Mental events

A more general approach adopted by many philosophers is called physicalism. This does not entail reduction of the theoretical or epistemological kind but is a question of whether the physical determines the chemical. Physicalism has been invoked in philosophy of mind to argue that there is a dependence relationship between mental events and physical goings on in the brain. This is clearly a weaker form of reductive claim that epistemological reduction discussed earlier in this article. 

Psi can obviously be incredibly selective. The percipient can show success in clairvoyantly guessing the order of a deck of cards sitting face down on the experimenter s desk. To do this, he must focus sequentially on each card in the deck to the exclusion of all the other cards. There may be a dozen decks of cards in the experimenter s desk drawer, but the percipient does not respond to them. In telepathy experiments, the percipient tries to pick up one person s thoughts, yet there are billions of people on this earth who may be sending out thoughts at that moment. But just as we have no idea how psi information is converted into neural impulses or mental events, we have no idea how this incredible selectivity is achieved. 

Ibid., iv, 246-247. Wright has also noticed the correlation between mental events and changes in the brain, which makes him think that dualism maybe is not a useful term to describe Boerhaave s system. Wright. Boerhaave on Minds 292. 

Davidson, D. 1980. Mental Events. In Essays on Actions and Events, (pp. 207-224). Oxford Clarendon. 

This chapter will discuss the problem of how anomalous monism can accoimt for causation in virtue of mental properties. This is a pressing problem for nonreduetive materialists, sinee nonreduetive materialists generally hold that mental events and properties are anomalous (i.e. that there are no striet laws eonneeting mental types to physieal types). Donald Davidson holds the view of anomalous monism (AM), which is naturally seen as deriving fiom three premises (P). The three premises from whieh Davidson derives AM are is follows ... 

These three premises taken together might seem problematic for mental eausation. Premise (3) states that the mental is anomalous. Premise (2) can be understood as the acceptance of what Davidson calls the Principle of the Nomological Charaeter of Causality. This principle states that where there is causality, there must be a law events related as cause and effect fall under striet deterministic laws (Davidson 1980 116). If we accept the nomological requirement for causality, then it might seem that mental events cannot enter into causal relations. In order for mental events to causally interact with physical events, there would need to be psycho-physical causal laws (by the... 

So on this view, although mental properties are distinct from and irreducible to physical properties, every mental event is token identical with some physical event. Thus, for example, the mental event of my being in pain might be token identical with the physical event of enhanced substance P production. So there would be, for instance, a single event E, which causes my behavior of sa)dng ouch . This event E has both physical properties (higher concentrations of substance P) and mental properties (painfulness). These mental properties supervene on the physical properties, but yet are irreducible to the physical. 

So the mental event of my being in pain cm causally affect my behavior of saying ouch , since that mental event just is a physical event, and we do have laws cormecting physical events with other physical events. 

So anomalous monism can account for how mental events can causally affect physical events. The problem (as suggested by Kim, McLaughlin, Sosa, and others) is... 

Davidson, I think, is led to this particular line of defense because of his views about causation. Davidson holds an extensionalist view of causation - i.e., that causation is a relation between non-abstract particular events. Thus he says, But it is also irrelevant to the causal efficacy of physical events that they can be described in the physical vocabulary. It is events that have the power to change things, not our various ways of describing them (Davidson 1993 12). Since it is events that are causes, then any properties that are relevant to what a particular event causes are causal properties. Davidson says, But properties are causally efficacious if they make a difference to what individual events cause, and supervenience ensures that mental properties do make a difference to what mental events cause (1993 15). So since mental properties supervene on physical properties, and physical properties make a difference to what an event causes, mental properties also make a causal difference. 

Davidson s monism and his views about causation lead him to the conclusion that how we choose to describe an event is irrelevant to what that event causes. A mental event just is a physical event, and as event, it has the ability to cause certain effects. Whether we choose to describe the event as mental or as physical has no bearing on what the event will cause. This much seems right. Which properties we pick out when describing the event are irrelevant to what the event causes. But Davidson seems to conclude from this that an event therefore cannot be causal in virtue of having certain properties. But this conclusion just does not follow. The fact that what properties we pick out when describing an event are irrelevant does not mean that certain properties of the event cannot be more causally relevant than others. It makes perfect sense to ask which... 

