Conspectus of Jaegwon Kim’s paper, Mental Causation and Consciousness: Our Two Mind-body Problems (2005)1 – Peter Sjöstedt-H – MMXVIII Introduction – For the ‘contemporary physicalist’, there are two main mind-body problems: 1. The problem of mental causation (MC): ‘How can the mind exert its causal powers in a world that is fundamentally physical?’ [p. 7] 2. The problem of consciousness (Conss.): ‘How can there be such a thing as consciousness in a physical world, a world consisting of nothing but bits of matter distributed over space-time behaving in accordance with physical law?’ [ibid.] – These two ‘world-knots’ are intertwined. Mental Causation and Consciousness – Historically, Descartes’ response to mental causation was unsatisfactory, and it is of note that many of his successors rather abandoned mental causation than dualism (e.g. Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz). o ‘[It] is interesting to note that mental causation is regarded with much greater seriousness by us today than it apparently was [then].’ [p. 9] – Rejecting substance dualism in favour of physicalism does not resolve MC, quite the contrary. – Kim then reviews some reasons for wanting to save MC: 1. For the possibility of human agency and therefore ‘moral practice’ [p. 9] – i.e. moral responsibility. [But see Schopenhauer against Kant on this issue]. 1b. Beliefs, desires, intentions, decisions must help us navigate the world and build ‘bridges and cities’ etc. [But is this not begging the question?] 2. ‘[The] possibility of human knowledge presupposes the reality of mental causation’ [p. 9] o Perception, memory and reasoning require mental effects from mental causes. § [With regard to the last, A. N. Whitehead’s remark springs to mind: ‘Reason is inexplicable if purpose [final cause] be ineffective … A satisfactory cosmology must explain the interweaving of efficient and of final causation.’ (FR, ch.1)] 3. Psychology as a science (i.e. as nomological) depends on the reality of MC. [There are many other reasons for rejecting epiphenomenalism (i.e. non-MC), such as Alexander’s Dictum and Popper’s evolutionary argument against epiphenomenalism (1977/8). But I suppose that Kim does not want to focus on this much-debated issue here.] – Kim now turns to briefly consider consciousness. o Oddly conss was ‘virtually banished from the philosophical and scientific scene for much of the last century’ [p. 10]. o Still today (2005) much of ‘cognitive science seems still in the grip of what may be called methodological epiphenomenalism.’ [p. 11] § This is in contradistinction to conss’ establishment in value theory and moral philosophy. § Kim quotes Ivan Pavlov on the importance of conss per se: ‘“only one thing in life is of actual interest for us—our psychical experience.”’ (1904) [p. 12] o Kim quotes William James (1890) on the ‘philosophical problem of consciousness’ [p. 12]: § ‘… That brains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the one mystery which returns…’ [PP, p. 647] § Kim notes that mere correlation is not explanation: ‘Making a running list of psychoneural correlations does not come anywhere near gaining an explanatory insight into why there are such correlations...’ [p. 13] – Kim writes that the intertwined problems of MC and conss ‘make each other insoluble.’ [p. 13] The Supervenience/Exclusion Argument – This is an argument against the consistency of physicalism vis-à-vis mental causation. – Thus, this section details ‘how the problem of mental causation arises within a physicalist setting.’ [p. 13] – ‘Supervenience’ is broadly defined as ‘the claim that what happens in our mental life is wholly dependent on, and determined by, what happens with our bodily processes.’ o This is then defined as a physicalism, compatible with certain mind-brain identity theories, functionalism, and emergentism (as ‘explicitly noted’ [p. 14] by British emergentist C. D. Broad [1925, p. 64]). o Mind-body supervenience though attractive to physicalists as a means to avoid dualism, comes with its own heavy burden: MC. This predicament is now detailed using a few principles: 1. The causal closure of the physical domain: – ‘If a physical event has a cause at t, then it has a physical cause at t.’ [p. 15] o (This is qualified by the possibility that a physical event could have no cause – i.e. it is not a principle of physical determinism. Furthermore, the principle is compatible with non-interactionist substance dualism [e.g. those of Spinoza, Leibniz – but not of Descartes].) 2. The principle of causal exclusion: – ‘If an event e has a sufficient cause c at t, no event at t distinct from c can be a cause of e (unless this a genuine case of causal overdetermination).’ [p. 17] o c1 e o t § In itself, this is neutral with regard to whether the causes are physical or mental. This is made more apparent by a ‘generalized version of the exclusion principle’ which he provides: 3. ‘The principle of determinative/generative exclusion: – ‘If the occurrence of an event e, or an instantiation of a property P, is determined/generated by an event c—causally or otherwise—then e’s occurrence is not determined/generated by any event wholly distinct from or independent of c— unless this is a genuine case of overdetermination.’ [p.17] c 1 e/P § [Overdetermination is when one event has two sufficient determiners: e.g. death by simultaneous poisoning and stabbing.] § Note the chief difference between 2 and 3: 3 broadens ‘causation’ to determination, which includes supervenience (aligned, Kim says, to Elizabeth Anscombe’s notion in her paper ‘Causality and Determination’ [1971].) • E.g. beauty can generated/determined by the composition of paint. Such determination need not be diachronic. • (Kim is unimpressed by counter-factual accounts of causation/determination.) – Next Kim applies these principles to the ‘Supervenience/Exclusion Argument’ [p. 19]. o (Really, he says, the supervenience argument is a special form of the exclusion argument.) – If mental event M causes mental event M* (as is compatible with the the causal exclusion principle), but if M* must be instantiated by physical event P* (e.g. a neural event), this transgresses the exclusion principles (2 and 3): Is M* only caused by M or by P? o ‘In what sense, then, can the M-instance be said to be a “cause,” or a generative source, of the M*-instance?’ [p. 19] § § § M " M* 5 P* – Kim begins by considering the following proposed solution: o ‘the M-instance caused the M*-instance by causing the P*-instance.’ [p.20] § § § M M* $ 5 9 P* § [= Model M-P*] – The problem with this proposed solution, for a physicalist, is that it still posits [anomalous] mental-to-physical causation (rather than mental-to-mental causation as in the previous model). – Another option is to say that M’s determiner, P, is that alone which causes P* (thereby proposing pure physical-to-physical causation). § § § M M* X X P " P* § [= Model P-P*] – Thus we consider two models (M-P* and P-P*). For a non-reductive physicalist (i.e. non-eliminativist), both P and M types are distinct properties. – ‘At this point the causal exclusion principle applies: either M or P must be disqualified as P*’s cause.’ [p. 21] o If P is disqualified as P*’s cause, then this breaks the causal closure principle (a physical event must have a sufficient physical cause [if it has a cause at all]). – So in order to harmonize the exclusion principle (2 and 3) with the causal closure principle (1), it seems as if we must accept Model P-P*. o In this case, M and M* would be like ‘two successive shadows cast by a moving car’ [p. 21]: i.e. they are both epiphenomena of the car, and the first shadow per se does not cause the second. – But if mental events are not at all causally efficacious, we then come across another problem: o ‘The problem of mental causation. Causal efficacy of mental properties is inconsistent with the joint acceptance of the following four claims: (i) physical causal closure, (ii) causal exclusion, (iii) mind-body supervenience, and (iv) mental/physical property dualism—the view that mental properties are irreducible to physical properties.’ [pp. 21-22] § Essentially, the acceptance of mental causation (which Kim has argued is needful) is inconsistent with those four principles which must be accepted by non-reductive physicalists. § So Kim then considers whether we can solve this inconsistency by dropping non-reductivism (i.e. by reducing the mental to the physical). Can We Reduce Qualia? – Kim begins by claiming that the philosophical debate of the past few decades concerning mind-to-matter reduction has been futile because it has adopted the wrong view of reduction: namely that of Ernest Nagel (of the 1950s). o This was reduction as the requirement of providing bridge laws between the reducing and reduced theories [e.g. psychology and neurology]. o One problem with this is that the theoretical existence of such bridge laws would be compatible with many dualism such as double-aspect theory, pre- established harmony, epiphenomenalism and emergentism. Therefore such bridge laws (aka. transordinal nomology] would not themselves deliver any particular explanation of the mind-matter relation. I.e. the venture to find those laws is a philosophical dead end. o One might want to ‘strengthen the bridge laws into identities’ [p. 23] (e.g. “pain = C-fiber activation”), but there are many known serious flaws with such reduction to identity. – Kim then states that that which might be required to reduce a mental property is the functionalizing of the mental property. He thus calls this functional reduction. o E.g. being in pain could be defined by being in a state that is caused by certain inputs (e.g. tissue damage, trauma) that in turn cause certain outputs (e.g. screaming, weeping). o Next, once a mental property has been functionalized, ‘we can look for its “realizers”—that is states or properties that specify the causal specification defining that mental property.’ [p. 24] o Because of the possibility of multiple realization [Fordor, Putnam, et al.], establishing such realizers will be an ongoing affair ‘with no clear end’. § [I.e. there may be little or no similarity between the pain realizers of humans, octopuses, aliens, etc., in which case no generalization (i.e. into a law) may be possible. – no ‘global reduction’, as the Nagelian transordinal nomology would have it]. • ‘the multiple realizability of pain is no barrier to local reduction by functionalization’ [p. 25] – i.e. we can at least focus on the realizers of a specific [‘local’] species, or individual. • Kim puts forward the claim that a mental event is its functional realizer (e.g. ‘to be in pain is to instantiate one of its realizers’ [p. 26]). • If this functional realization were the case, then the Ms and Ps in the models above would not represent two causal sources but one and the same, thereby seemingly resolving the problem of causal exclusion and causal closure. But: – ‘The key question then is this: Is pain functionally reducible? Are mental properties in general functionalizable and hence functionally reducible? Or are they “emergent” and irreducible?’ [pp. 26/27] – To this question, Kim immediately offers this nuanced response: intentional/cognitive properties are functionalizable but phenomenal properties (qualia) are not. o Qualia are not functionally reducible, Kim says, because of ‘the metaphysical possibility of qualia inversion’ [p. 27]. § [This is the possibility that the qualitatively identical, say, neural activity that realizes the colour quale auburn in one person will realize the colour quale azure in another person, even were the two persons to use the same name for the distinct qualia (an argument John Locke made).] § Kim states that this view is standard amongst ‘philosophers who work in this area’ [p. 27] such as Block, Hill, Jackson, Levine, McGinn, McLaughlin. o Kim also states that ‘mind-brain identity reduction is [also] not an option for us’ [p. 29] (for reasons Kim provides elsewhere). o [I note that Kim does not in this essay really give any reason as to why ‘intentional/cognitive properties’ are functionalizable.] The Two World-Knots – Kim takes stock: MC is solvable iff mental events are functionally reducible, but qualia are not thus reducible, hence ‘the problem of mental causation is not solvable for phenomenal mental properties.’ [p. 29] o ‘So the functional irreducibility of consciousness entails the unsolvability of both the problem of consciousness and the problem of mental causation’ [p. 29]. § [I.e. the functional irreducibility of qualia halts the resolution of matter-mind upward causation and mind-matter downward causation (and mind-mind lateral causation – mental causation is really of two main types).] – Kim wonders whether this impasse is caused by a deficient, flawed scheme of concepts and language in which we frame the questions. o But he states that the impasse alone is not enough to discard the conceptuallinguistic framework we employ – rather, to justify such a discarding we need other reasons ‘independently of the fact that it [our current framework] generates puzzles and problems that we are unable to deal with.’ [p. 30] o ‘Why should we suppose that all problems are solvable—and solvable by us?’ [p. 30] § [This tends towards the ‘Mysterianism’ proposed by Colin McGinn.] – Kim concludes by the assertion that these two knotty problems ‘represent the most profound challenge to physicalism. … [P]hysicalism will not be able to survive intact and in its entirety … [but] what does survive is good enough for us.’ [p. 31] o [The rest of the book – Physicalism, or Something Near Enough – continues to explore this emasculation of physicalism.] ——— 1 This is the first chapter from Jaegwon Kim’s book Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (2005, Princeton University Press, pp. 1–31). An early version of this chapter appeared as ‘Mental Causation and Consciousness: the Two Mind-Body Problems for the Physicalist’ in: Physicalism and Its Discontents, C. Gillett and B. Loewer, eds. (2001, Cambridge University Press).