My position, perhaps unsurprisingly, falls within the physicalist camp. My guess is that most scientists find themselves here, regardless of their specific field. But I'm a neuroscientist, so I have a bias towards biological explanations, and I suspect that many of our answers will be found at this level, likely rooted in evolutionary theory. I often wonder whether if I had pursued physics, or philosophy, instead of biology, would my approach to the mind-body problem be completely different? Perhaps.
With regard to the philosophical theories, I think they are a great place to start. And an amazing tool to use to sharpen our thinking about these topics. But I don't think we will find our answers with logical arguments alone. I think we need empirical evidence too.
What sort of empirical evidence would convince you to fully accept your conclusion? You clearly have doubts about it because you wonder if your education has biased you. Isn’t your need for empirical evidence (physical, observable) a wee bit tautological no? It’s going to take physical evidence to convince you the mind is no more than a brain…
I'm not sure I'll every be completely convinced to fully accept any position. That might be the scientist in me. I hold a tentative position, and I'm open to evidence or reasoning that shows I'm wrong.
I have doubts about my position, yes, of course. I think we all should. Our views and positions are the result of our biases. We are all biased -- we can not NOT be biased. I've been wrong before. And I don't suspect that the last time I was wrong will be the last time I'm ever wrong.
But this puts us all in a strange position. Even when we think we've scrutinised our beliefs thoroughly, when we look at any one individual belief, we think that belief is true. But we also know with certainty that we will be wrong about many things. We just don't know which of our beliefs are true and which ones are not.
Our biases, which are often shaped by our education, culture, personal experiences, and the currently accepted paradigms in our field, often have us accepting certain ideas without question.
One of the strengths of combining scientific inquiry with philosophical reflection is that it forces us to examine our biases, question our assumptions, and test and potentially falsify our ideas. I think the combination is critical for dealing with complex problems like consciousness.
On the point about needing empirical evidence. Just as I don't think reason and logic is sufficient for knowledge I don't think that empirical evidence alone is sufficient either. This is why I have a great respect for philosophy. Which used to be a somewhat radical view among my scientist colleagues, but seems to be a more widely accepted stance these days.
The issue is one cannot consider the mental condition during an isolated physical event as an "ought" or an "if->then" because that decision vacuum does not exist unless it is one's absolute first experience with the mental event. Mental events are consecutive and ever changing either confirming or debunking every time. Even if a physicalist correctly determines the next physical step of an event due to understanding the current state of the mental, it'll still be a statistical estimation based on how much context they understand of former stimuli. Bringing us back to the ever true, "perception is reality."
I agree! Thinking about mental events as isolated events is problematic. This is probably true for physical events too. Each event is influenced by past events and the current situation.
But allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment... Couldn't the non-reductionist argue that the analogy between mental events and the is-ought problem still holds value, even if we acknowledge the continuous nature of mental events? It seems the key point of the analogy is not about isolated events, but about the difficulty of reducing one type of explanation (mental or moral) to another type (physical or factual). -- just as we can't derive an 'ought' statement solely from 'is' statements without additional moral premises, non-reductive materialists argue that we can't fully explain or predict mental events solely from physical events without additional psychological or intentional concepts.
Another enthralling post on a fascinating topic! My initial reaction, oddly, is that both Davidson and Kim make good points, yet I quibble with all three of Davidson's principles.
I feel Davidson might be right about irreducibility. I also take Kim's point about overdetermination. I think what your diagrams show as "Mental Events" vs "Physical Events" are the subjective/objective sides of the same thing. The mental events are what the physical events are like from inside. So, Kim's analysis is right, but mental and physical aren't separate things, so there's no overdetermination.
Which means I think Donaldson's first principle is misstated. The second and third principles assume a determination that's true at the very small scale, but which becomes statistical at large scales. Weather, a good example, depends on physical laws and is deterministic, but weather *systems* are irreducible wholes effectively impossible to predict for lack of data resolution and compute power. I would think brains are at least as complicated as weather systems and may remain only statistically predictable and only on small time scales. I suspect we'll improve our ability to map the outer to the inner, but since every human has a slightly different brain, we may only be able to make general correlations.
I'm just guessing, of course, but so is everyone else. Until we understand the brain better, talking about the meanings of mental states requires a lot of guessing. That seems another issue with Kim's argument: it assumes it knows what mental states are.
