Suppose I have the urge to get inside my automobile and drive to a restaurant. While being driven, the car itself might be moving forward because I am not pressing the brake pedal, which would allow the tires to continue rotating, gripping the pavement due to traction. Physics-related activities occur in the engine, like the movement of the pistons spinning the crankshaft. Whatever physical causes and effects are engaged would of course be why, on one level, that being the scientific one, the car is driving. However, in another sense, the phenomenological/psychological one, this is not why I am driving at all: I am driving because I want to go from one place to another by car.
While neither is the entirety of why the car is moving in the first place, the phenomenological reason behind the event is at the very least no less important than that of physics--and it is logical possibility as dictated by consistency with logical axioms that makes either aspect of this possible to begin with, so matter and mind alike, while being of causal relevance, are not the foundation of all reality here or elsewhere. Yes, I am driving because I am a conscious being that has intentionality, sensory perception, and freedom of the will [1]. I could stop the car or turn it from its path at any moment.
This does not exclude any of the physical causality relationships (yes, observed correlations might not be causes and effects and almost no cause and effect can be proven/known to go together [2], but either way, some sort of physical causality would have to occur) that are required for a car to literally turn on and then become mobile. There are electrical and mechanical components that have to function a certain way for the vehicle, under the perceived laws of physics, to operate, and to operate in an effective way that gets me from one location to another as desired. It is just that desire, intentionality, and choice are inherently of the mind rather than the physical world or the laws of nature tied to it.
Every human action that is not within the mind alone, such as introspective concentration, requires a combination of mental and physical factors. Someone cannot eat without using their jaw to chew and their throat to swallow food, but they also have to will themselves to lift any utensils being used, to open and close their jaw, and so on. They could stop at any time, and there might be mental reasons for eating beyond just the need for physical sustenance. For instance, he or she might want to delight in the taste of a particular dish, which is a mental phenomenon rather than a physical one, although it might trigger bodily reactions like salivation.
As such, there are reasons for things like the movement of a car as it is being driven or the consumption of food that go demonstrably beyond any sort of mere physical occurrences. The mind is logically necessary for the experience of perception that lurks within the body, for it is the immaterial thing that does the perceiving, whatever its exact causal relationship to the body it is confined to. The body is necessary for there to be a foot on the gas pedal or to engage in the active behavior of eating, as well as the passive process of digestion, but in these and other such examples, it is because of the mind that there is perception and because of the mind that there is intention and thus intentional action.
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