Parallelism

Parallelism is a metaphysical position within the debate of how the mind and the body interact. The parallelist solution is that they don’t interact, but rather they merely run parallel to each other and have no causal contact. In a sense, they are both synchronized - with some philosophers such as Leibniz positing that the states of the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’ are pre-determined, and thus remain parallel throughout the course of life. For example, lift your hand into the air. The fingers on the hand all raise (albeit not perfectly parallel, but this is merely an analogy), even though the raising of one did not cause the other - they simply happened at the same time. Another example that is commonly used is that of two synchronized clocks that always keep the same time - with the two always telling the exact same time - corresponding to the state of events [time], but still having no causal connection. Those who believe in parallelism hold that when we experience real-life events such as pain or pleasure, the mental activity corresponding to those sensations are not produced by those events, but rather occur simultaneously. Of course, in recent years, scientific advances generally do not support parallelist theories, with the body sometimes clearly affecting mental states. Nonetheless, the view was held by certain important thinkers and does raise some certainly valid points about the apparent fundamental difference between the body and the mind.