Mental Causation via Neuroprosthetics? A Critical Analysis
Synthese (12):5159-5174 (2018)
Abstract
Some recent arguments defending the genuine causal efficacy of the mental have been relying on empirical research on neuroprosthetics. This essay presents a critical analysis of these arguments. The problem of mental causation, and the basic idea and results of neuroprosthetics are reviewed. It is shown how appealing to the research on neuroprosthetics can be interpreted to give support to the idea of mental causation. However, it does so only in a rather deflationary sense: by holding the mental identical with the neural. So contrary to what the arguments have been assuming, neuroprosthetics cannot be used to argue for nonreductive physicalism. It can rather be taken to illustrate just the opposite: how the mental and the physical are identical.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1007/s11229-018-1713-z
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Citations of this work
Elimination, not Reduction: Lessons from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) and Multiple Realisation.Tuomas K. Pernu - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42:e22.
Causal Explanation in Psychiatry.Tuomas K. Pernu - 2019 - In Şerife Tekin & Robyn Bluhm (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
From Neuroscience to Law: Bridging the Gap.Tuomas K. Pernu & Nadine Elzein - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11.
Brain-Computer Interfaces and the Translation of Thought into Action.Tom Buller - 2020 - Neuroethics 14 (2):155-165.
References found in this work
Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation.James Woodward - 2003 - Oxford University Press.
Mind in a physical world: An essay on the mind–body problem and mental causation.Jaegwon Kim - 1998 - MIT Press.
Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience.Carl F. Craver - 2007 - Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.