DualIsm can be characterized in various ways; on one account, it is simply the view that MentalEvents and PhysicalEvents are totally different kinds of events. The most common variety of dualism is DualisticInteractionism. The latter is the CommonSense view of the mind--or so it would seem. But there is a puzzle about how the mind and body interact causally, and this puzzle is more serious than might appear at first. See DualisticInteractionism for details.
The other kinds of dualism also accept that mental events and physical events both exist and that they are totally different kinds of events; but unlike interactionism, they deny that mental and physical events causally interact. For example, according to a theory called parallelism, mental events and physical events are perfectly coordinated, it is said by God; so that when a mental event such as my decision to walk across the room occurs, then it just so happens that my body heads across the room. But there isn’t any cause-effect relation between mind and body; mental and physical events are just perfectly coordinated, in advance, by God.
Then there is another kind of dualism, called epiphenomenalism, according to which physical events have mental effects, but mental events have no physical effects. In other words, the causal interaction goes only one way, from physical to mental. So if I eat a candy bar and experience pleasure, that pleasure is caused by my eating the candy bar; but if I decide to get another candy bar, my decision does not cause my body to get another candy bar. So mental events are just side-effects, or by-products, of physical processes in my nervous system. (The word "epiphenomenon" means, roughly, "by-product." That’s why the view is called "epiphenomenalism"; it is the view that the mental is just a by-product of the physical.)
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