Unless, perhaps like Descartes and some Cartesian dualists, we assume all causation in the material world must be physical causation, the entire interaction problem seems wildly inflated. It seems hard why two distinct, different kinds of substances shouldn't interact. Perhaps those who put forward this objection are labouring under the assumption that immaterial-material causation is problematic because we can't give some mechanics-like description of what goes on the causal process - all we can say is immaterial substance X causes such and such an effect in material substance Y (or vice versa). But this seems a mistaken assumption because, one, it is hard to see why immaterial-material causation should have to behave like material-material causation, and, two, even in the latter case, the mechanical description itself doesn't actually explain why any particular material cause has a particular material effect (in any particular situation). 

​In short, I don't think there is an interaction problem for hylomorphic dualism in just the same way there isn't one for (most) substance dualism. At least critics need to give a lot better reasons for thinking so than the usual gesturing about how different substances can enter into a causal relationship.

I posted this quotation by Anscombe in another thread:
​

[T]he whole enterprise is a mistake, of finding some other events which are to carry a thought at a particular moment. A dualist may say at this point: 'Right! So you see there is the immaterial event, which proves the immaterial substance or medium in which this immaterial event takes place.'

To this we may reply: 'Just on this sort of occasion, when the other events are few or none? Surely the immaterial nature of thought is there, even when there is a full-blown material occurrence to identify as the occurrence of a thought.' I mean, for example, when there is a pursuit of ends by intelligent handling of things in the light of scientific knowledge or thorough practical acquaintance. Or when there is the manipulation of signs in rapid calculation on paper. And in these cases there is no reason to believe that this immateriality of thought involves the occurrence of an immaterial event in an immaterial medium. ...

The immateriality of the soul consists at bottom in the fact that you cannot specify a material character or configuration which is equivalent to truth. ("Analytic Philosophy and the Spirituality of Man," in Human Life, Action and Ethics, p. 15)

​I quote from this again, now because I think it exhibits the right way of thinking of the soul as the form of the body. My calculating on paper may just be​ intelligent calculation. These material movements are a thought because a thought specifies and informs what is going on. Likewise when I "think aloud". The same vocalization may not be​ thought, if it is (say) just repeated by someone who does not speak the language, and just learned that language. ​This is even the case, I think, for what we think of what seem to be paradigm instances of mentality. The sentences "p", "if p, then q", and "q​" flash before your mind in succession. Have you inferred? Not necessarily. But in some cases, those materials may be taken up into inference--and there might be no further thought which of itself guarantees that these three sentences are strung together in an inference​.

​I think it's a mistake to conceive of an intention as a subjective, first-personal entity which causes neuronal processes to activate movement of the arm. Rather intention informs these movements. The immateriality of the intellect (here practical intellect) will consist in there being no "material character or configuration which is equivalent to truth."
 

Greg, are you saying it would be incorrect to conceive of material brain processes correlated with mental activity as purely material--rather, they take on a different nature like how ink blots in a book and vocalizations derive intentionality from an intelligence which forms them. If this is the case, wouldn't it still hold that, like the ink blot "dog," the material brain processes are meaningless independent of the human mind. And if we are to concede this then wouldn't it follow that we are dealing with two separate entities, the material body or brain and the intelligence which informs them?

Last edited by RomanJoe (4/27/2018 2:45 pm)

RomanJoe wrote:

Greg, are you saying it would be incorrect to conceive of material brain processes correlated with mental activity as purely material--rather, they take on a different nature like how ink blots in a book and vocalizations derive intentionality from an intelligence which forms them. If this is the case, wouldn't it still hold that, like the ink blot "dog," the material brain processes are meaningless independent of the human mind. And if we are to concede this then wouldn't it follow that we are dealing with two separate entities, the material body or brain and the intelligence which informs them?

I am saying that material brain processes, when they are meaningful, are meaningful in the same way that vocalizations are, when they are meaningful. But that is not because I think that in the latter case they derive their intentionality from a separate, meaning-bestowing mental act. There may be no such thing. The "thinking aloud" may just be the thinking; this material process has the form of the thought in question.

​So yes, there is a sense in which it is true that these brain processes or this vocalization is meaningless independent of the human mind, in the sense that it is possible that the same sort of brain process or the same vocalization could occur without being meaningful, in another person who was not engaged in this course of thinking. But that is not to say that the meaning is conferred on the brain processes or vocalization by some separate efficient cause, unless we are discussing something other than hylomorphic dualism.

RomanJoe wrote:

I'm still wondering, though, why the hylemorphic dualists don't even entertain the interaction problem. It seems as if they don't really see the mind and body as really interacting in the way it is normally assumed they do.

I think hylomorphic dualists do sometimes entertain the interaction problem. I don't have Feser's Philosophy of Mind or Madden's ​Mind, Nature, and Matter​ on hand at present, but I think they both present hylomorphic dualism as, in part, a position that avoids (what they treat as) the problems facing substance dualism and materialism. But I agree that they tend to be glib on the topic and typically write as though the view that the soul is the form of the body clearly overcomes various problems. Whereas I think it's true that it remains exceedingly obscure and abstract just to claim that, for instance, hylomorphic dualism avoids the causal exclusion argument by holding that mental causation is formal causation (as Jaworski does). One needs a detailed proposal for the relationship between thought and those occurrent mental phenomena and 'sub-personal' processes which stand in causal relations to each other and the world. I think that the characterization of the irreducibility of mental phenomena one gets from Wittgenstein and Anscombe helps in this regard.

Yes, I had that Feser post in mind, but didn't go look for it.

I think we can put it this way: It is a ​constraint​ on a hylomorphic dualist that he not​ conceive of the relation between soul and body as one of interaction, because that is an efficient-causal relation. So as long as he is honest, the interaction problem is not his problem. His problem is whether he can find some other way to conceive of the relation, or whether, after interaction, the options are exhausted.

​A lesson of this is that, in reading Ross's "The Immaterial Aspects of Thought," the hylomorphist should not be thinking that since material processes are indeterminate, there must be determinate immaterial​ processes which guarantee the determinacy of thought. To remain in the category of processes here is still to be searching for an efficient cause, and to fail to appreciate that thought's relation to what makes it determinate need not be that.