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If you had to choose between Dualism, Physicalism, and Hylomorphism, which one do you think is more likely to be accurate and why? I think Dualism is the most plausible, but that might be because I am Christian?
How can I find out the strongest arguments for the dualist position?
You ask for a suitable philosophical framework for anthropology.
Because you name already three approaches, you may take them as starting point for a top-down reasoning: What are the basic assumptions of each approach, which technical terms does it use, what are its main conclusions?
How can I see this more objectively?
You may go into the oppposite direction, bottom-up: Which questions do you want the anthropology to answer? Make a short and precise list of questions. And then ask each of the three approaches about its answers.
The three approaches are not ends in themselves. They are tools to answer questions. Your concrete questions about the human person are the starting point.
Dualism has the most emotionally satisfying answers to human experience of consciousness and qualia of perception, even if those answers are not actually useful in practice.
Dualism offers an alluded alternative to the "determinism vs. random" dichotomy by placing the mind outside the physical universe where nothing would seem impossible. It saves us from regarding ourselves as mindless zombies without moral responsibility, as allegedly physicalism would have it.
Dualism also greatly helps with faith in objective morality that is known to us a priori, existing in the same place as our minds, in the divine.
Dualism also plays nicely with reports of the supernatural, like family members mysteriously sensing the death of a close one in faraway lands, or people curing their cancers through prayers, or people remembering prior lifetimes and speaking in tongues they never learned.
In terms of accuracy however, physicalism is the best because it actually explains a lot of observable things, like:
But physicalism is difficult to unify with Christian faith, early proponents risked being burned alive for suggesting it.
Dualism is the religious way of thinking, as it assumes another level of existence separate from the physical world. The problem with dualism is that we cannot really know, measure or analyze the spiritual side. We have no verified objective facts about it, only fiction or subjective experience.
Physicalism is a very limited way of thinking. Physicalism does not recognize concepts like information or knowledge. Physicalism sticks to the claim that they are physical matter or energy, even though they have no measurable physical properties.
Hylomorphism seems to be the most accurate. Hylomorphism acknowledges that objects have both physical (matter, energy) and non-physical (form, shape, order) properties. Physical properties can be measured to get objective data. Non-physical properties can only be subjectively experienced, interpreted and evaluated.
Mind can be seen as the non-physical property of a physical brain. Its ability to process (experience, interpret and evaluate) non-physical information.
