See attached .htm file or read the in-line
text below. Again, this file is also posted
on the handouts section of the class
page.

Ontology and the Mind Body Problem
(Part II)

Dualist Answers to the Mind-Body
Problem (Con't)

Epiphenomenalism says that physical
eventscausally affect mental events, but
not the reverse. Mental phenomena (i.e.
conscious thought) is seen as a
byproduct of the functioning of the brain
without any real causal power.
Epiphenomenalists think of the
relationship between the physical and the
mental as analogous to the relationship
between the level of gasoline in your gas
tank your gas gauge. The level of gas in
your tank causes the gauge to read the
way it does. However, if you were to break
the glass on the gauge and move the
needle up or down, this would have
absolutely no effect on the level of gas in
your tank. You could even break the
gauge completely and the gas in your
tank would be unaffected. The cause and
effect relationship runs just one way--the
gas in your tank makes the gauge read
the way it does, but the gas gauge's
reading has no effect on the contents in
the tank. Similarly, the body, or, more
specifically, the brain, creates mental
affects when it functions. But these
mental phenomena have no effect on the
brain. To use another analogy, the brain
is like fire and mental phenomena are
smoke. The fire produces the smoke as a
byproduct, but the smoke does not have
any effect on the fire. Most
epiphenomenalists are weak dualists,
that is, they believe that mental
phenomena does not have independent
existence, though they agree that it is not
material or physical in nature.

Parallelism (sometimes also called
Occasionalism) says that the mental and
physical two separate processes which
run side by side, but never interact. This
view mental and physical phenomena as
analogous to the sound and picture in a
movie. We here words being spoken and
see the actor's mouth moving, but the
sound and picture are usually recorded
separately and usually sounds are edited
in post-production to add in sound
effects, music, etc, independently of the
recorded picture. We don't notice that they
are on separate tracks because they are
synchronized so perfectly, though
perhaps you remember a time when you
were watching a movie and something
went wrong, and the soundtrack got off a
bit and the words didn't match up ike a
badly dubbed Kung Fu movie.

Paralleism says that at the beginning of
time, God synchronized mental and
physical processes so that every time you
had a mental intention to do something, it
is followed by a corresponding physical
effect. For instance, God, looking forward
in time, saw that on January 25th , 2003
at 8:21 PM you would want to raise your
left hand to scratch your nose. Knowing
this, God set up the world so that all the
physical chain of cause and effect
beginning at the first moment of creation
would lead up to your left hand going up
and scratching your nose. Because one
occurs right after the other, it appears that
one causes the other. But this is an
illusion created by God's synchronizing of
events.

When exposed to this view, most
students notice its Rube Goldbergish ad
hoc character. Why would anyone believe
such a view? What idiot came up with it?
You may find this shocking, but the
philosopher credited with this view was
Gottfried Leibniz, one of the two men who
discovered and devleoped Calculus (the
other was Sir Issac Newton. Leibniz and
Newton discovered Calculus at roughly
the same time, Leibniz in Germany and
Newton in Britian, and each accused the
other of stealing his discovery). Why
would such a brilliant philosopher come
up with such a tortured and implausible
answer to this problem? The likely
answer is that Leibiz thought that trying to
explain how an immaterial substance
could great material effects was so
difficult, that he felt he had to create this
theory to deny that it ever occurred.
Parallelism illustrates what a serious
challenge the mind-body problem has
been for dualists.

The two materialist anwers to the
mind-body problem, logical behaviorism
(Gilbert Ryle), the mind-brain identity
theory (J.J.C. Smart), eliminative
materialism (Richard Rorty, Patricia and
Paul Churchland) are treated adequately
in Palmer.

ŠJeffrey Borrowdale
All rights reserved

Prof. Borrowdale
borrowdalej@lanecc.edu