Mental Causation
Varieties of Mental Causation
Mental-to-Mental Causation: This refers to cases where one mental state causally produces another mental state. The lecture provides several detailed examples:
Reasoning and Intentions: A person may have a desire for "big money," a belief that they are "lucky," and a belief that lucky people who go to Las Vegas win big money. Together, these existing mental states cause the formation of a brand-new mental state: the intention to go to Las Vegas.
Perception and Belief: The act of perceiving advertising (a mental state) can produce a specific belief about the content of that advertising, such as beliefs regarding the attractions of Las Vegas.
Desire-to-Desire Causation: A fundamental desire, such as the desire to pay a mortgage, can lead to the development of a secondary desire, such as a desire for big money.
Intention and Imagination: Forming an intention to go to Vegas may subsequently cause the mental activity of daydreaming about the trip.
Mental-to-Physical Causation: This occurs when a mental event causes a physical event or action. This is considered a common-sense assumption in daily life.
Complex Actions: Deciding to go to Las Vegas (a mental decision) triggers a chain of physical events: clicking a mouse to buy a ticket, packing physical bags, driving an actual car to the airport, and walking onto a plane. These physical actions are predicated on the mental cause.
Basic Motor Control: A simple example is the intention to raise one's arm. One forms the mental intention, and the physical arm moves upward as a direct result.
The denial of this relationship is known as epiphenomenalism, where the "phenomenal" or mental is seen as having no causal influence on the physical.
Physical-to-Mental Causation and Philosophical Implications
Physical-to-Mental Causation: This involves physical states or events in the world causing specific mental experiences or perceptions.
Sensory Perception: If a person's eyes are functioning and a physical slot machine is placed in front of them, the presence of that physical object causes the mental state of "perceiving a slot machine."
Sensation and the Nervous System: If a cold drink is spilled on someone, the physical interaction with the skin and nervous system causes the mental sensation of "feeling coldness." The experience of coldness is a mental state caused by a physical trigger.
Idealism: The speaker notes that the only way to deny that physical events cause mental states is to hold the position of idealism. Idealists believe that the mental life is completely closed off from any external physical world.
Epiphenomenalism: The Denial of Mental Influence
Definition of Epiphenomenalism: This is the philosophical view that while physical events can cause mental events, mental events never cause physical events. The mental life is effectively a "byproduct" with no causal power.
Huxley’s Train Metaphor: T.H. Huxley, a proponent of this view, used the analogy of a steam train to explain the relationship:
The Physical is like the train engine, chugging along due to its internal mechanical processes.
The Mental is like the sound of the steam whistle.
While the train's movement (physical process) causes the whistle to blow (mental state), the sound of the whistle does nothing to propel the train forward or change its direction. The train would function identically whether the sound existed or not.
Causal Asymmetry: In this view, experiences are side effects of physical processes. If you were to remove the internal experiences, the physical behavior and events would remain exactly the same.
Evidence for Epiphenomenalism: Rationalization and Dissociation
Psychological Rationalization: Evidence for epiphenomenalism often comes from cases where the mind "invents" a cause for a physical action after the fact.
Hypnosis Case Study: Under hypnosis, a subject is told they will get a drink of water upon waking. When they wake up and perform the action, they do not cite the hypnosis. Instead, they rationalize the behavior by saying, "I'm thirsty." They have invented a mental cause (thirst) for a physical event that was actually dictated by a prior physical/external command.
General Mistakes: Humans frequently make mistakes or take actions and then construct "hokey stories" to explain them, convincing themselves they intended to do what their bodies were already doing.
Talking Before Thinking: A specific dissociative experience occurs when one is extremely tired.
Normally, a person thinks of a word and then speaks it a split second later.
In states of exhaustion, the speaker notes one might hear the words coming out of their mouth before they experience the thought of saying them. This suggests the physical action of speaking occurred without being preceded by a conscious mental cause, making the subsequent experience an observer of the action rather than the driver.
The Nature of Action and the Causal Status of Reasons
The Significance of Epiphenomenalism: If epiphenomenalism is true, it would fundamentally undermine the common-sense understanding of the human mind's impact on the world.
Actions vs. Mere Events:
An event is something that simply happens in the world.
An action is distinguished by being produced by a reason. It involves an agent (a person) who is in control and acts for specific reasons.
Causal Control: Philosophers like Jaegwon Kim and Donald Davidson interpret the agent's control as causal control.
Kim's View: The agent must be the cause of their actions, and reasons themselves must function as causes.
Davidson's View: Davidson argues that among the many reasons one might have for an action, the "true" reason for that action is specifically the one that causally produced it.
Teleological vs. Efficient Causation
Efficient Causation: Often described as "fancy talk" for regular physical causation involving a "push" or a "pull" (e.g., one billiard ball hitting another).
Teleological Explanation: This relates to end goals, purposes, or what something is for.
The Speaker’s Critique: The speaker suggests that Kim and Davidson might be conflating two different vocabularies: the vocabulary of cause-and-effect and the vocabulary of justification/reasons.
Purpose over Pushing: The speaker argues that mental states provide the purpose for actions rather than a physical-style "mental pushing."
Example: The reason for going to Vegas is "in order to win big money." However, winning money is a future state. If it were a cause in the traditional sense, it would lead to "backwards causation" (where the future causes the past).
Therefore, the speaker views reasons as teleological end goals rather than efficient causes, though the lecture notes that for the sake of the Kim-Davidson debate, reasons will be treated as causes.
Conclusion
The next lecture will focus on Anomalous Monism, which is the specific philosophical view held by Donald Davidson regarding these issues.