Problem of mental causation

The concept of causing mental refers to the phenomenon of causal efficacy of mental states. He thus describes the idea that mental states are causes of actions and other mental states. Headaches are about the cause that you take an aspirin tablet. Dissatisfaction can be the cause of the idea for a long time to go away.

The mental causation is often seen as a problem for dualism. In addition, fought in the contemporary philosophy of mind is whether the different variants of non-reductive materialism can explain the phenomenon of mental causation.

  • 3.1 The materialist perspective
  • 3.2 Problems of materialism with the mental causation

History

The question of the causal interaction between material body and immaterial spirit has long been recognized as a problem for dualism. Already René Descartes saw himself in a letter from Elisabeth von Herford confronted with the question of how it was doing the mind to interact with the body. At least it was, however, to Descartes times not as implausible that a place would be found in the brain where the mind acts on the body. However, this changed with the progress of neuroscientific knowledge, there is no neural process found, for whose existence you had to accept an immaterial cause.

These problems led in succession to Descartes ' dualistic to many positions that the interaction of mind and brain - and thus the mental causation - denied. Such as developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Nicolas Malebranche positions, however, have had very little influence in the 20th century. Rather, the Spirit has been interpreted in modern materialistic philosophy of mind often, which should lead to a reduction of problematic mental causation to the unproblematic physical causation. In recent decades the debate on mental causation has been particularly influenced by a series of papers Jaegwon Kim, who tried to show that nonreductive materialisms on the question of mental causation fail.

Dualism

The classical ontological dualism distinguishes between material and immaterial, especially mental, entities. It is also often claimed the immateriality of other phenomena, such as aesthetic and moral qualities, numbers and propositions. As a candidate for immaterial entities dualists are all the phenomena that can not be explained by the Natural Sciences and resist such a reduction. The dualism is especially to René Descartes and its distinction of matter and the spiritual as an independent substance (res extensa and res cogitans ) back.

The argument against dualism

Critics of dualism argue that the existence of mental causation, each dualistic position insuperable difficulties. The anti-dualistic strategies assume that the mental causation is obvious and therefore a dualist premise must agree to the following:

Now further argue Antidualisten that the physical world is causally closed. This means that there is a sufficient physical cause is p2 for each physical event p1. In support of this thesis the results of the natural sciences can be given. For physical events whatever physical causes have been found. There is no evidence that it is somewhere in the causal event giving gaps that could only be explained by intangible factors. The second premise is:

The second premise implies that there is a sufficient physical cause of every human action. When a person swallows about a headache tablet, so there's sure a purely physiological cause and it must be used in the explanation of the conclusion of the action, no mental causes. But now you want to also say that the mental state Headache is a cause of the swallowing of the headache tablet. Materialists argue that this causal efficacy of the headache is only understandable if the headaches are a part of the physiological action itself. Finally, it is done " causal work" by the physiological processes already all so that an intangible headache would no longer function.

Dualists seem to stay the claim that the headache and the physiological events are two independent causes of the same physical event. Dualism Critics argue, however, that even such a case of overdetermination is implausible. Although there Überdeterminationen or double causation by independent events, but this is a rare chance. An example would be a house that comes with a cable fire and a lightning strike fire. Although such cases might occur, but is a systematic overdetermination of actions enormously implausible. Exactly this would require a dualist, however, when he claimed, for actions there is always a mental and - independent of - a physical cause. The third premise is:

The three premises together entail the falsity of dualism: if 1) there is mental causation, 2) However, every physical event purely physical causes, and there is no systematic overdetermination 3), then the dualism can not be true.

Dualistic reactions

There are various dualistic strategies with the argument presented deal. All three featured assumptions may be doubted.

