Psychophysical Interaction

Abstract

I HAVE followed with much interest the discussion opened in your columns by Sir Oliver Lodge's recent contention that mind directs but does not create energy. What is aimed at, as I understand it, by this distinction is the reconciliation of the activity and efficiency of mind with the mechanical laws of the conservation of energy and momentum. The distinction itself is, as is well known, as old as Descartes, being designed by him to meet the same problem as it presented itself to the thinkers of the seventeenth century. As is also well known, it was immediately disowned by his successors on the ground that guidance or direction of energy by the mind is an interference with the operation of material forces as the physicist is bound to conceive of them not less than the creation of it. Why is it more inconceivable that mind should alter energy or momentum than that it should interfere in any way whatever with the material world as a closed mechanical system? While to Sir Oliver Lodge it seems axiomatic that mind cannot produce energy, to others it has seemed equally axiomatic that it cannot resist or control it. It remains, therefore, for those who propose to revive the above distinction as a way of making the relation of mind to matter comprehensible to show by an analysis of the conception of control that the direction of physical energy by the mind is any more intelligible than its creation. Failing this, the problem they have sought to solve by means of this formula only returns in a deeper form. How is mental efficiency in any shape to be reconciled with fundamental mechanical principles? The purpose of this letter is to suggest a form of solution, somewhat different from that of Prof. Ward's in his “Naturalism and Agnosticism,” which makes recourse to so ambiguous a distinction unnecessary.