Also, as I wrote here, in the “Production” section following the “Creative Genius” one of Human Action, Mises defines prouction as (p. 140)
not an act of creation […]. The producer is not a creator. Man is creative only in thinking and in the realm of imagination. In the world of external phenomena he is only a transformer.
Yet, he seems to contradict this, saying that production “is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon” (p. 141), as though production were creative in addition to being transformative.
He concludes this section with (p. 142):
[W]e do not know what mind is, just as we do not know what life, motion, and electricity are. Mind is simply the word to signify the unknown factor that has enabled men to achieve all that they have accopmlished.
If Mises does “not know what mind is,” other than it being an “unknown factor,” then how does he know “mind” is not matter and that, against the Marxist materalists, “the ‘productive forces’ are not material” (p. 141)?
Thanks