Rejecting the second premise: the classic dualism in the tradition of René Descartes denies the causal unity of the physical. Descartes could still accept that no action would be physiologically explain an assumption that no longer seems plausible today. The thesis of the causal closure of the world says, however, that all actions are caused purely physiological. This would be unprovable in accordance with the fallibilism, the closing of individual observations on the accuracy of a materialist theory of mind would listen induction and thus logically plain wrong.

Other contemporary critics of the thesis of causal closure of the world usually refers to the quantum physics and explain that this makes the causal unity of the world implausible. Representative of the idea of ​​the causal closure of the world react to these quantum- theoretical challenge often with a rephrasing of the assumption. While speaking in the classical formulation of the causal closure of of " sufficient cause " suggests about David Papineau ago to formulate the thesis with specified probabilities.

Rejection of the third premise: Some philosophers deny the implausibility of overdetermination. They explain that such a phenomenon would only be an incomprehensible coincidence that ontologically independent causes are independent of each other and in all other respects. However, one could easily imagine relations between the causes that did not lead to a reduction of a cause. This would be the case if the causes were connected as by a law of nature or circumstances in another nonreductive Supervenienzverhältnis.

Rejecting the first premise: while the previously presented dualistic positions try to explain the existence of mental causation, there are also dualists who give up the first premise, and thus the idea of ​​mental causation. Even if in the history of philosophy such different positions - such as the psycho-physical parallelism and occasionalism - were represented in today's debate only epiphenomenalism is seriously discussed. His thesis is that mental states ( or individual aspects, such as qualia or intentionality ) are indeed caused by physical states, but themselves have no effects. While such a position may reject the presented argument, but need to pay the price, to say that about the headache in reality there are not the cause of the swallowing of the headache tablet.

So the dualists remain different strategies the argument of mental causation rejected. In fact, in today's debate no premise is indisputable, even if the presented argument - or variations thereof - still represents the most popular attack on the dualistic metaphysics.

Materialism

The materialist perspective

Materialists argue that the dualism faces a dilemma: Either he gives mental causation, but then remains incomprehensible how an intangible spirit can act on a material substance. Or he denies mental causation, but also leads to unsatisfactory positions (see: epiphenomenon ). In this sense, the phenomenon of mental causation leads to an argument against dualism.

The problems seem to disappear when one identifies mental states with physical states. The riddle was: How can the mind act on matter? When the mind about the brain - that is a part of the matter - is identified, the problem disappears. Similarly, the problem of overdetermination seems to disappear. Because the mental state is identified with a physical condition, there is exactly one cause that had the dualists mistaken for two different causes.

Problems of materialism with the mental causation

However, it is by no means clear that the materialism the problem of mental causation in fact get rid of so quickly. To understand the newly emerging problems, the distinction between reductive and nonreductive materialisms must be understood. Although the early positions of the philosophy of mind - about behaviorism and the identity theory - would reduce the mental to the physical, have there been since the seventies of the 20th century a tendency to non-reductive materialism. This was due in particular formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor problem of multiple realization. According to Putnam and Fodor mental states can not be attributed to specific physical conditions, because the same mental state could be realized by quite different physical states.

The in the philosophy of mind very popular nonreductive materialisms were, however, very sharply attacked by Jaegwon Kim, who explains that they are basically the same problems as the dualism. Nonreductive materialists argue that mental states - or at least some properties of these states - not be reduced to physical states. Now Kim argues that the physical states but already do all the causal work. For the unreduced mental states would therefore remain no function at all, unless there'll be a superdeterminacy claimed. This should, however - as seen in the discussion of dualism - highly problematic.

So Kim is materialism in a dilemma: either it is said the reducibility of mental states, which, however, also many materialist philosophers seems unlikely due to the multiple realization of qualia and Intentionalitätsproblematik. Or one claims the irreducibility of mental states, which one but after Kim captures the problems that also has the dualism. Kim tries to solve this problem by a defense of the reductionist theory. One way to respond to Kim argument has the analogy between the physical and mental conditions on the one hand and determinants Determinablen and on the other side.

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