Your argument seems to align a little with Stephen Yablo's views -- especially your point about scales of complexity. This is similar to Yablo's concept of mental properties as determinables of physical determinates. In this view, determinables are more general properties (like colour) that can be specified by determinates (like red or blue). Yablo argues that mental properties are not reducible to physical properties but are realised by them, which seems consistent with your point here.
Lately I have been reading Searle and Nagel and really liking their views. They both commit to physicalism but also high-level systems as irreducible, essentially due to the synergy of the components. Like weather. It may be determined by air molecules and water droplets and gravity and sunlight but can only be understood as an interacting system.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! But those guys made big errors. What they call “epiphenomenalism” is just causation at different levels of description. For example, what caused WWI? The assassination of Franz Ferdinand? No. According to Kim the answer is particle physics. You see, the cause of WWI is over-determined, so the assassination was superfluous.
They thought there was such a thing as *the* cause. But every event has multiple causes at different levels of description.
Good point -- causation can occur at different levels of description.
But it doesn't seem to me that the cause of WW1 is overdetermined in the same way that Kim is arguing that mental states are overdetermined. In the WW1 example, if everything is in the physical domain, it's all reducible. It's all the same thing. We can talk about it at the different levels of abstraction. But we can't have multiple causes here, because in the end all those levels of abstraction are really just the same thing.
But, the way I see it, Kim seems to be making a slightly different argument. Kim is highlighting a specific problem in how we understand mental causation within a physicalist framework.
The crux of Kim's argument seems to be about the irreducibility of mental properties. If mental properties are truly irreducible to physical properties (as non-reductive physicalists claim), then there are two things -- the mental and the physical -- we can't have two sufficient causes without either overdetermination or violating the principle of causal closure.
So would Kim argue that the cause of WWI was a single bullet from a gun or whatever killed Franz? It’s sufficient, it’s physically causal. But then how did that single bullet cause millions of bullets to shoot?
Yeah, but, as you point out, for Kim to avoid the conclusion that the Archduke's assassination was epiphenomenal he'd have to embrace full on reducibility: he'd have to say that WWI can be explained *entirely* in terms of particle physics and that descriptions at higher levels of abstraction don't add any new information. That's crazy. Frankly the idea that there's nothing more to WWI than subatomic particles colliding is even wackier than the idea that there's nothing more to beliefs and desires than neurons firing, even if you think that beliefs and desires are "mental" and WWI is "physical."
I think you're right to point out that a fully reductive view of WWI (explaining it solely in terms of particle physics) would be extreme and uninformative -- and perhaps crazy 😜
However, I wonder whether there's some conflating going on here -- conflating the usefulness of higher-level descriptions with causal efficacy. Higher-level descriptions (like historical narratives) can be extremely useful for understanding complex events, but I'm not sure this necessarily means they represent distinct causal forces. And just because a description is useful doesn't seem to mean it corresponds to a fundamentally distinct level of reality with its own causal powers.
I think the idea in the WWI case, is that higher-level descriptions are more informative and useful, but they're still describing the same underlying physical events. All levels of description are thought to be within the physical domain and are in principle reducible (even if such reduction isn't practical, informative, or even possible with our current understanding).
In the mental causation debate, however, the question is whether mental properties are truly irreducible to physical properties, which would make them fundamentally different from just another level of physical description. Even if we could account for all the physical stuff -- would there be still something left over?
The interesting question, it seems, is whether all higher-level phenomena can be reduced to lower-level processes, or do some have irreducible causal powers?
Great post! Your Substack is quickly becoming my go-to when I want a quick and clear breakdown of various terms in philosophy of mind.
I haven't read Davidson himself—my understanding of him comes almost exclusively through editing husband's book, which isn't on the same topic—and I appreciate learning what he had to say on the mind-body problem without having to read him myself. From what you've outlined here, he seems quite fair-minded.
I think since the issue we're dealing with here doesn't belong to the realm of science proper, we have every right to take a hard look at our now-impoverished notions of causality and consider what we lost when we dumped Aristotle's formal and final causes. Overdetermination only seems to be a problem if you insist on looking at the matter exclusively through a scientific lens (which is a philosophical position, not a scientific one), but I don't see it as a problem for those who believe knowledge is much broader than science's reach. (Gasp! Sacrilege!)
