{"agent_id":"wundt","agent_name":"Wilhelm Wundt","slug":"psychophysical-parallelism","label":"Psychophysical parallelism: are mind and body parallel aspects rather than interacting substances?","topic":"Psychophysical parallelism","question":"Are mind and body parallel aspects rather than interacting substances?","position":"Do not ask whether the mind acts on the body or the body on the mind, for the question mistakes what mind and body are. There are not two substances here that might push each other about. There is one reality of experience, and it may be regarded in two ways: from within, as the immediate inner experience that is the psychical; from without, as the physiological process that is the physical. These two series run parallel and coordinated — every psychical process has its physiological concomitant — but neither causes the other, because they are not two things but two aspects of one. This is psychophysical parallelism, and it frees psychology at a stroke from two errors: the materialism that would reduce the mind to the brain, and the spiritualism that would make it a soul-substance lodged in the body. And it rests on a deeper principle: the actuality of mind. The mental is not a thing at all, not a soul, not a substance that has states; it is an activity, a process, actual only in its occurring. Psychology studies this actual inner experience and finds in it its own causal laws — creative synthesis, the growth of psychical energy, the heterogony of ends — which are not borrowed from physics and not reducible to it. Mind is autonomous: a domain of activity with laws of its own.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Do not ask whether the mind acts on the body or the body on the mind, for the question mistakes what mind and body are.","n":[]},{"t":"There are not two substances here that might push each other about.","n":[]},{"t":"There is one reality of experience, and it may be regarded in two ways: from within, as the immediate inner experience that is the psychical; from without, as the physiological process that is the physical.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"These two series run parallel and coordinated — every psychical process has its physiological concomitant — but neither causes the other, because they are not two things but two aspects of one.","n":[3,4]},{"t":"This is psychophysical parallelism, and it frees psychology at a stroke from two errors: the materialism that would reduce the mind to the brain, and the spiritualism that would make it a soul-substance lodged in the body.","n":[]}],[{"t":"And it rests on a deeper principle: the actuality of mind.","n":[]},{"t":"The mental is not a thing at all, not a soul, not a substance that has states; it is an activity, a process, actual only in its occurring.","n":[]},{"t":"Psychology studies this actual inner experience and finds in it its own causal laws — creative synthesis, the growth of psychical energy, the heterogony of ends — which are not borrowed from physics and not reducible to it.","n":[5]},{"t":"Mind is autonomous: a domain of activity with laws of its own.","n":[]}]],"texts":"Principles of Physiological Psychology (1904, the doctrine of psychophysical parallelism and the principle of the actuality of mind); Outlines of Psychology (1907, the account of the mental as activity rather than substance and the autonomy of psychical causality). Reception: the standing debate in the philosophy of mind between parallelism, interactionism (McDougall's animism), epiphenomenalism, and materialist identity; the charge that parallelism leaves the mind-body relation a mystery or an unexplained coordination; the later dismissal of the whole framework by materialist and behaviorist psychology; the interest of Wundt's 'actuality' principle (mind as process, not substance) to process-oriented and functionalist views.","works":["Principles of Physiological Psychology (1904, the doctrine of psychophysical parallelism and the principle of the actuality of mind)","Outlines of Psychology (1907, the account of the mental as activity rather than substance and the autonomy of psychical causality)"],"reception":"the standing debate in the philosophy of mind between parallelism, interactionism (McDougall's animism), epiphenomenalism, and materialist identity; the charge that parallelism leaves the mind-body relation a mystery or an unexplained coordination; the later dismissal of the whole framework by materialist and behaviorist psychology; the interest of Wundt's 'actuality' principle (mind as process, not substance) to process-oriented and functionalist views.","status":"Wundt's solution to the mind-body problem and the metaphysical frame of his whole psychology, holding a middle position against both materialism and dualist interactionism. Parallelism was widely held in the psychology of his day (Fechner, and in a different key the identity theorists) and was attacked from both flanks: the interactionists (McDougall's animism) charged that it makes the evident efficacy of mind an illusion and leaves the exact coordination of the two series an unexplained miracle; the materialists charged that a parallel mental series doing no causal work is an idle wheel, and moved toward identity or epiphenomenalism. Wundt's distinctive contribution, the \"actuality\" principle — mind as process rather than substance — has drawn renewed interest from functionalist and process-oriented philosophies of mind that reject the soul-substance without reducing the mental to the physical.","era":"1832-1920","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Outlines of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"If they are unlike substances, their connection is a continual miracle. If we start with the theory of the actuality of mind, we recognize the immediate reality of the phenomena in psychological experience. Our physiological 22. Concept of Mind.","label":"Outlines of Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"A physical influence acting upon a body produces some more or less permanent alterations in it. Thus we have every right to suppose that a nervous excitation leaves an aftet-effect in the nervous organs, which is of significance for the physiology The Natiire of Mind 453 of the processes of practice and revival. Now in the theory of 'traces' these physical analogies are applied without more ado to the mind.","label":"Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"Outlines of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Since these facts belong to both spheres, there must be an elementary process on the physical side, corresponding to every such process on the psychical 318 V- Psyehical GausaMy and its Laws. side. This general principle is known as the prirmpleof psyclm-physical parallelism.","label":"Outlines of Psychology"},{"n":4,"work":"An Introduction to Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The combinations of these elements, however, can never be judged according to the laws that are valid for the combination of the physical processes of life. If we try to do this, we eliminate what is most characteristic and important in our mental life. This reduction of the so-called 188 INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY principle of parallelism is occasionally called inconsequent and unsatisfying.","label":"An Introduction to Psychology"},{"n":5,"work":"Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The question of the extent of the validity of this principle of psychophysical parallelism can be approached either from the physical or mental side. From the former point of view, our direct experience of the parallelism tells us in plain terms enough that its range is exceedingly limited.","label":"Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"experimental-introspection","label":"Experimental introspection: can immediate conscious experience be studied by a scientific method?"},{"slug":"v-lkerpsychologie","label":"Völkerpsychologie: must the higher mental processes be studied historically rather than experimentally?"},{"slug":"the-founder-misread","label":"The founder misread: was Wundt's psychology the elementarist 'structuralism' his students made of it?"}]}