Why is there a mind-body dualism in Western thought?

pythagoras'->plato's influence forms v shadow reaching all the way to descartes

>>24531273 (OP)
The small brain man has the wisdom to perceive his shortcomings and ask a question of how and where to improve himself.

The big brain man is smug in his self perceived superiority, blind to his own shortcomings where the small brain man is not and thus will be surpassed by small brain man who in time will posses a big brain to match his big body and will have realized his full potential.

>>24531273 (OP)
why isn't there in eastern thought is the bigger question.

>>24531273 (OP)
>>24532971
Because western languages have past-present and future tense which makes us exceedingly and consistently aware of aging and "otherness". Most eastern languages only have a present tense therefore everything is simultaneouly happening and all yous of the past and future are also the you that is now. These are not concious deductions, if they were they would not have such a significant effect.

>>24532971
There used to be but Buddhism dispelled it long enough for it to only come back as some demented mind-body-spirit fuckery in later Hindu and unfortunately Buddhist thought

>>24531273 (OP)

>>24531273 (OP)
Because of dungeon and dragon.
A warrior build cannot be a mage build and vice-versa, so the "strong man" imagine that it works like this and when the nerd hit the gym and become ripped he gets depressed instead of trying to become smarter.

>>24533046
> Buddhism dispelled it long enough for it to only come back as some demented mind-body-spirit fuckery in later Hindu and unfortunately Buddhist thought
The highest and most refined Buddhist thought and the highest and most refined Hindu thought reach the same conclusion about this: that ultimate reality is primordial, pristine Awareness (Dharmakaya, Atman) and which is different from ordinary mind (although the latter may be “of the nature of” the former, but the inverse is not true).

This makes crypto-materialist hylics who want to cast eastern systems as being completely empirically-based and as reconcilable with physicalism seethe to no end.

>>24531273 (OP)
I think about this a lot. It's mostly a cope taught to kids in school both to keep the skeleton-boy math whiz from kys-ing himself, and also an American predecessor to the modern Chinese model of just churning out a shit ton of STEM autists for the military/economic machine.
I was one of those caught by the "big brain small muscle better person" meme. It really frustrated me when I made it into college, and saw that the athletic and popular people in highschool were for the most part still good looking and popular, and even in the Engineering college a lot of the smartest students were also athletic, good-looking and popular.

>>24531273 (OP)
Mind-body dualism exists in Western thought because it reflects the same foundational split that runs through Western religion and culture: a deep fear of the body, nature, and the unconscious. In Christianity, the soul is good, the flesh is fallen; spirit is divine, the body is corrupt. This metaphysical division gets secularized in philosophy — from Plato to Descartes — turning into a worldview where the mind is seen as pure, rational, and superior, while the body is animalistic, chaotic, and suspect.

This split wasn’t born from observation but from moral anxiety. Western thought inherited a need to dominate and control what it couldn’t integrate — the body, emotion, instinct. So it elevated the mind as a godlike faculty and treated the body like a machine or prison. Unlike many Eastern traditions that see mind and body as interdependent expressions of the same reality, the West carved them apart, producing a civilization that worships reason while pathologizing sensation — and in doing so, alienated itself from wholeness.

>>24531273 (OP)
Because no definitive proof exists either way. The materialist cucks can't spin up a 2nd mind instance on a single brain hardware and the man in the sky cucks can't shoot fireballs to demonstrate their soul. It's probabilistic larping at best.

>>24534194
Good post. I would venture to add that it mainly originates from the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Christians were so repulsed by the licentiousness of the Romans (all those orgies and bloodsports) that they reacted violently in the opposite direction, and condemned the body (indeed, the entire physical world) as profane and unworthy.
Witness all those Christian monks starving and flagellating themselves, because they thought the mortification of the flesh brought them closer to God.
Two millennia later, we are still dealing with the consequences of this, while the orientals look on with bemusement.

>>24535689
Well there t is. Christians cucked everything up. Good job, idiots.