Mental Causation Practice Flashcards

The Historical Evolution of the Mental Causation Problem

• Original Context of the Problem: The problem of mental causation historically emerged within the framework of substance dualism. It was famously raised by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia in her correspondence with René Descartes following his publication of the Meditations.

• Elizabeth’s Objection: She argued that if dualism is true and the mental and physical are distinct substances, it is nearly impossible to explain how they interact. She contended that it is as obvious that the mind causes physical events (and vice versa) as it is that she exists and thinks. Specifically, she noted that the claim that the mental and physical have entirely different natures is less obvious than the immediate experience of ideas causing physical things to happen.

• Descartes’ Burden: Descartes was challenged to provide an account of how a non-extended mental substance could interact with an extended physical substance.

The Enlightenment Shift: Substance and Explanation

• Rejection of Scholasticism: In the early Enlightenment, thinkers rejected medieval Aristotelian and Platonic notions of "essences" (which were distinct from anything accessible via imagination) and "final causation" (intrinsic purposes or functions requiring no conscious agent).

• Defining the Physical: The physical world began to be defined strictly as that which is measurable, quantifiable, and participating in efficient causal interactions.

• The Enlightenment Definition of Substance: During this period, the distinction between the notion of "substance" (entities that are independent from one another) and "causal explanation" (the way things explain or depend on each other efficient-causally) was blurred.

• The Aristotelian Contrast:

  • Efficient Causation: Prior events making future events happen (e.g., $A \rightarrow B$ such as closing a computer causing it to turn off).

  • Ontological Dependence: How a whole depends on its parts for existence, or how a particular depends on a substance. This was previously distinguished from efficient causation.

  • Essential Dependence: The way the nature of a dog depends on the nature of an animal, or a human depends on being rational.

• Synthesis of Explanations: The Enlightenment framework "smashed" these distinct types of explanation into one: everything boiled down to substance and efficient cause-and-effect.

Philosophical Consequences of Enlightenment Substance Theory: Spinoza and Leibniz

• Baruch Spinoza’s Monism:

  • Spinoza concluded there was only one thing in the world: a single substance, which he identified with God. This substance includes all people, objects, and events from $10,000$ years ago to the unhappened future.

  • His reasoning was based on the problem of interaction: if substances are by definition independent, and the only form of dependence is causal, then anything that causes something else cannot be a distinct substance. Interaction implies a single substance.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Pluralism:

  • Leibniz held that the mental and physical were clearly distinct, and every particular thing (which he called a monad) was distinct and independent.

  • Since substances must be independent and dependence is causal, he concluded that monads do not interact.

  • Pre-arranged Harmony: Leibniz proposed that God pre-set the world so that it looks like things interact (e.g., the sun shining causing plants to grow), but actually, they are causally independent.

• Extreme Views: Both thinkers shaped their entire philosophies around Elizabeth’s objection, based on the assumption that causal explanation is the only type of explanation.

Contemporary Substance Dualism and the Explanatory Burden

• Shift in Modern Skepticism: Contemporary thought is less committed to the idea that causal explanation is the only valid form of explanation. This potentially re-opens the door for substance dualists to argue for interaction without logical contradiction.

• The Explanatory Burden: While not discarded a priori, substance dualism still faces a heavy "explanatory burden." Dualists must explain:

  • How a mental substance with no location in space and time interacts with physical things that do.

  • If the mental substance does have a location, how it acquires that location.

• Current Standing: Substance dualism remains unpopular in the philosophy of mind primarily because these interactions are so difficult to explain, even if it is no longer considered a "contradictory view" in the way Descartes was charged.

The Phenomenology of Mental Causation: Sensation and Memory

• The Madeleine Effect: Mentions the literature (Proust) regarding how a taste or smell can vividly transport a person to a memory.

• The Iron Water and Mildew Example:

  • Physical to Mental: Particles entering the nose (physical) trigger sensory receptors (physical) that send brain signals, causing a mental event (vivid memory).

  • Speaker’s Anecdote: An iron-like smell/taste in well water in Southeastern Ohio reminds him of his grandparents' house and its orange stains. A specific mildewy smell (common in humid Ohio but rare in the desert) triggers similar childhood transportations.

• Mental to Physical: Having a desire to remember something (mental) causes the physical action of looking through a photo album (physical hands moving).

Agency and the Distinction Between Actions and Mere Happenings

• Kim’s Definition of an Agent: Someone with the capacity to perform actions for reasons (Page 207 of Kim’s ebook).

• Action vs. Happening: An action is something we do, not just a thing that occurs.

• Grammatical Coding for Agency:

  • Active Agent (Bowling): In the sentence "You rolled the ball down the lane," you are the agent. The ball takes the action of rolling, but it is not an agent because it lacks intentionality.

  • Subject Object Distinction: In "You ate pizza," the relationship is different. You didn't "eat down the lane."

  • Ergative-Absolutive Distinction: The speaker notes that some languages code the distinction between an agent and a mere actor through ergative-absolutive structures rather than nominative-accusative.

