Can the Mind Command the Body?

Abstract

People naturally intuit that an agent's ethereal thoughts can cause its body to move. Per intuitive physics; however, one body can only interact with another. Are people, then, covertly puzzled by the capacity of thoughts to command the body? Experiment 1 first confirms that thoughts (e.g., thinking about a cup) are indeed perceived as ethereal-as less detectible in the body (brain), and more likely to exist in the afterlife relative to matched percepts (e.g., seeing a cup). Experiments 2-5 show that thoughts are considered less likely to cause behavior than percepts (e.g., thinking of a cup vs. seeing one). Furthermore, mind-body causation is more remarkable when its bodily consequences are salient (e.g., moving an arm vs. brain activation). Finally, epistemic causes are remarkable only when they are ascribed to mental- (e.g., "thinking") but not to physical states ("activation"). Together, these results suggest that mind-body interactions elicit a latent dualist dissonance.