The Soul and Body

[theCardinalbird]

How can an immaterial mind (soul) move a physical body, and how can a body that consists of heavy, dense spatial matter affect an immaterial mind? If the mind is immaterial, it is not part of the physical world. How can something like the mind reach into the physical world and affect it?

 

[Cruciferi]

Your body and soul are fused together. How they work together is still a mystery.

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the quantum realm or our interaction with the other dimensions of our Universe.

 

[Wesrock]

In Thomist philosophy, the intellect is a power of the soul, not the soul itself, and the soul is the principle of what a living material being is.

My understanding of Thomist philosophy of the mind is that the the Intellect, for one, is not all of our consciousness, but the ability of the person to abstract from particulars to understanding those concepts universally. And it’s not an immaterial part interacting with material parts, but rather a faculty of a human being as a whole. An " emergent property" (kind of), rather than a part. We’re a whole which is something new and not just the sum of parts. It’s just in the nature of a human to do this by virtue of being human. It’s not mechanical, as Descartes and those who came after him conceived it, but is better understood with Aristotlean conceptions of causation.

 

[Richca]

Well, God who is a pure immaterial spirit created the material/physical world out of nothing, preserves it in being, and moves the entire world as ‘the first cause who operates in and through secondary causes’ (CCC#308). The spiritual powers of intellect and will are superior powers than all material/physical natures and thus can move bodies which are of an inferior nature by contact of power.

 

[Shakuhachi]

Perhaps what we define as “material” and “immaterial” are not as discrete as we would like to think.