Based on the research that I did for the mind and consciousness session; which was interactionism vs. epiphenomenalism, I looked more into them after class and I personally think that the interactionism thought process is more convincing than epiphenomenalism. Just like we discussed in class, interactionism is the idea that the mind and body are two separate entities yet they impact each other. I agree with this, I think that both the mind and body control different parts of a person yet they are fully capable of impacting each other. An example is stress. When some one is stressed out, that’s a mental thing associated with the mind yet it is scientifically proven that being stressed weakens the immune system and a person tends to get physically sick if they’ve been stressed for a period of time. An example of the body impacting the mind is, let’s say, when you’re working out and you lift a heavy weight, you begin to feel a stress on your arms. This physical stress leads your mind to think that you can’t lift a weight that heavy and you begin to tell yourself you can’t do it. Because of these examples, I think that interactionism is the most convincing idea of consciousness in the argument of that and epiphenomenalism.
Your idea of lifting a weight, and causing stress to the mind is similar to many other such examples and can be used as a template. For example, copying the same notes over and over by hand can cause the mind to become stressed. But I’m not sure if this theory is better than epiphenomenalism, which I feel also makes sense. The reason we feel pain one we burn our hand is not because the skin on our body got burnt, but because of the neural impulses and the pain reception sites in the spinal cord. They are what allow us to feel the pain. If we didn’t have those neural connections, we wouldn’t feel the pain. The name for this phenomena is congenital analgesia. Individuals with this condition if they broke their bone for example wouldn’t feel any pain. Therefore I think it makes it hard to judge which theory is better.
One could say that stress is still just a physical brain state causing other physical states like the weakened immune system and that our mental state, if it exists separately from the brain state, is merely a byproduct. It can be hard to tell if something is or is not a physical state.
I was assigned these two views and I think that interactionism is the better of the two as well. I liked your example about large amounts of stress physically causing illness because this shows that stress on the mind affects the body. I agree with one of the replies about it being hard to tell if something is or is not a physical state, but I think that stress mainly affects the mind and that this then affects the body, causing the two to impact each other.