I agree that viewing overdetermination as a problem stems from a scientifically-focused philosophical stance. And your comment has me pondering why there isn't more discussion about challenges to our fundamental understanding of causation. One could argue that there's no universal concept of causation, so widening the notion of causation could be seen as a way to solve the problem of mental causation. This broader view of causation, perhaps incorporating ideas like Aristotle's formal and final causes as you mentioned, could provide new perspectives on the mind-body problem and mental causation.
But I see arguments like these potentially benefiting dualists, who might use it to defend the idea of separate mental and physical causation. However, I'm not sure it helps the non-reductive physicalists. They're committed to the causal closure of the physical, which asserts that all physical effects have sufficient physical causes. Rejecting a universal concept of causation might undermine this key principle of physicalism.
The point about viewing ontology through a scientific (quantitative, predictive) lens and assuming therefore that empiricism coupled with statistical analysis will give us a final answer—that’s a free choice. Where does your freedom to choose science come from if not your mind?
Perhaps we should conduct a rigorous double-blind study to determine if my choice to believe in science is scientifically sound. We could call it "A Quantitative Analysis of Why I Love Quantitative Analysis." 😉
I’m returning to Kierkegaard and the Knight of Faith aka the Knight of the Right Answer. How can we know something is false yet believe it is true—and act on that belief as if we know it were true? Which is it? The brain or the mind? Is folk psychology akin to philosophy in the empiricist epistemology? The challenge of existentialism factors in somehow…beyond just a casual o, I feel a spirit inside, there must be more…idk…Searle is a non-reductive materialist am I thinking right on this point?
Wow! I wasn't expecting to go from Kierkegaard to Searle in one comment! I like the link with existentialism.
The paradox of believing something we "know" is false is a mind-bender, isn't it? But I think this can happen. I understand that I have biases and I cannot be correct about everything -- so I know I must be wrong about somethings. But when I examine each belief individually, I think each belief is true. Just as Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith maintains belief in the face of absurdity, I feel like I'm maintaining individual beliefs while simultaneously holding a meta-belief about my own fallibility.
Yes, Searle's ideas could be considered a form of non-reductive materialism. He argues that consciousness is a real, irreducible phenomenon, but one that emerges from the physical brain. Negal would also be a non-reductive materialist.
Haha...I wonder why there isn't more discussion about causation too! I actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on the topic of causation and teleological understanding, although there I was looking at the issue by contrasting Plato and Descartes. Aristotle would have been the more obvious choice, but as I told the outside examiner, "Plato is way more fun." I also came across a very similar thesis in David Bentley Hart's book, "The Experience of God", but I doubt scholars in philosophy of mind are paying much attention to the likes of him. That said, Phillip Goff seems to be advocating for psychophysical harmony, which seems in line with a teleological view. I haven't read any of his books, though, so I don't have a clear idea where he stands on that. And most will dismiss him right off the bat because he's a panpsychist. (I'm not, but I'm open to it and find it intriguing).
Embracing a broader causality wouldn't necessarily mean insisting on keeping the mental separate from the physical in support of dualism. One could interpret it that way, but then what would be the point? To me it seems intuitive that for certain explanations a purely physical causation suffices, but for others, it wouldn't be enough. I think if we're being honest, we'd agree we experience ourselves as affecting things in the world, call it what you will, but a purely physical causal explanation, such as we see that today, can't accommodate the super strong intuition we have that our mental lives, our private thoughts, matter in the physical world. Any theory that dismisses this intuition will be fighting uphill, if not doomed. The reason isn't logical, exactly, but simply that it fails to satisfy. It doesn't do the job. If someone asked why I'm sitting at the bus stop, I'd say, "I'm waiting to ride the bus", (or maybe, "What do you mean? Isn't the bus coming?") but not "my brain state is such and such." And yet saying that I'm sitting at the bus stop to get to the other part of town wouldn't be pitting one form of explanation over another, but simply responding appropriately to the question. It would be taken for granted that 'atoms arranged in such and such a way' make it possible for me to be waiting for a bus, but that alone would make for an asinine answer to the question. I give Plato the credit for the point I'm making here; he has Socrates say something like his "bones and sinews" could be well on their way to Megara if he didn't think staying put in prison was the right thing to do.
"Rejecting a universal concept of causation might undermine this key principle of physicalism."
I'm not sure a broader causation couldn't be universal, but you're right, it undermines the physicalist stance if that stance entails scientism, or rejecting all but a scientific understanding. But then again, I'm not a physicalist. I'm okay with saying the limited physicalist notion of causation can't adequately explain everything, and that the physical sciences don't get the final word on absolutely everything there is to know.
