On Theism & Immaterial Minds

[FallentoReason]

But physical processes have been demonstrated to have great effects on the mind and its facets, such as personality.

Agreed. The OP heavily relies on this known fact.

Sure, there are things it hasn't accounted for, but all dualism has is the claim that the soul fills these gaps.

It's more than that. It's a response to the apparent problem that material substance can't ever be about something else. I can believe proposition p and such a thing can't be represented in a material way such that we can point to it and say "look, there's FtR's belief about p". In fact, such an occurence of this would first require a concious being to assign meaning, a belief, that somehow that collection of atoms/molecules represents my belief in p.

Secondly, I don't see why the concept of a soul has to come into this. Like I said, one could believe that the only thing required for consciousness is causal relations and qualia.

No one can even say what the soul is exactly or what its effects are.

I've never jumped on that band wagon, so I can't really speak for them.

I do not see how the claims of each side are equally extreme.

Well, like I said, naturalism is too extreme in the sense that no naturalistic account can explain how simply atoms/molecules could be about something, which means the naturalist doesn't believe anything, let alone be conscious about any beliefs. Immaterialism is just classic theist101 baseless assumptions with absolutely nothing to back it up. Neither side is credible.

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Cool. I understand. As you've probably gathered from my above responses, I side firmly against dualism based on the available evidence. IMO, until some factual evidence is presented in favour of dualism, there's not even any need to consider it as a viable argument.

I don't think evidence will ever be found. The reason being that if dualism is correct, then that explains why complex robots can/could never reach our level; they have causal relations i.e. complex circuitry that interacts with the environment much like our neurons/senses interact with our environment, but they're missing instances of qualia i.e. they can't have experiences like we do. There's something still missing in robots that we have. But how does one find evidence of something that doesn't appear to be a purely material substance?