first published 141001 as follow up to Harmonic Ontologies
For me, the mind is not material, but only in a very specific way is it "part of" the material world. By contrast, the brain is material, but that's because these days the brain is seen as a collection of neurons whereas the mind is seen as the domain of thought.
That phrasing "part of" doesn't do well to clarify the actual relationship between the mind and the material world. There is no matter in mind, as for example you can know my mind and never exchange any matter with it; even the term "energy" cannot capture what a thought is even considering its transmission from one mind to another. But that's just to make the point that words like 'mind', 'thought', and 'will' all exist in a different ontology than "matter" and "energy". Similarly "matter" and "energy" are both of a different ontology than the fundamental patterns from which they emerge.
It has to do with free will in just that way, ie. the point of the ontological distinction was to resolve the "problem" of free will in the face of an apparently deterministic physics. Free will exists, but only in the same ontological domain as mind, thought, taste, etc. In the domain of matter and energy, free will has no meaning, and while this doesn't necessarily imply that the matter-energy ontology is deterministic, it at least allows it to be without generating a paradox.
To say the mind is part of the material world is like saying politics is part of physics. Well, yeah sorta, but not really. Or it's like saying my daughter's hope to see her friend tomorrow is part of cellular chemistry. One can admit they are related, but "part of" doesn't really get it. In fact, it seems more natural to say it in reverse for these kinds of things, ie. physics is part of politics or cellular chemistry is part of what makes up our hopes and dreams. I think the "natural feeling" of which direction makes more sense has to do with which is closer to home for the "person doing the talking", which might have to do with the accessibility of the relevant variables. For example, a lot more goes into my hopes for the future than my present cellular chemistry, and those other variables dominate the cellular chemistry and even drive it.
The study of how higher (downstream, nested) ontological domains drive their lower (upstream, nesting) domains is the non-paradoxical take on the mind-body problem. No one doubts that wills move bodies and that bodies move resources and that resources aggregate molecules and molecules aggregate atoms and atoms associate electrons and electrons express quantum fields.
But everyone wants to know what a will is in terms of electrons. Well, it's just a particular pattern of elements from all those domains in which it is nested, PLUS MORE relationships which are synthetic (cross-stream) at each of those ontological levels. The reason you can't reduce those nested patterns is because of those "plus more" things that come from the relationships that are relevant at each of those nested pattern levels bottom to top. Those cross relationships are very specifically relations of those nested patterns themselves and thus cannot be expressed in the ontologies of their nesting domains.
This inability to express is what the mystery is all about. Ironically, it IS expressed perfectly in the form of thoughts and language and culture and all the rest of what we experience as our extant reality. For some reason, everyone wants to explain it rather than just know it by experience. All I'm saying here is that you won't be able to explain it reductively, which is to say analytically, which is to say by mining down through the nesting chain in only one direction. Each of the nested ontologies breed and produce offspring in their own domains, and those processes have no meaningful expression in their nesting ontologies.
The trail disappears in that direction, into a deluge of stochastics and uncertainties. Consider: How many ways might cars have been invented? And how many ways were they invented? Now we have a history of how the cars we have today actually came to be what they are. Was there genuine creativity involved? Of course! That's part of what made the distinction between the actual history we now might accept vs. all the possible histories which might have resulted in cars. People made choices which produced the results we know today. At the level of chemistry and metallurgy did everything proceed according to natural laws? Yep.
Freedom and free will are "part of" natural law. Or is it that natural law is "part of" freedom in that as freedom is exercised, movements are made in nature, and according to her laws? Do you see how it's not the most useful distinction which is sought in the question of free will vs. deterministic natural law? Some distinctions that can bear more fruit include:
Influence from the embedded ontologies into the nesting ontologies is real. It's happening everywhere all the time. Minds move matter in a way that matter does not move minds. This is the organizing principle of existence.