Though I certainly agree with Jaewon Kim’s argument against non-reductive physicalism, to me it also seems a bit complicated and abstract. I’ve developed a more general way to potentially protect science from such unnatural influences.
I believe that science needs a respected community of professionals which provide it with various agreed upon principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology from which to work. The metaphysical position that I think would help in this regard begins by observing that science itself becomes obsolete to the extent that systemic causality fails. Given this observation it should be prudent for scientists in general to adopt a metaphysics by which it never fails so as not to undermine their discipline itself. But then some scientists should decide not to accept this principle since it might actually be wrong. Here we’d have two different forms of science — a purely “natural” form, and a “natural plus” form.
The net effect of this is that when a person like Donald Davidson comes along with an idea which mandates a violation of systemic causality (such as “there are no psychophysical laws”), a standard sort of response from general scientists should be expected. This might be something like “Actually the premise of my own work mandates that causality never fails, and so professionally I must reject your position for violating this tenant. It might actually be true however. Fortunately there are scientists I can refer you to who do explore that sort of thing.”
Fascinating idea! I'm intrigued and I have questions!
I'm really intrigued by your concept of 'natural' and 'natural plus' forms of science. It's got me thinking about the practical aspects of how this might work.
How would a 'natural plus' form of science implement the scientific method? What happens to falsifiability?
How do you envision these two approaches coexisting in practice? Would you suspect there'd be different journals, conferences, or institutions for each? What about in different fields of science? How would this principle apply in fields like quantum mechanics, where traditional notions of causality sometimes seem to break down?
Thanks Suzi! Regarding the practical effects for things like journals, conferences, and institutions, I’d let that evolve however it does. My guess however is that scientists in general would perceive themselves to be full naturalists, though sometimes their work would effectively get them demoted to the “natural plus” form where systemic causality is presumed to ultimately fail. These scientists would still work under the scientific method as much as possible, but this could also be fudged when sufficiently inconvenient. Note that inherently unfalsifiable proposals would be more acceptable here given that non-causal dynamics needn’t even have any evidence in order to be true.
I’m not ultimately concerned about what these scientists would find however. Instead I suspect that if standard scientists were to work under the mandate that causality never fails, then they’d be able to do their jobs better than they currently do. Quantum mechanics is a great example. Today scientists are able to effectively cheat without much in the way of professional consequences. As I understand it for example, in order to account for quantum funkiness Sean Carroll posits that bajillions of literal worlds like ours emerge from ours each second. So here we have an unfalsifiable notion that seems to make a mockery of the concept of “systemic causality”. But if scientists faced the threat of being demoted to a “natural plus” form of science for proposing such things, then they might think twice about doing so. And in truth it’s not physics that worries me, but rather our generally soft mental and behavioral forms of science. I consider them to be in need of all sorts of metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological help.
Heady stuff (sorry). Thank you for a marvellous tutorial series. Out of curiosity what’s your position on this issue?
Thanks John!
My position, perhaps unsurprisingly, falls within the physicalist camp. My guess is that most scientists find themselves here, regardless of their specific field. But I'm a neuroscientist, so I have a bias towards biological explanations, and I suspect that many of our answers will be found at this level, likely rooted in evolutionary theory. I often wonder whether if I had pursued physics, or philosophy, instead of biology, would my approach to the mind-body problem be completely different? Perhaps.
With regard to the philosophical theories, I think they are a great place to start. And an amazing tool to use to sharpen our thinking about these topics. But I don't think we will find our answers with logical arguments alone. I think we need empirical evidence too.
What sort of empirical evidence would convince you to fully accept your conclusion? You clearly have doubts about it because you wonder if your education has biased you. Isn’t your need for empirical evidence (physical, observable) a wee bit tautological no? It’s going to take physical evidence to convince you the mind is no more than a brain…
I'm not sure I'll every be completely convinced to fully accept any position. That might be the scientist in me. I hold a tentative position, and I'm open to evidence or reasoning that shows I'm wrong.
I have doubts about my position, yes, of course. I think we all should. Our views and positions are the result of our biases. We are all biased -- we can not NOT be biased. I've been wrong before. And I don't suspect that the last time I was wrong will be the last time I'm ever wrong.
