I wouldn't call myself a physicalist, but I wouldn't say that what happens in the mind is totally separate from the physical realm either. I'm not a philosophy guy so I assume there's jargon that I just don't know that explains what I believe already, but it's something like this:
The self is an emergent phenomenon of many different things - your brain and its structures, your hormones and how they interact with it, your interactions with others and your perceived place in society, etc. Free will may or may not be part of the phenomenon of the self, but if it does exist then it forms a base-superstructure relationship with the things that created it - so your free will is constrained by, but also has the capacity to change, those aspects.
edit: after skimming wikipedia's article on mind-body-dualism, maybe I do lean towards physicalism actually, because I don't think that the mind is some extra special metaphysical thing.
edit3: okay I've seen a dozen variants of this graphic and I wanted to draw my own
Show
I hope this clarifies things.
M1 is your starting mental state, M2 is your ending mental state. P1, PA, and PI are your starting physical states, and P2, PB, and PII are your ending physical states. All mental states are emergent from their parallel physical states, and are effected by previous mental and physical states. All physical states must follow from previous physical states, but are effected by previous mental states. The degree to which the mental effects the physical varies depending upon which physical process you're talking about, with some processes being purely deterministic.
I wouldn't call myself a physicalist, but I wouldn't say that what happens in the mind is totally separate from the physical realm either. I'm not a philosophy guy so I assume there's jargon that I just don't know that explains what I believe already, but it's something like this:
The self is an emergent phenomenon of many different things - your brain and its structures, your hormones and how they interact with it, your interactions with others and your perceived place in society, etc. Free will may or may not be part of the phenomenon of the self, but if it does exist then it forms a base-superstructure relationship with the things that created it - so your free will is constrained by, but also has the capacity to change, those aspects.
edit: after skimming wikipedia's article on mind-body-dualism, maybe I do lean towards physicalism actually, because I don't think that the mind is some extra special metaphysical thing.
edit2: oh here's my word of the day: Emergentism
edit3: okay I've seen a dozen variants of this graphic and I wanted to draw my own
I hope this clarifies things.
M1 is your starting mental state, M2 is your ending mental state. P1, PA, and PI are your starting physical states, and P2, PB, and PII are your ending physical states. All mental states are emergent from their parallel physical states, and are effected by previous mental and physical states. All physical states must follow from previous physical states, but are effected by previous mental states. The degree to which the mental effects the physical varies depending upon which physical process you're talking about, with some processes being purely deterministic.
That's graph but its several different ways of making PPB