Parallelism, psychophysical
(Cr parallelos, from para, beside — allelon, of one another). A dualistic solution of the mind body problem (see Mind-body relation) which asserts, in its extreme form, a perfect one-to-one correlation between the system of physical events in nature and the system of psychical events in mind. In its more moderate and restricted form, parallelism asserts only a correlation between all psychoses (mental events in an individual mind) and all or some neuroses (neural events in the individual’s body). Thus there may exist physico-chemical and even neural processes in the body having no psychical correlates The term parallelism was introduced by Fechner (Zend-Avesta, Bk III, ch XIX, D) but the doctrine appeared in Spinoza (Ethics, Bk II, prop. 7 schol. and props. 11 and 12) — L.W.