If you think dualism is a settled problem in the history of philosophy, you have underestimated its reach. The splitting of reality into mind and matter that Descartes elevated to a principle in 1641 was never truly resolved. It was renamed, displaced, dressed in ever new garments. Materialism claims to have overcome dualism by striking out the mind-side. Computationalism makes the same claim by declaring mind to be software and matter to be hardware. Both movements perpetuate the Cartesian founding decision: that matter is something mindless. And it is precisely this decision — not a discovery about nature but a stipulation about it — that determines the entire modern worldview.
#The Cut That Produced an Epoch
In the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641), René Descartes determined two substances that share nothing in common: res cogitans, thinking substance, and res extensa, extended substance. Matter is pure extension — measurable, calculable, mindless. Mind is pure thought — without extension, without location. No natural connection exists between them, which is why Descartes proposed the pineal gland as a mediating instance, a stopgap that convinced few even among his contemporaries.
The consequences of this separation reached far beyond epistemology. Descartes defined animals as mechanical automata. If a dog makes noises during vivisection, it squeaks like a mechanism, not like a suffering being (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026, 79:05). What has no mind cannot suffer. What does not suffer may be dissected. Dualism is not merely a philosophical thesis; it is an authorisation: it transforms everything it assigns to the mindless side into disposable material.
Arthur Schopenhauer put the matter succinctly in The World as Will and Representation (1819): Descartes had sharply split nature into mind and matter, that is, into thinking and extended substance, and likewise set God and world in complete opposition to one another (cf. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1819). Spinoza had only recognised the fundamental falsity of this twofold dualism in his final years.
#Why Materialism Does Not Overcome Dualism
The materialist philosophy of mind claims to have corrected Descartes’ error. One no longer speaks of two substances but of a single one: matter. Consciousness, mind, subjective experience are declared epiphenomena of neural activity. Functionalism defines mental states by their causal role, not by their experiential quality. In this view, no ontological gap remains because only one side exists.
This sounds like overcoming. It is amputation. Materialism strikes out Descartes’ res cogitans and retains his res extensa unchanged: matter as mindless extension, measurable, calculable, without an inner dimension. It thereby inherits exactly the premise that generated the problem in the first place. That dead matter produces consciousness has never been proven (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle, 2006). It remains an assertion repeated so often that it passes for fact.
David Chalmers formulated the Hard Problem of Consciousness in 1995: why is there subjective experience at all? Why does anything feel like anything? The question is legitimate, but if you follow it to its root, you do not arrive at a riddle of nature. You arrive at an artefact of dualism. Whoever begins with mindless matter cannot derive mind — not because the derivation is too difficult, but because the starting point excludes what is to be explained. In the Everlast AI Debate (2026), Gwendolin Kirchhoff named this structure: the question is which metaphysics produces a Hard Problem (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026, 76:24). A metaphysics that understands the cosmos as living does not produce one.
#The Computational Variant: Software as Disguised Dualism
In the contemporary debate on artificial intelligence, dualism appears in a particularly unrecognisable form. Joscha Bach, one of the most influential proponents of computationalism, claims that mind is software and the body its hardware. Consciousness, on this account, is a causal pattern that stabilises and perpetuates itself in the physical world (cf. Bach, Everlast AI Debate, 2026, 23:17-23:36). Software, not soul, is said to be the modern name for mind. With this, the claim runs, the concept of mind is rescued for the twenty-first century.
The rescue fails because it destroys what it claims to rescue. Software is a program written by a human engineer, translated into machine code, and executed on deterministic hardware (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026, 26:30-26:38). That is a very particular kind of dualist conception that conceals the fact that the subject — and therefore consciousness — is already present. The self-simulation that Bach speaks of, too, is observed by someone: by a mind. The homunculus explains nothing. It displaces the problem into the interior of the machine, where it becomes invisible without being solved.
Computationalism thus adopts the Cartesian structure in new disguise: res extensa persists as hardware, res cogitans is relabelled as software. The ontological question of where experience comes from is replaced by a functional description that does not contain experience. Gwendolin Kirchhoff distilled this in the Everlast AI Debate (2026, 75:38-75:47): the attribution that the cosmos is a machine strikes out the quality of aliveness and consciousness. It simply deletes what we immediately perceive phenomenally.
#Schelling’s Identity Philosophy: The Other Way
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, in his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), diagnosed dualism as a separation that thought inflicted upon itself, and formulated the counter-design: natural philosophy overcomes the split not by building a bridge between mind and matter, but through the insight that the separation itself was the error. Nature is the visible mind, mind the invisible nature.
If you suspect this identity philosophy of being reductive, you are misreading it. It does not claim that mind and matter are the same, but that they are expressions of the same living reality. All rigid being in nature is an illusion; things as such are illusions, the expression of inhibited forces (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Schelling: Genius of Natural Philosophy, 57:30). In truth, solid things do not exist; there is a living, fluctuating process.
Schelling formulated the decisive consequence with a clarity that has lost nothing: as long as I am myself identical with nature, I understand what living nature is as well as I understand my own life. But as soon as I separate myself and with me everything ideal from nature, nothing remains to me but a dead object. And I cease to comprehend how a life outside me is possible (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Schelling: Genius of Natural Philosophy, 34:00). The separation produces the dead nature it then cannot explain. Whoever separates, kills what they seek to understand.
#Dualism as Civilisational Pathology
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) radicalised Schelling’s diagnosis. For him, dualism is not merely a philosophical error but a foundational civilisational disease that expresses itself in technological development, ecology, and human self-understanding. When the human being, disregarding the living, directs his gaze entirely at inorganic relations and grants them alone the throne of the real, then the machine-city is his destiny (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Goethe as Philosopher, 00:02). No morality or bioethics can halt this dynamic — only a substantial widening of vision toward the totality of the natural nexus.
Mechanistic science thinks the natural nexus as a machine from the outset: first the clockwork, then the steam engine, now the computer (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Science on Trial, 20:39). The same analogy is always applied to life and the living. Dualism is the precondition of this machine-metaphor, for only when matter is mindless can it be described as a mechanism. And only when it is described as a mechanism can the idea arise of producing consciousness technically.
If you wish to pursue these connections further, the entry on the Cosmic Anthropos presents the counter-position: the human being as microcosm of a living macrocosm, to which consciousness need not be affixed because it is its fundamental trait. The layer model describes how, beneath the surface of the scientific progress narrative, the dualist pre-decision lies hidden, rarely questioned.
#Sources
- Chalmers, D. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200-219.
- Descartes, R. (1641). Meditationes de Prima Philosophia.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Everlast AI Debate: Kirchhoff vs. Bach [conversation].
- Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2006). Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2021). Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie [video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-jL1EER5Q.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1800). System des transcendentalen Idealismus. Tübingen: J.G. Cotta.
- Schopenhauer, A. (1819). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig: Brockhaus.