Interactionism Quotes

...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

That our being should consist of two fundamental elements [physical and psychical] offers I suppose no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only.

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.

To separate mind from body doesn't make any sense.

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

One of the most important aspects of what makes us who we are is neither straight genes or straight environment but actually what happens to us during development.

Perhaps people need to understand some history here. Rene Descartes, in the late 16th, early 17th century, postulated that body, mind, physicality and spirituality belonged to different realms of reality that didn't interact. On a positive side, it got the Inquisition off the backs of the intellectuals and they quit burning them at the stake for disagreeing with the Church.

Internal and external nature, mind and matter, are in time and space, and are bound by the law of causation.