Powers, Double Prevention and Mental Causation

Metaphysica ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Davies
Keyword(s):  
Mental Causation ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Physical Domain ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Causal Closure ◽  
Mental Events

AbstractS. C. Gibb holds that some mental events enable physical events to take place by acting as ‘double preventers’ which prevent other mental events from effecting change in the physical domain. She argues that this enables a dualist account of psychophysical interaction consistent with the causal relevance of mental events, their distinctness from physical events, the causal closure of the physical and the exclusion of systematic overdetermination. While accepting the causal powers metaphysic, this paper argues that:

Could Mental Causation be Invisible?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Robb
Keyword(s):  
Human Physiology ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Long Term Results ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Empirical Prediction ◽  
Causal Closure ◽  
Mental Events

E. J. Lowe proposed a model of mental causation on which mental events are emergent, thus exerting a novel, downward causal influence on physical events. Yet on Lowe’s model, mental causation is at the same time empirically undetectable, and in this sense is ‘invisible’. Lowe’s model is ingenious, but I don’t think emergentists should welcome it, for it seems to me that a primary virtue of emergentism is its bold empirical prediction about the long-term results of human physiology. Here I’ll try to restore emergentism’s empirical status, but my broader aim is to use Lowe’s model to explore some central topics in the mental causation debate, including the ‘causal closure’ of the physical world and the nature of causal powers.

Mental causation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Loewer
Keyword(s):  
Physical Properties ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
Completeness Of Physics

Both folk and scientific psychology assume that mental events and properties participate in causal relations. However, considerations involving the causal completeness of physics and the apparent non-reducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena have challenged these assumptions. In the case of mental events (such as someone’s thinking about Vienna), one proposal has been simply to identify not ‘types’ (or classes) of mental events with types of physical events, but merely individual ‘token’ mental events with token physical ones, one by one (your and my thinking about Vienna may be ‘realized’ by different type physical states). The role of mental properties (such as ‘being about Vienna’) in causation is more problematic. Properties are widely thought to have three features that seem to render them causally irrelevant: (1) they are ‘multiply-realizable’ (they can be realized in an indefinite variety of substances); (2) many of them seem not to supervene on neurophysiological properties (differences in mental properties do not always depend merely on differences in neurophysiological ones, but upon relations people bear to things outside their skin); and (3) many of them (for example, ‘being painful’) seem inherently ‘subjective’ in a way that no objective physical properties seem to be. All of these issues are complicated by the fact that there is no consensus concerning the nature of causal relevance for properties in general.

Determinables, Determinates, and Causal Relevance

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Walter
Keyword(s):  
Physical Properties ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Causal Exclusion ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Exclusion Argument ◽  
The World ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Manifest Image

Mental causation, our mind's ability to causally affect the course of the world, is part and parcel of our ‘manifest image’ of the world. That there is mental causation is denied by virtually no one. How there can be such a thing as mental causation, however, is far from obvious. In recent years, discussions about the problem of mental causation have focused on Jaegwon Kim's so-called Causal Exclusion Argument, according to which mental events are ‘screened off’ or ‘preempted’ by physical events unless mental causation is a genuine case of overdetermination or mental properties are straightforwardly reducible to physical properties.

Criticism of D.B Volkov’s Teleofunctional Solution to the Problem of Mental Causation

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-135
Author(s):  
Anton V. Kuznetsov
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Physical Factors ◽  
Multiple Realizability ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Local Properties ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
First Editions

The articles examines the teleofunctional solution to the problem of mental causation, presented by Dmitry Volkov in his recently published book Free Will. An Illusion or an Opportunity. D.B. Volkov proposes solutions to three big metaphysical problems – mental causation, personal identity, and free will. Solving the first problem, Volkov creatively combines the advantages of Dennett’s teleofunctional model and Vasilyev’s local interactionism. Volkov’s teleofunctional model of mental causation seeks to prove the causal relevance of mental properties as non-local higher order properties. In my view, its substantiation is based on three points: (a) critics of the exclusion problem and Kim’s model of mental causation, (b) “Library of first editions” argument, (c) reduction of the causal trajectories argument (CTA 1) by Vasilyev to the counterpart argument (CTA 2) by Volkov. Each of these points faces objections. Kim’s criticism is based on an implicit confusion of two types of reduction – reduction from supervenience and from multiple realizability. The latter type does not threaten Kim’s ideas, but Volkov uses this very type in his criticism. The “Library of first editions” argument does not achieve its goal due to compositional features and because non-local relational properties are a type of external properties that cannot be causally relevant. The reduction of CTA 1 to CTA 2 is unsuccessful since, in the case of this reduction, important features of CTA 1 are lost – these are local mental properties, due to which the influence of non-local physical factors occurs. My main objection is that the concept of causally relevant non-local properties is incompatible with the very concept of cause. The set of causally relevant properties of cause can only be local.

