Causation as dependence

But I think a good case can be made that causation as dependence will do perfectly well. 

C is a common cause of A and B when C causes both A and B but there is no causal relation between A and B. For example, a rock thrown into the center of a pool (Q causes a wave to hit at point a and at point b at time t. The worry is that the counterfactual i(A had not occurred, then B would not have occurred may appear to be true. In fact, I think that in ordinary language this counterfactual is plausibly tme in the situation 1 described. But recall that the characterization of causation as dependence involves a very particular way of evaluating counterfactuals. On that way this counterfactual is false since the world in which a small violation of law occurs just before r that leads to A not occurring but leaves all else the same, including B, is a more similar world to the actual world than the world that also leads to the wave not hitting b at t. Again, as in the backtracking case, there may be systems that are set up so that one does obtain counterfactual dependence between events that are effects of a common cause. But this won t occur with respect to mental events and their putative effects. 

It is plausible that under normal conditions small diflferences in a person s brain corresponding to diflferent mental states (e.g., different intentions) lead by law to correspondingly different bodily movements. That is, that counterfactual dependencies on Lewis s construal of counterfactuals between mental events and bodily events obtains. If so, then mental events cause in the dependence sense bodily events. My proposal is not that Lewis s influence account perfectly captures our intuitive concept of causation. But I do claim that causation as influence is near enough to our folk conception of mental causation to underwrite the role of causation in folk psychology, rational deliberation, action theory, and so on. In the remainder of this chapter, I lay out a case for this claim. 

Kim raises another worry about dependence that is related to the common cause objection. He argues that causal dependence cannot distinguish the situation in which mental events are genuine causes from the view in which they are mere epiphenomena that are nomologically correlated with brain events that are the genuine causes. Kim pictures the situation involving mental causation as follows ... 

Some authors go beyond this picture and see emergence as depending on downward causation (Hendry 2006). Others do not consider downward causation as a necessary condition for emergence (Batterman 2002). In this paper I will assume a fairly liberal concept of emergence - arguably, a theory which does not include downward causation can stiU be a theory of emergence if it talks about levels of reality which are dependent but autonomous from one another. 

McLaughlin takes the fact that there is now a highly successful quantum mechanical account of chemical bonding to indicate that the chemical level is dependent upon the physical and that physical forces bring about bonding at the chemical level. As may be seen in die above quotation McLaughlin takes this state of affairs to leave no room whatsoever for downward causation. 

Incident causation is assumed to progress from the bottom to the top, which means that chances for early prevention of accidents decrease as you get closer to the top. The order of incident analysis is assumed to be top-down, but with different starting points in the iceberg depending On the type (or level) of data that trigger the detection in the first place. It is also assumed that modem investigation techniques will always try to get as far to the bottom of... 

It has been argued, though, that supervenience is not itself a dependence relation, but only a modalized covariance of properties. On this view, it is at best the sign of ontological dependence, related to it as correlation is to causation, see Horgan 1993. 

If these are the only kinds of cases that can be called cases of causal overdetermination, then Kim is right that it is absurd to think that all cases of mental causation are cases of overdetermination. If we use the term overdetermination as Kim seems to here, then we should reject the idea that P is causally overdetermined by M and P. Surely M and P are not completely independent and individually sufficient causes for P. Rather, M and P are related by supervenience (and possibly also by realization and event identity as well). It is not as if M could have caused P even if P had not occurred. If P had not occurred, M would not have occurred either - M depends on P for its existence. Thus, it seems plausible to accept premise (7) in Kim s exclusion argument - i.e. that P is not causally overdetermined by M and P. 

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