This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mind and Body gathers four positions on how mental and physical events relate to one another, from Descartes's classical dualism to twentieth-century attempts to preserve consciousness without a separate soul.
Interactionism holds that mind and body causally influence one another directly, the common-sense assumption behind ordinary talk of choosing to raise an arm; Descartes proposed the pineal gland as their point of contact. Epiphenomenalism denies this, holding that consciousness is real but causally inert, a byproduct thrown off by brain processes the way smoke is thrown off by fire, an image Thomas Henry Huxley drew from a steam engine's whistle, present but contributing nothing to the engine's motion.
Property Dualism tries to hold a middle position: one physical substance, the brain, bearing two fundamentally different kinds of property, physical and irreducibly mental, a view David Chalmers pressed hardest with his hard problem of consciousness, arguing no amount of physical detail can logically entail what experience feels like from the inside.
Emergentism holds that sufficiently complex physical organization can produce genuinely new properties, not derivable even in principle from the parts alone, while nothing beyond the physical parts actually exists; C.D. Broad's example was the liquidity of water, unpredictable from hydrogen and oxygen alone before it was observed. Each position answers the same question differently: whether the felt experience of willing an action reflects a real causal power of mind over matter, or only ever appears to.