Since time immemorial, scholars and philosophers have been trying to explain the relationship between mind and body and the origin of mental and physical phenomena. The major theories exploring the mind-body problem can be divided into two major categories of dualistic and monistic theories. Notwithstanding the width of the gap between the arguments offered by the proponents of different theories, there are certain points at which their views intersect. For example, Interactionism belonging to the dualistic category and Phenomenalism belonging to the monistic category accept the possibility of interaction between the immaterial mind and material body but the former claims that the causation can be bidirectional, whereas the latter presents it as a unidirectional impact of non-physical matter on physical processes.
According to Phenomenalism, physical objects exist only in people’s perception as sensory stimuli and consequently cannot influence the mental states. According to Interactionism, mental states can have an impact on physical states and vice versa. It is hard to give a feasible explanation for the mechanism through which the processes in the immaterial dimension influence the processes in the material body and vice versa. For this reason, the reasoning used by the proponents of this theory lacks empirical truth or logical argumentation and places the main emphasis upon everyday occurrences providing evidence for supporting their claims. For example, when a baby has a stomachache (physical event), he/she feels the pain (mental event) and cries (physical event) making his/her parents worry (mental event). Thus, the arguments offered by Interactionism are stronger than those of Phenomenalism because the physical phenomena do have an impact upon non-physical matters.