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Having read the ideas and arguments for materialism and idealism, you might be wondering if there is a balance between the two. There is, and it is called interactionism. Essentially they believe that matter and the mind both exist. But this leads to multiple variations to this with interactionism as the basic idea that mind and body affect each other. I will now discuss the main variant on dual mind-body belief besides interactionism: epiphimomeneualism. They believe that there is a mind and body, but that the mind has no effect on the body. In other words, the mind is there, but just for the ride and has no control over the body. This leads to parallelism. This is the belief that the mind and body just happen to work in harmony, so when you think to walk your body walks since they just happen to be in harmony. This does not mean that your mind made you walk, it means that when you thought to walk, you happened to have your body walking. There is a variant of this idea called pre-established harmony. This belief is that this harmony was set up by God. This then leads to occasionalism. These people believe that God "tweaks" the parallelism between the mind and body on occasion to keep everything in sync since the mind and body are bound to get of synchronization.. Two viewpoints that I would like to mention that are not connected to interactionism or epiphimomeneualism are the double-aspect theory and no-mind theory. The double-aspect theory believes that there are 2 aspects to the same thing, and I think that means that everything has a mental and physical aspect to it. The No-mind theory believes that there is no body or mind, in other words no "self". |