Now how does all of this pose a problem for nonreductive materialism Nonreductive materialism holds that although every mental property supervenes on some physical property (and is possibly also realized by tiiat physical property and token identical with it as event), mental properties are neither type identical with nor reducible to physicjd properties. Now in order to give an adequate account of mental causation, the nonreductive materialist will need to be able to say how it is that mental events can be causally potent - i.e., how can a mental event M cause another mental event M to occur, and how can a mental event M cause a physical event P to occur Now if we are working with a Davidsonian model and we have token identity, where every mental event is token identical with its physical instantiation base, then there is no problem with event causation. Mental events are causal because theyjust are physical events. But the... 

Notice that this is the same type of move that saves event causation for anomalous monism. Mental events are causal because each token mental event is identical with a physical event. The problem of property causation, however, is a challenge posed by the exclusion principle that the nonreductive... 

The above considerations show that as long as we hold M and P to be token identical events, Kim s plausible version of the exclusion principle will not rule out mental events as causal. This is good reason for the nonreductive materialist to hold a Davidsonian view of event identity. It seems that a mere supervenience or realization relation between M and P is not quite enough. In addition to supervenience and realization, it seems that we also need the token event identity of M and P, in order to avoid M getting ruled out as causal by the plausible exclusion principle. Thus, fijom this point forward, I will assume that any viable nonreductivist position requires that M and P are token identical events. I will, from now on, assume a Davidsonian event identity. 3.3 Kim s second formulation of the exclusion principle Kim s second formulation of the exclusion principle, which actually appears in the exclusion argument is as follows ... 

Some historians, particularly John Wotiz, have recently argued that Kekul6 was "no genius," hut rather a "gifted opportunist," a "fraud," and a "cheat" who fabricated these anecdotes to create an irrefutable cover story—irrefutable because they were private mental events—in order to steal credit for cyclical benzene from those who he knew were really the first to write cyclical formulas, namely, Couper and Lo-schmidt. Having failed to publish before his rivals (Wotiz suggested), Kekule falsely claimed that he had had these ideas first, in dreams, before them. He was thus guilty of "misconduct." ... 

One central aspect of this concordance is revealed by the very "fine structures" that Holmes sought out. As Gruber convincingly argued, "The more one looks at a case, the more one sees that a seemingly sudden inspiration exhibits a complex history of purposeful growth and a dense inner structure." Moreover, memories can reprocess prior mental events in unpredictable ways. 

Physicalism comes in two varieties reductive physicalism (RP) and nonreductive physicalism (NRP). RP claims contrary to (3) that every real, or as I will say genuine, property (G-property) that has instances in our world (or any physically possible world) is identical to a physical G-property. NRP claims that some mental properties are G-properties that are not identical to any physical G-properties. If events are, as Kim and I think, instantiations of G-properties, then there are mental events that are not identical to physical events but that are nonetheless real. Mental causation says that some of these mental events cause physical events. It is pretty obvious that NRP is committed to causal overdetermination. Later, we will look at how Kim formulates an argument that makes this commitment explicit and attempts to refute it. 

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. 

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. 

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 ... 

Kim (1998b) has defended a bold position concerning mental causation the nature of our world is such that every mental event is either a physical event or an epiphenomenon. One of the main principles he relies on in making his case is the causal closure of the physical, arguably a presupposition of physical theory. That principle has been formulated in various ways. I will formulate it as follows ... 

If causal determinism is true, that probability will be i if indeterminism is true, it may fall short of i.) Another principle he invokes, but does not label -1 will call it the no effects without physical effects principle — is that if a mental event is a cause of another mental event, then it is a cause (is among the causes) of some physical event or other." 1 will not attempt to determine whether Kims argument for his position is successful. 1 note only that these... 

Some philosophers recoil from Kim s position. They maintain that mental events are patently not physical events and that it is nevertheless patently absurd to think that any mental event is an epiphenomenon. That reaction is understandable. On a certain natural conception of events, the property exemplification conception, it is at least deeply controversial whether any mental event is a physical event. On that conception, it seems that a mental event could be a physical event only if the relevant mental property - the mental property the exemplification of which is the mental event - is a physical property. And it is, of course, deeply controversial whether any mental property is a physical property (though the reasons vary depending on the kind of mental property in question). Furthermore, it is hard to believe that any mental event is an epiphenomenon. Epiphenomenalism — the view that mental events are epiphenomena — seems patently absurd. 

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