Occasionalism
Occasionalism is a parallelist theory of mind-body interaction. Parallelism denies that causal interaction between the mind and the body occurs. Of course, our mental lives and our physical lives do appear to affect one another. This, though, according to the parallelist, is nothing more than an appearance. Though the two aspects of our lives run in parallel, there is no direct causal link between them.
If there is no causal link between our mental and physical lives, though, then this raises a question: why do they run in parallel? There are two parallelist answers to this question, both of which invoke God to explain the near-perfect correlation between mental events and physical events: occasionalism and pre-arranged harmony.
Occasionalism holds that God is constantly intervening in order to maintain the balance between mind and body. If I decide to do something, which decision would be a mental event, then my decision on its own cannot affect the world. The reason that it appears that decisions do affect the world is that God, seeing such decisions, intervenes in the physical world to set in motion physical causes that will lead to the mental event. My decision thus indirectly causes my action, even though there is no direct connection between the two. The same process works in reverse, with physical events indirectly, but not directly, causing mental events.
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