# Dualism

Explore dualism through the lens of Mormon Transhumanism—examining the relationship between mind and body, spirit and matter, and what it means for our future.

[Image: Luke 24:39 contrasts Jesus’s risen body with an imagined spirit: “for a spirit hath not flesh and bones.”]

Restoration theology holds that all spirit is matter and that spirit and body together form the soul, leaving no place for the dualist claim that the true self is immaterial. Dualism is the view that reality, or a person, consists of two fundamentally different components. Thomas Hyde coined the term in 1700 for the Zoroastrian belief in two coeternal principles of good and evil, and Christian Wolff later applied it to the soul and the body. In its best-known form, substance dualism, mind and body are separate substances. Plato’s Socrates reports an old pun, *sōma sēma*, “the body a tomb,” and elsewhere describes the soul as viewing reality “through the bars of a prison.” René Descartes concluded that he was “a thinking, non-extended thing,” “really distinct” from his body and able to “exist without it.”

Some have assumed that scripture teaches a version of this view, in which an immaterial soul leaves the body at death for a heaven of pure spirit. However, the New Testament resists the idea that salvation entails leaving the body, and the Restoration denies that spirit is immaterial at all.

## The Body as Tabernacle

In contrast to the Platonic view of the body as a prison or tomb, the New Testament adopts the language of the tabernacle, the sacred tent in which God dwelt among Israel.

The Gospel of John says that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), and the Greek verb, *skēnoō*, means to pitch a tent or to tabernacle. The verb recalls the wilderness sanctuary, so that Christ’s flesh becomes the place where the divine presence dwells. When the disciples supposed they had seen a spirit, the risen Jesus answered, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). Paul uses a related noun, *skēnos*, “tent,” for the mortal body, and his wish that this “tabernacle” be “dissolved” is often read as a longing to be free of flesh. The same passage states his hope plainly: “we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life” (2 Corinthians 5:4).

## All Spirit Is Matter

[Image: Doctrine and Covenants describes the soul as the union of spirit and body: “the spirit and the body are the soul of man.”]

Joseph Smith taught in 1843 that “there is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes” (D&C 131:7-8). An earlier revelation defines the soul as the union of the two: “the spirit and the body are the soul of man. And the resurrection from the dead is the redemption of the soul” (D&C 88:15-16). The definition reads much like a gloss on Genesis, where the first man became a living being, a *nephesh*, only when breath entered a body formed from the ground. Resurrection thus repeats the pattern of creation. God is no exception, for “the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also” (D&C 130:22). Indeed, the revelations extend the tabernacle language from Christ to the whole material order: “The elements are the tabernacle of God; yea, man is the tabernacle of God, even temples” (D&C 93:35). Early leaders still distinguished spirit from body, and Orson Pratt held the mind to be material yet separate from the brain. Some therefore describe the Restoration position as a materialism with two grades of matter, while others call it a monism. Either way, spirit and body belong to one material order, and the soul reaches its full condition when the two are joined.

## Uploading and the New Gnosticism

[Image: Critics compare mind uploading to an escape from embodiment, while Restoration teaching stresses the soul as spirit and body rather than a disembodied self.]

Mind uploading revives the Gnostic hope of escape when it treats the body as disposable hardware, and the tabernacle tradition supplies the Mormon transhumanist answer.

For decades, futurists have imagined scanning a brain in detail and running its patterns on a computer, an idea called whole-brain emulation or uploading. Critics in literary theory and theology describe the dream as a new gnosticism, in which information loses its body and the self escapes into the machine. The science remains far behind. In 2024, researchers completed a wiring map of an adult fruit fly’s brain, about 140,000 neurons, and a model built from it predicted circuits behind some feeding and grooming. A human brain has roughly 86 billion neurons.

Mormon transhumanists hold that information can move from one substrate to another but is never disembodied; thus an emulated mind’s new substrate would be a new body. Read this way, emulation would be another tent, answering Paul’s wish to be clothed upon while keeping obligations to the bodies people have now. The danger is an attitude that treats present bodies, and people living in failing ones, as disposable.

## Beyond Platonic Dualism

By rejecting substance dualism, Restoration theology reclaims the physical body not as an obstacle to be escaped, but as a sacred component of eternal progression. The scriptural vision of the body—from the wilderness tabernacle to the resurrected Christ—affirms that redemption consists in the glorification of matter, not its abandonment. As emerging technologies invite us to reimagine the boundaries of the mind, this materialist theology offers a vital corrective: whether woven from flesh or instantiated in silicon, consciousness is never disembodied. True exaltation requires neither shedding our physical reality nor dismissing our mortal vulnerability, but honoring the soul as the eternal union of spirit and body.

*See also*: [Body](/topical-guide/body), [Eternal/Eternity](/topical-guide/eternaleternity), [Mind-Body Problem](/topical-guide/mind-body-problem), [Monism](/topical-guide/monism), [Mysteries](/topical-guide/mysteries), [Mysticism](/topical-guide/mysticism)