Sex and Dualism

Sex and Dualism

According to classical dualism, what we call a person consists of two separate substances, a mind and a body, the latter material and extended, the former immaterial and unextended. Each can survive the other; they have different essences. But this implies that when you have sex with someone, you are having sex with two separate things, the body and the mind. Normally, however, we accept that we are having sex with one thing, the thing we call a person. If that is right, dualism is false–we are having sex with two things, so it’s really a kind of threesome. How can we avoid this consequence? We might say we are having sex with only one of them—the body or the mind. Neither view seems plausible: you are not having sex with the body alone and you are not having sex with the mind alone, and not with both together. You are not having sex with the body and ignoring the mind, and you are not having sex with the mind and ignoring the body. Sex is psychophysical (whatever that means). Are you perhaps alternating between the body and the mind—now the body, now the mind? But that is not phenomenologically accurate; no such thing is going on in your consciousness. Thus, sex poses a problem for dualism, quite a nasty problem. So, who or what exactly are you having sex with—what is this “person” you speak of? That is the mind-body problem in a new guise. Sexual philosophy gives us a new way to think about it. Could it be a third entity hovering between mind and body, or maybe the hidden connection between the two? This is the sexual hard problem.[1]

[1] I thought of this after having an interesting conversation with Tom Nagel.