It's that being either dualist or monist is not an inherent cognitive structure (like interpreting the world in 3 physical dimensions, or enhanced facial recognition skills). They're socially constructed beliefs.
Agreed; but we could likewise say that morality and language are socially constructed systems, and our nature/development predisposes us towards acceptance of those. I should note/reiterate that the description "natural born dualists" was not my phrase but Richard Dawkins' (more precisely Richard Dawkins quoting developmental psychologist Paul Bloom), and taken literally is certainly hyperbole. I'm not suggesting that three year olds are sitting there thinking "The metaphysical substance of this sippy cup must have a set of essential properties fundamentally distinct from the substance of my own cognition"; I'm saying that they view the world at large as 'other,' as
different from themselves (and from other selves). I'm saying that recognizing some things about their own self, the extent of their own body's feelings and perceptions, is much easier than conceiving that there are feelings or perceptions elsewhere that aren't their own, and while they do eventually recognize other selves in their family (likely sometime before the terrible twos) doing so for animals or even other humans takes a lot longer. Do you really think that's not the case?
This is all in an attempt to answer the question of why - having no ability to detect the absence of consciousness and therefore having no logical or empirical basis for imagining the existence of non-conscious stuff at all - it seems so commonplace in our societies for people to assume materialism as the only/natural alternative to dualism. (A particularly striking but hardly unique example being that even an academic like Dawkins in discussing the subject just pretends that idealism/mental monism doesn't even exist; either justifiably confident that most of his readers wouldn't notice or genuinely not even thinking about it himself.) As I noted I think there are two big cultural reasons for that - our Christian heritage of dualism viewing 'the world' as distinct from God and 'the flesh' as distinct from 'spirit,' and the current materialist tendencies of capitalism viewing everything in the world up to animals and often even workers/competitors as little more than inert things to be exploited - but it seems likely that there's also a bias from our cognitive development as infants.
You're likely interpreting this as "evidence for inherent dualism" because you grew up with, or were extensively exposed to, dualist societies.
I agree that study doesn't prove the point of a tendency or at least bias towards dualism, but it does suggest commonplace tendencies which as you suggest
can be easily interpreted as and reinforce the view that minds and bodies/matter are largely distinct.
It's not based on scientific research, but empiricism -- as in, knowledge gained via experience, rather than reasoning -- is much broader than science.
True, which makes it all the more striking when we recognize that the idea of non-conscious material stuff has no empirical basis at all! How do you observe or experience the absence of consciousness? As I've pointed out, all we can do is infer its presence based on similarities of structure and behaviour, which starts to become pretty tenuous beyond the animal world... but inferring its
absence based on the absence of those structures and behaviours is wholly fallacious, denying the antecedent.
No, it's just an assumption that if you have a mind, then it has some sort of substrate.
We all acknowledge the existence of an external reality, yes, but it doesn't follow from that that all minds must have some further substrate. We could make a similar point about
anything that exists, that everything must have some more fundamental substrate... except the most fundamental things that don't. There's no
necessary reason why even human minds couldn't be that type of most fundamental thing without any further substrate, as in solipsism; in practice, based on our acknowledgement of a reality external to our minds we do view human minds as requiring (or at least having) a substrate/brains, but that in no way implies that "you need some sort of brain in order to have mental stuff."
I said nothing of the sort. I'm just saying that if you have mental activity, it has to have some kind of substrate. I see no reason why that substrate can't be silicon or some other physical substance.
There's no basis for asserting mental activity/consciousness
has to have some kind of substrate beyond itself, without first supposing that consciousness only exists in certain cases for which we can identify a substrate. It's a circular argument in other words.
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