Monetary-machine interactions

That concludes my example. Its intended purpose, of course, is as an analogy with mind-body interactions. What I hope to do is to draw some useful lessons from the analogy. For convenience, I refer to causal interactions between coins and vending machines as monetary-machine interactions. If we stopped here, if we looked no deeper, then, despite common explanatory practice, we would have to conclude that, with respect to machines, money was epiphenomenal. That is, the fact that money is money does not explain the effects of money on machines (or people, for that matter). It is the 5-facts that do all the explanatory work. What explains machine behavior is not broad facts about the value of internal coins, but narrow facts about their size, shape, and density. Once we have the analogy fully in place, though, I return to the analysis of these interactions and look a little deeper. I hope to show that, contrary to appearances, there is a sense in which monetary facts about coins and bank notes are causally relevant to machine behavior. The form of this relevance is suggestive about the way the mind may be causally relevant to human and animal behavior. 

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