Mental causation

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The term mental causation refers to the phenomenon of the causal effectiveness of mental states. It denotes the idea that mental states are causes of actions and other mental states. Headaches, for example, are the cause of taking a pill. Dissatisfaction can lead to the thought of going away for a long time.

Mental causation is often seen as a problem for dualism . In addition, the current philosophy of mind argues about whether the various variants of non-reductive materialism can explain the phenomenon of mental causation.

In the empirical sciences ( experimental psychology ; neurosciences ) it is not mental states themselves, but only the brain activities on which they are based, that are considered to be causative .

Even Rene Descartes was confronted with the problem of mental causation.

history

The question of the causal interaction ( influxus physicus ) between material body and immaterial spirit was recognized early on as a problem for dualism. René Descartes was already confronted in a letter from Elisabeth von Herford with the question of how the mind manages to interact with the body. At least in Descartes' time it was not considered implausible that a place could be found in the brain where the mind acts on the body. However, this changed with the advancement of neuroscientific knowledge, since no neuronal process could be found for whose existence one had to assume an immaterial cause.

In Descartes' successor, these problems led to numerous dualistic positions that denied the interaction of mind and brain - and thus the mental causation. Such positions developed by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche , however, had little influence in the 20th century. Rather, in the more recent philosophy of mind, the mind was mostly interpreted materialistically , which should lead to a reduction of the problematic mental causation to the unproblematic physical causation. In recent decades, the debate about mental causation has been influenced in particular by a series of essays by Jaegwon Kim , who tries to show that even non-reductive materialisms fail because of the question of mental causation.

dualism

The classical ontological dualism distinguishes between material and immaterial, especially spiritual, entities. The immateriality of other phenomena is also repeatedly asserted, such as aesthetic and moral properties, numbers and propositions. Dualists are considered candidates for immaterial entities as all those phenomena that cannot be explained by the natural sciences and thus resist reduction. The dualism goes back in particular to René Descartes and his distinction between matter and spiritual as an independent substance ( res extensa and res cogitans ).

The argument against dualism

Critics of dualism claim that the existence of mental causation presents any dualistic position with insurmountable difficulties. The anti-dualistic strategies assume that the mental causation is obvious, and a dualist must therefore agree to the following premise :

Premise 1 : Mental states are causes of physical events.

Now, anti-dualists go on to argue that the physical world is causally closed. This means that there is a sufficient physical cause p2 for every physical event p1. The results of the natural sciences are cited as evidence for this thesis . Physical causes have always been found for physical events. There is no evidence that there are gaps anywhere in the causal process that can only be explained by immaterial causes. So the second premise is:

Premise 2 : Every physical event has a different physical event as a sufficient cause.

The second premise implies that there is a sufficient physical cause for every human act . If a person swallows a headache tablet, for example, there is a purely physiological cause and no mental causes have to be used to explain how the action came about. But now one also wants to say that the mental state of headache is a cause for swallowing the headache pill. Materialists argue that this causal effectiveness of the headache can only be understood if the headache itself is part of the physiological process. After all, all “causal work” has already been done through the physiological process, so that an immaterial headache no longer has any function.

Dualists seem to maintain that the headache and the physiological process are two independent causes of the same physical event. Critics of dualism object, however, that such a case of overdetermination is also implausible. Although there are overdeterminations or double causes due to independent events, this is a rare coincidence . An example would be a house caught on fire by a cable fire or a lightning strike. Such cases could occur, but a systematic overdetermination of actions is enormously implausible. However, this is exactly what a dualist must demand when he asserts that there is always a mental and - independently of this - a physical cause for actions. So the third premise is:

Premise 3 : There is no systematic overdetermination.

The three premises together imply the falseness of dualism: If 1) there is mental causation, 2) however every physical event has purely physical causes and 3) there is no systematic overdetermination, then dualism cannot be true.

Dualistic reactions

There are different dualistic strategies to deal with the argument presented. All three presented premises can be questioned.

Rejection of the second premise: The classic dualism in the René Descartes tradition denies the causal closeness of the physical. Descartes could still assume that no action could be explained physiologically , an assumption that no longer seems plausible today. The thesis of the causal closure of the world, however, says that all actions are caused purely physiologically. According to fallibilism , this would be unprovable, the conclusion of individual observations about the correctness of a materialistic theory of mind would be an induction and thus logically simply wrong.

Other contemporary critics of the thesis of the causal closure of the world mostly refer to quantum physics and explain that this makes the causal closure of the world implausible. Proponents of the idea of ​​the causal closeness of the world often react to this quantum theoretical challenge by reformulating the assumption. While the classic formulation of causal closeness speaks of “sufficient causes”, David Papineau , for example, suggests formulating the thesis with fixed probabilities .

