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Philosophy of Mind .Info

Substance Dualism

Property Dualism

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Mind-Body Interaction

Personal Identity

Glossary

Philosophy of Mind

Substance Dualism

Mind-Body Interaction

Parallelism

Pre-Arranged Harmony

Pre-Arranged Harmony

Pre-arranged harmony 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.

Pre-arranged harmony holds that God set things up from Creation to run in parallel. It is not coincidence that our mental lives and our physical lives correspond; it is divine design.

 

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