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- Markus E. Schlosser (2009). Non-Reductive Physicalism, Mental Causation and the Nature of Actions. In H. Leitgeb & A. Hieke (eds.), Reduction: Between the Mind and the Brain. Ontos.Given some reasonable assumptions concerning the nature of mental causation, non-reductive physicalism faces the following dilemma. If mental events cause physical events, they merely overdetermine their effects (given the causal closure of the physical). If mental events cause only other mental events, they do not make the kind of difference we want them to. This dilemma can be avoided if we drop the dichotomy between physical and mental events. Mental events make a real difference if they cause actions. But actions are neither mental nor physical events. They are realized by physical events, but they are not type-identical with them. This gives us non-reductive physicalism without downward causation. The tenability of this view has been questioned. Jaegwon Kim, in particular, has argued that non-reductive physicalism is committed to downward causation. Appealing to the nature of actions, I will argue that this commitment can be avoided.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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Consider the following dilemma for non-reductive physicalism. If mental events cause physical events, they merely overdetermine their effects, given the causal closure of the physical. And if mental events cause only other mental events, they do not make the kind of difference we want them to. This dilemma can be avoided once the dichotomy between physical and mental events is dropped. Mental events make a real difference if they cause actions. But actions, I will argue, are neither mental nor physical (...)
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This paper is about the causal exclusion argument against non-reductive physicalism. Many philosophers think that this argument poses a serious problem for non-reductive theories of the mind — some think that it is decisive against them. In the first part I will outline non-reductive physicalism and the exclusion argument. Then I will distinguish between three versions of the argument that address three different versions of non-reductive physicalism. According to the first, the relation between mental and physical events is token-identity. According (...)
Orthodox physicalism has a problem with mental causation. If physics is complete and mental events are not identical to physical events (as multiple-realisation arguments imply) it seems as though there is no causal work for the mental to do. This paper examines some recent attempts to overcome this problem by analysing causation in terms of counterfactuals or conditional probabilities. It is argued that these solutions cannot simultaneously capture the force of the completeness of physics and make room for mental causation.
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: springerlink.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: springerlink.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. This paper is an attempt to understand the content of, and motivation for, a popular form of physicalism, which I call ‘non-reductive physicalism’. Non-reductive physicalism claims although the mind is physical (in some sense), mental properties are nonetheless not identical to (or reducible to) physical properties. This suggests that mental properties are, in earlier terminology, ‘emergent properties’ of physical entities. Yet many non-reductive physicalists have denied this. In what follows, I examine their denial, and I argue that on a plausible (...)
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| | Other links: ucl.ac.uk web.mac.com | Scholar | More.. The anti-reductionist who wants to preserve the causal efficacy of mental phenomena faces several problems in regard to mental causation, i.e. mental events which cause other events, arising from her desire to accept the ontological primacy of the physical and at the same time save the special character of the mental. Psychology tries to persuade us of the former, appealing thereby to the results of experiments carried out in neurology; the latter is, however, deeply rooted in our everyday actions and (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: transactionpub.metapress.com springerlink.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: transactionpub.metapress.com springerlink.com | Scholar | More.. Sydney Shoemaker has proposed a new definition of `realization’ and used it to try to explain how mental events can be causes within the framework of a non-reductive physicalism. I argue that it is not actually his notion of realization that is doing the work in his account of mental causation, but rather the assumption that certain physical properties entail mental properties that do not entail them. I also point out how his account relies on certain other controversial assumptions, including (...)
The paper argues that mental causation can be explained from the sufficiency of counterfactual dependence for causation together with relatively weak assumptions about the metaphysics of mind. If a physical event counterfactually depends on an earlier physical event, it also counterfactually depends on, and hence is caused by, a mental event that correlates with (or supervenes on) this earlier physical event, provided that this correlation (or supervenience) is sufficiently modally robust. This account of mental causation is consistent with the overdetermination (...)
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| | Other links: springerlink.com | Scholar | More.. This paper argues that the non-reductive monist need not be concerned about the ‘problem’ of mental causation; one can accept both the irreducibility of mental properties to physical properties and the causal closure of the physical. More precisely, it is argued that instances of mental properties can be causally efficacious, and that there is no special barrier to seeing mental properties whose instances are causally efficacious as being causally relevant to the effects they help to bring about. It is then (...)
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| Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: springerlink.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: springerlink.com | Scholar | More.. In my reading list
| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: links.jstor.org jstor.org | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: links.jstor.org jstor.org | Scholar | More.. In this paper I develop a novel response to the exclusion problem. I argue that the nature of the events in the causally complete physical domain raises the “problem of many causes”: there will typically be countless simultaneous low-level physical events in that domain that are causally sufficient for any given high-level physical event (like a window breaking or an arm raising). This shows that even reductive physicalists must admit that the version of the exclusion principle used to pose the (...)
