualism lies within the universal law of duality which states, according to Blanchard (2013), “…everything is in a continuum and has a complementary opposite within the whole.” With that being said and taken into consideration, where the material and immaterial entities are concerned, it gives reason in supporting the existence of both entities since they can be viewed as being oppositely independent and separate to each other yet function and interact as one or a whole. On another note, in Physics, it said that gravity cannot be seen, felt or heard but its influence can be observed from one object onto another by an observer that isn’t within the gravitational field of the two said objects in space. If we can relate this to the material and immaterial entities, then, we can say that it gives support to dualism by acknowledging that there is ‘something’ that connects and influences the interaction between the entities even if this ‘something’ cannot be seen, felt or heard in order to provide physical evidence of its presence.
On the other hand, the opposition of the monistic outlook of the world can also be supported in many questionable ways. In one aspect, memory encoding and memory retrieval begs to debate with the materialist monist by questioning if the material entity is the only entity that exists, how many storage buildings or warehouses does a person need in order to store their memories if one cannot rely on an immaterial entity to store data and information that is observed in the material world? Asking such a question may seem almost humorous when logic and psychology is applied to it, therefore, it gives good reason to reject the material monistic viewpoint. Another aspect of psychology that seems to oppose the materialist monist’s beliefs is the subconscious awareness while a person is awake, for example, when a person is trying to solve a problem and a solution suddenly ‘hits’ them or ‘pops’ into their thoughts. This happens because insights occur from a subconscious connection between ideas that is so strong that it makes its way into the individual’s awareness. With that being said, one would ask the materialist monist, where would such innate ideas or insights come from if the individual wasn’t aware of it in any way before? More than likely, the materialist monist would not be to answer such a question without a biological or chemical explanation, therefore, it is within reason to oppose the material monistic perspective, again. On the opposite side of the monistic spectrum, however, if the theory of the block universe is correct, then, this could be useful in opposing the idealist monist’s perspective. The block universe theory outlines that everything that is occurring (the present), was occurring (the past) and will be occurring (the future) are all happening at one given point, therefore, this would mean that the material entity (the body) is always existing in the present making it completely independent and separate to the immaterial entity (the mind) which has the ability to retrieve information and data that was observed in the past and to encode information and data that would be observed in the future or for the future. Viewing these two entities in such a way therefore defeats the argument that the immaterial entity (the mind) has to perceive the material entity (the body) in order for it to exist and this is why it opposes the idealist monist’s theory.
In conclusion, it remains that it is both logical and empirical at the same time to support the Cartesian dualistic theory because there are scientific, psychological and metaphysical evidence that can support the existence of two independent and separate entities which can also interact and influence each other at the same time whereas the monistic view can be humorous and illogical when it is applied to the world around us.
Original References
Blanchard, B. (April 3rd, 2013). The Law of Duality. Retrieved from http://beverlyblanchard.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-law-of-duality.html#:~:text=The%20Law%20of%20Duality%20basically,extremes%20of%20the%20same%20thing.
Miller, Dr. K. (September 1st, 2018). The block universe theory, where time travel is possible but time passing is an illusion. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-02/block-universe-theory-time-past-present-future-travel/10178386#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20block%20universe,exist%20%E2%80%94%20and%20are%20equally%20real.
Schirber, M. (July 2nd, 2019). What is Relativity? Retrieved from https://www.livescience.com/32216-what-is-relativity.html
King, L. A. (2008). The Science of Psychology. 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020: McGraw-Hill, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
