Dualist Solutions to the mind body problem

Interactionism - This is the common sense solution. It seems that physical events cause mental events and that mental events have the ability to cause physical events. It was formulated by Descartes in the Meditations (1641). The problem with this solution is that it does not explain how mental and physical substances can interact. Descartes later proposed that interaction took place in the pineal gland but this just relocated the problem.

Parallelism - This solution was suggested by Leibniz who in other writing is a monist. He said that we need to make a distinction between the mental and the physical in terms of causation. According to his doctrine of pre-established harmony (1686) God has arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies

are in harmony with each other; mental and physical events coincide but do not interact. 

Occasionalism - This was proposed by Nicholas Malebranche (1675) amongst others. Like Hume, Malebranche argued that there was no necessary connection between cause and effect. Unlike Hume he attributed the apparent connection between cause and effect to the direct intervention of God.

 

Epiphenomenalism - This view was advanced by Huxley (1874)and states that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but mental events have no causal role in any physical events. Behaviour is caused by muscles that respond to neural impulses, and neural impulses come from other neurons or from sense organs. Huxley compared mental events to a steam whistle that adds nothing to the work of a locomotive.