Rejection of the third premise: some philosophers also deny the implausibility of overdetermination. They explain that such a phenomenon is an incomprehensible coincidence only if the ontologically independent causes are also independent of one another in every other respect. However, one can certainly imagine relationships between the causes that do not lead to a reduction in one cause. This would be the case if the causes were linked to one another by a law of nature or were in a different non-reductive supervenience relationship .

Rejection of the first premise: While the dualistic positions presented so far try to explain the existence of mental causation, there are also dualists who abandon the first premise and thus the idea of ​​mental causation. Even if various such positions - such as psychophysical parallelism and occassionalism - were represented in the history of philosophy, only epiphenomenalism is seriously discussed in today's debate . His thesis is that mental states (or individual aspects such as qualia or intentionality ) are caused by physical states, but have no effects themselves. Such a position can reject the argument presented, but it has to pay the price of claiming that headaches, for example, are in reality not the cause of swallowing the headache pill.

So the dualist has various strategies to reject the argument of mental causation. Indeed, no premise is uncontested in today's debate, even if the argument presented - or its variations - is still the most popular attack on dualistic metaphysics .

materialism

The materialistic perspective

Materialists argue that dualism faces a dilemma : either it admits mental causation, but then it remains incomprehensible how an immaterial spirit can affect a material substance. Or he denies the mental causation, but this also leads to unsatisfactory positions (see: epiphenomenon ). In this sense, the phenomenon of mental causation leads to an argument against dualism.

The problems seem to go away when one identifies mental states with material states. The riddle was: How can the spirit act on matter ? If the mind is identified with the brain - that is, a part of matter - the problem disappears. Likewise, the problem of overdetermination seems to be disappearing. Since the mental state is identified with a physical state, there is exactly one cause that the dualists mistakenly believed to be two different causes.

Problems of materialism with mental causation

If the mental states (red) cannot be traced back to the physical states (blue) realizing them and if there are causal connections between the physical states, then there seems to be no causal work left for the mental states. The arrow from M1 to M2 would not describe a causal relationship.

However, it is by no means clear that materialism is actually getting rid of the problem of mental causation that quickly. In order to understand the emerging problems, the distinction between reductive and non-reductive materialisms must be understood. Even if the early positions in philosophy of mind - such as behaviorism and identity theory - aimed to reduce the mental to the physical, there has been a tendency towards non-reductive materialism since the 1970s. This was due in particular to the multiple realization problem formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor . According to Putnam and Fodor, mental states cannot be traced back to specific physical states, because the same mental state could be realized through completely different physical states.

The non-reductive materialisms, which are very popular in the philosophy of mind, have, however, been very sharply attacked by Jaegwon Kim , who explains that they basically face the same problems as dualism. Non-reductive materialists argue that mental states - or at least some properties of those states - cannot be traced back to physical states. Now Kim argues that the physical states are already doing all the causal work. For the unreduced mental states there would therefore be no function at all, unless an overdetermination is asserted. However, as seen in the discussion of dualism, this is highly problematic.

Kim thus confronts materialism with a dilemma: Either one asserts that mental states can be reduced, which, however, also appears improbable to many materialistic philosophers due to the multiple realization, the problems of quality and intentionality . Or one asserts the irreducibility of mental states, which, according to Kim, captures the problems that dualism also has. Kim tries to solve this problem by defending reductionist theory. One way of responding to Kim's argument is to use the analogy between physical and mental states on the one hand and determinates and determinables on the other.

Empirical Sciences

In experimental psychology and neuroscience , mental states are not themselves considered to be the cause of something. Only the brain activities underlying the mental states are considered to be causative.

literature

Web links

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  1. ^ Letter: Elisabeth von Herford to René Descartes, May 16, 1643
  2. ↑ Erhard Oeser: History of Brain Research , WBG, Darmstadt, 2002 ISBN 3534149823
  3. ^ Jaegwon Kim Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1993, ISBN 0521439965
  4. ↑ Karl Popper , John Carew Eccles : The I and its brain. 8th edition Piper, Munich a. a. 2002, ISBN 3-492-21096-1
  5. ↑ David Paineau: Thinking about consciousness Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002 ISBN 0199243824
  6. ^ EJ Lowe: Physical Closure and the Invisibility of Mental Causation in Heckmann / Walter pp. 137–155
  7. ↑ Frank Cameron Jackson : Epiphenomenal Qualia , in Philosophical Quartaly , 1982
  8. ↑ Hilary Putnam : Psychological Predicates , in: WH Captain (Ed.): Art, Mind and Religion , Pittsburgh 1967, pp. 37-48 and Jerry Fodor : Special sciences. In: Synthesis 28 (1974) pp. 97-115.
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Prinz : Critique of Free Will: Comments about a social institution. Psychologische Rundschau 55 (4), 2004, pp. 198–206, online PDF ( memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.studgen.uni-mainz.de
  10. ↑ Wolf Singer : Interconnections determine us. We should stop talking about freedom . In: Christian Geyer : Brain research and free will: To the interpretation of the newest experiments , Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 2004, pp. 30–65, ISBN 3518123874 .