Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
But the man who received the blow becomes conscious that he was struck, and both interactionist and parallelist regard him as becoming conscious of it when the incoming message reaches some part of the brain. What shall be done with this consciousness? The interactionist insists that it must be regarded as a link in the physical chain of causes and effects he breaks the chain to insert it.
Nor do I see any reason why a believer in God, one who bows at the shrine of Mind-Stuff, or one who refuses to commit himself at all upon such matters, should enter a demurrer. The Parallelist and the Interactionist, however widely they differ touching the relation of mind and body, may here fall upon one another's necks and shed tears of brotherly affection.
Is not this a recognition of the fact that the choice is a thing to be accounted for, and is, nevertheless, a free choice? I have been considering above the world as it is conceived to be by the parallelist, but, to the reader who may not incline towards parallelism, I wish to point out that these reasonings touching the freedom of the will concern the interactionist just as closely.
Ideas and things, said a third, constitute two independent series; no idea can cause a change in things, and no thing can cause a change in ideas. The interactionist is a man who refuses to take any such turn as these philosophers. His doctrine is much nearer to that of Descartes than it is to any of theirs.
We must not forget that neither parallelist nor interactionist ever dreams of repudiating our common experiences of the relations of mental phenomena and physical. Neither one will, if he is a man of sense, abandon the usual ways of describing such experiences. Whatever his theory, he will still say: I am suffering because I struck my hand against that table; I sat down because I chose to do so.
He answered that if the word "belief" were taken broadly enough to express a willingness to look into things, he might be said to believe. Is there any scientific evidence open to the parallelist in psychology which is not also open to the interactionist? Is the conviction that one's country is in the right a mere matter of scientific evidence?
He insists that mind and matter stand in the one causal nexus; that a change in the outside world may be the cause of a perception coming into being in a mind, and that a volition may be the cause of changes in matter. What shall we call the plain man? I think we may call him an interactionist in embryo.
The opponent of the interactionist insists, however, that the plain man is satisfied with this view of the matter only because he has not completely stripped off the tendency to conceive the mind as a material thing. And he accuses the interactionist of having fallen a prey to the same weakness.
But we must not be deceived by such phrases, and assume that they mean what they have no right to mean. OBJECTIONS TO PARALLELISM. What objections can be brought against parallelism? It is sometimes objected by the interactionist that it abandons the plain man's notion of the mind as a substance with its attributes, and makes of it a mere collection of mental phenomena.
They have no necessary connection with parallelism. The interactionist, as well as the parallelist, may be a determinist, a believer in freedom, or he may be a "free-willist." He regards mental phenomena and physical phenomena as links in the one chain of causes and effects. Shall he hold that certain mental links are "free-will" links, that they are wholly unaccountable?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking