Commentator: Human behavior cannot be fully understood without inquiring into nonphysical aspects of persons.
Conclusion
Human behavior cannot be fully understood without inquiring into nonphysical aspects of persons.
Evidence (as evidence of this)
Suppose we had a complete scientific account of the physical aspects of some human action. Even with all that we would obviously still not truly comprehend the action or know why it occurred.
Evaluate
This argument is about whether or not we can fully understand human behavior using only physical descriptions, or whether to fully understand human behavior you would need some nonphysical information too (like their thoughts).
This is essentially the Mind / Body problem from philosophy. Are humans reducible to our constituent physical processes, or is there something like a Mind / Soul that is not captured by our physical properties? (I even wrote a song about it)
This author is arguing that we aren't reducible to our physical parts. There's more to us than just the physical explanation of what our bodies are doing. He says that if we had a complete physical account, we still wouldn't truly comprehend the action or know why it occurred.
If you were a materialist or determinist who thought that humans are reducible to physical terms what would you say in response?
We would probably just say,
Goal
It's hard to say exactly how we should complain about this argument. It feels like the author is just insisting that a complete physical explanation still isn't truly a full explanation. Why not? He doesn't really give a reason. He just says, even then we still wouldn't know why an action occurred.
Let's look for something that is like,