Causal Powers, Realization, and Mental Causation

Erkenntnis ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Hofmann
Keyword(s):  
Mental Causation ◽  
Causal Powers

Free Will and Mental Quausation

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARA BERNSTEIN ◽  
JESSICA WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
General Problem ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Nonreductive Physicalism ◽  
Hard Determinism ◽  
Special Cases ◽  
Common Strategy ◽  
Mental Events

ABSTRACT:The questions of how to understand free will and mental causation are clearly connected, for events of seemingly free choosing are mental events that appear to be efficacious vis-à-vis other events. Nonetheless, the free will and mental causation debates have proceeded largely independently of each other. Here we aim to make progress in determining the mutual bearing of these debates. We first argue that the problems of free will and of mental causation can be seen as special cases of a more general problem of mental ‘quausation’, concerning whether and how mental events of a given type can be efficacious qua the types they are—qualitative, intentional, freely deliberative—given reasons to think such events are causally irrelevant. We go on to identify parallels between hard determinism and eliminativist physicalism and between soft determinism and nonreductive physicalism, and we use these parallels to identify a new argument against hard determinism and to reveal and motivate a common strategy underlying apparently diverse soft determinist accounts.

Nonreductive Materialism and Mental Causation

1994 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ausonio Marras
Keyword(s):  
Mental Causation ◽  
Physical Theory ◽  
Nonreductive Materialism ◽  
Token Physicalism ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Bridge Principles

I take nonreductive materialism to be the conjunction of two theses, the first ontological, the second epistemological. The ontological thesis - token physicalism- is that mental events (processes, states, etc.) are tokenidentical to physical events; the epistemological thesis is that psychology is not reducible to physical theory in the classic sense of 'reduction,' according to which we reduce a theory to a another theory by deriving the laws of the former from the laws of the latter via 'bridge principles' linking the predicates of the reducing theory with the predicates of the reduced theory.

scholarly journals Epiphenomenalism for Functionalists

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Beebee
Keyword(s):  
Functional Properties ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Natural Consequence ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Exclusion Problem ◽  
Mental Properties

This chapter focuses on an assumption implicitly made by most recent attempts to solve the exclusion problem for mental causation, that mental (and so multiply realized) properties are ‘distinct existences’ from their alleged effects. Without that assumption, no such solution can work, since we have excellent grounds for thinking that there is no causation between entities that are not distinct from one another. But, assuming functionalism—which, after all, constitutes the grounds for thinking that mental properties are multiply realized in the first place—mental properties are not distinct from the effects to which they are alleged to bear causal relevance, since functional properties are defined in terms of the causal roles of their realizers. The chapter argues, however, that the natural consequence—epiphenomenalism with respect to mental properties—is not as problematic as many philosophers tend to assume.

scholarly journals Dennett’s Account of Mind versus Kim’s Supervenience Argument

1970 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Marczuk
Keyword(s):  
Causal Powers ◽  
Reductive Physicalism ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
Mental Events

This paper challenges Daniel Dennett’s attempt to reconcile the performance of mind and brain within a physicalist framework with Jaegwon Kim’s argument that a coherent physicalist framework entails the epiphenomenalism of mental events. Dennett offers a materialist explanation of consciousness and argues that his model of mind does not imply reductive physicalism. I argue that Dennett’s explanation of mind clashes with Jaegwon Kim’s mind-body supervenience argument. Kim contends that non-reductive physicalism either voids the causal powers of mental properties, or it violates physicalist framework. I conclude that Dennett’s account of mind does not escape or overcome Kim’s mind/body supervenience problem. If Kim’s argument does not prove Dennett’s explanation of mind to be either a form of reductive materialism, or a logically inconsistent view, it is due to the ambiguity of concepts involved in Dennett’s theory.

scholarly journals Double Prevention and Mental Causation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sean Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Causation ◽  
Causal Exclusion ◽  
Exclusion Problem ◽  
Mental Events

<p>Double prevention is often mentioned in the causation literature but is not often discussed in depth. In this thesis my primary goal is to take a deep look at double prevention and evaluate one place it has been put to work. Briefly, a case of double prevention is a case where one event prevents another from preventing a third. While we have strong intuitions that such cases should be causally relevant at least, there is debate over whether they should be counted as fully causal. Sophie Gibb (2013) puts this concept to work by arguing that mental events act as double preventers to physical events. She frames this as an argument against the causal exclusion problem. I propose my own adaption of Gibb’s proposal which does not rest on the controversial premises the original does and as such has a wider appeal.</p>

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