Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Proprioception, Parallelism, Formal Causality

One of the functions of Proprioception is to help coordinate Motility, e. g. by maintaining balance.  Thus, Proprioception exerts Causality on the Body.  Now, Spinoza denies Causal interaction between Mind and Body, which is one of the characteristics of the Parallelism that he attributes to them.  It would thus seem to follow that Proprioception does not exemplify his concept of the Mind-Body relation, contrary to what has been previously proposed here.  However, the only Causality that he recognizes is Efficient Causality--in which Mind is the cause of Motility or conversely--whereas coordination is an example of Formal Causality, i. e. because it unifies a manifold of motions.  Thus, his Parallelism, at least as is, is not inconsistent with Proprioception.  Indeed, an interpretation of his Mind-Body relation as that of Form-Matter, grounds Proprioception, and maintains a Parallelism in which Efficient Causal interaction is precluded.

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