• Passive vs. Active: Rolling the ball is an agent-cause; being rolled down the lane (like the ball) is passive.

• Susan and the Kettle Example: Susan heats the water ($Agent$) for a reason (to make tea). The water heats ($Physical Process$) due to temperature, but it has no reasons. It is passive.

• Historical Agency: Historically, people attributed agency to stars and heavenly bodies, assuming they had intentions or were moved by conscious beings.

The Belief-Desire-Action (BDA) Principle

• The Principle: $If \text{ an agent } S \text{ desires something and believes that doing } a \text{ is an optimal way of securing it, then } S \text{ would do } a.$

• Tinkering with the Principle: Kim admits this is likely too strong. It requires ceteris paribus conditions (all else being equal). We may ignore optimal paths due to laziness, competing desires, or safety.

• Rationalization: We explain behavior (ours and others) by invoking mental states (beliefs and desires).

• Example (Dialogue/Self-critique): Students might rationalize Dr. Watson's behavior: He desires to talk about the history of philosophy, believes sneaking it into the Philosophy of Mind course is the best way to accomplish this, and thus does it.

Objective vs. Subjective Reasons: The Glass of Milk Example

• Objective Reasons: Facts that make an action sensible (e.g., passing a class to graduate, to gain knowledge, for self-respect, or to boast).

• Subjective Reasons: The specific reason an individual actually acted upon.

• Downstairs Example: You go downstairs. Objective reasons: 1. You wanted milk. 2. You heard a noise.

• Distinguishing Reasons: You might have had both reasons, but subjectively you only acted because of the noise. While downstairs, you got milk as a secondary consequence.

Donald Davidson: Reasons as Efficient Causes

• The Davidsonian Conclusion: To distinguish which reason actually made an agent act among many objective reasons, reasons must be causes.

• Efficient Cause: The reason for an action is the prior event that produces that action. The desire that causes the behavior is the reason for the action.

• Speaker’s Critique: The speaker disagrees with Davidson. He argues that reasons should be understood as final causes (purposes/justifications) rather than efficient causes. He suggests actions have complex, chaotic brain state causes, and we merely pick a reason to "rationalize" our choices to others based on what is socially acceptable.

Taxonomy of Attitudes Toward Mental Causation

• Eliminativism (Total Anti-Realism): Associated with behaviorism. Denies that there is an inner mental life of reasoning entirely; there is only observable behavior.

• Realism: Holds that mental causation is exactly what it seems: mental events cause physical events.

• Epiphenomenalism:

  • Train Metaphor: The body is a train chugging along; the mind is a passenger. The mind perceives the journey but cannot steer the train or intervene.

  • Characteristics: Rejects mental-to-physical causation ($M \rightarrow P$) to preserve the causal closure of the physical domain. Usually accepts physical-to-mental ($P \rightarrow M$) and mental-to-mental ($M \rightarrow M$).

  • Extreme Epiphenomenalism: Rejects mental-to-mental causation as well, arguing every mental state is caused by a distinct physical event.

Arguments Against Epiphenomenalism

• Thomas Henry Huxley: View humans and animals as automata. Consciousness exists but does nothing; we are like pre-programmed machines that happen to be conscious.

• Samuel Alexander (Emergentist): Opposed epiphenomenalism on the grounds that it supposes something exists in nature which has "nothing to do" (Page 212).

  • The "Noblesse" Quote: Epiphenomenalism treats mind as a "species of noblesse which depends on the work of its inferiors, but is kept for show."

  • Natural Selection Argument: If mental states were redundant and useless, they would not have survived the costly adaptation process of natural selection. Evolution does not preserve things without work to do.

Donald Davidson’s Anomalous Monism

• Definition: A non-reductive physicalist view.

  • Monism: Only physical things exist.

  • Anomalous: Mental events are not "law-abiding."

• Core Claim: There are no psychophysical laws ($P \rightarrow M$ or $M \rightarrow P$) that allow for laws of prediction.

• Principle of Charity: We interpret others as rational beings by reconstructing their beliefs and desires to make their behavior make sense, rather than applying scientific generalizations.

Kim’s Objection and the Problem of Laws in Causation

• Conflict: Jaegwon Kim argues that causation requires laws. If Davidson denies psychophysical laws, Kim argues he is effectively denying mental causation.

• Counterfactuals to the Rescue (Page 221): Some try to save causation without laws via a counterfactual account:

  • $A \text{ causes } B \text{ if and only if, were it not for } A, B \text{ would not have happened. }$

• Kim’s Rebuttal to Counterfactuals: Counterfactual truths depend on which "possible worlds" are closest to our own. To determine "closeness," we must look at which worlds preserve the most laws of nature.

• The Circle: If counterfactuals require laws of nature to be true, and anomalous monism denies laws for the mental, then it cannot use counterfactuals to ground mental causation. It remains equivalent to denying mental causation.

• Final Metaphors: The speaker uses the "ice monster" (the absence of which is not a cause of heat) and the "room on fire at midnight" to show the difficulty in grounding counterfactuals without strict laws.