But this puts us all in a strange position. Even when we think we've scrutinised our beliefs thoroughly, when we look at any one individual belief, we think that belief is true. But we also know with certainty that we will be wrong about many things. We just don't know which of our beliefs are true and which ones are not.
Our biases, which are often shaped by our education, culture, personal experiences, and the currently accepted paradigms in our field, often have us accepting certain ideas without question.
One of the strengths of combining scientific inquiry with philosophical reflection is that it forces us to examine our biases, question our assumptions, and test and potentially falsify our ideas. I think the combination is critical for dealing with complex problems like consciousness.
On the point about needing empirical evidence. Just as I don't think reason and logic is sufficient for knowledge I don't think that empirical evidence alone is sufficient either. This is why I have a great respect for philosophy. Which used to be a somewhat radical view among my scientist colleagues, but seems to be a more widely accepted stance these days.
The issue is one cannot consider the mental condition during an isolated physical event as an "ought" or an "if->then" because that decision vacuum does not exist unless it is one's absolute first experience with the mental event. Mental events are consecutive and ever changing either confirming or debunking every time. Even if a physicalist correctly determines the next physical step of an event due to understanding the current state of the mental, it'll still be a statistical estimation based on how much context they understand of former stimuli. Bringing us back to the ever true, "perception is reality."
I agree! Thinking about mental events as isolated events is problematic. This is probably true for physical events too. Each event is influenced by past events and the current situation.
But allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment... Couldn't the non-reductionist argue that the analogy between mental events and the is-ought problem still holds value, even if we acknowledge the continuous nature of mental events? It seems the key point of the analogy is not about isolated events, but about the difficulty of reducing one type of explanation (mental or moral) to another type (physical or factual). -- just as we can't derive an 'ought' statement solely from 'is' statements without additional moral premises, non-reductive materialists argue that we can't fully explain or predict mental events solely from physical events without additional psychological or intentional concepts.
Another enthralling post on a fascinating topic! My initial reaction, oddly, is that both Davidson and Kim make good points, yet I quibble with all three of Davidson's principles.
I feel Davidson might be right about irreducibility. I also take Kim's point about overdetermination. I think what your diagrams show as "Mental Events" vs "Physical Events" are the subjective/objective sides of the same thing. The mental events are what the physical events are like from inside. So, Kim's analysis is right, but mental and physical aren't separate things, so there's no overdetermination.
Which means I think Donaldson's first principle is misstated. The second and third principles assume a determination that's true at the very small scale, but which becomes statistical at large scales. Weather, a good example, depends on physical laws and is deterministic, but weather *systems* are irreducible wholes effectively impossible to predict for lack of data resolution and compute power. I would think brains are at least as complicated as weather systems and may remain only statistically predictable and only on small time scales. I suspect we'll improve our ability to map the outer to the inner, but since every human has a slightly different brain, we may only be able to make general correlations.
I'm just guessing, of course, but so is everyone else. Until we understand the brain better, talking about the meanings of mental states requires a lot of guessing. That seems another issue with Kim's argument: it assumes it knows what mental states are.
Yes, but guessing is the fun part!
Your argument seems to align a little with Stephen Yablo's views -- especially your point about scales of complexity. This is similar to Yablo's concept of mental properties as determinables of physical determinates. In this view, determinables are more general properties (like colour) that can be specified by determinates (like red or blue). Yablo argues that mental properties are not reducible to physical properties but are realised by them, which seems consistent with your point here.
His paper Mental Causation is a good one to read alongside Davidson and Kim. https://www.mit.edu/~yablo/mc.pdf
Lately I have been reading Searle and Nagel and really liking their views. They both commit to physicalism but also high-level systems as irreducible, essentially due to the synergy of the components. Like weather. It may be determined by air molecules and water droplets and gravity and sunlight but can only be understood as an interacting system.
Thanks for the link!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! But those guys made big errors. What they call “epiphenomenalism” is just causation at different levels of description. For example, what caused WWI? The assassination of Franz Ferdinand? No. According to Kim the answer is particle physics. You see, the cause of WWI is over-determined, so the assassination was superfluous.
They thought there was such a thing as *the* cause. But every event has multiple causes at different levels of description.
Hi Misha!
Good point -- causation can occur at different levels of description.
But it doesn't seem to me that the cause of WW1 is overdetermined in the same way that Kim is arguing that mental states are overdetermined. In the WW1 example, if everything is in the physical domain, it's all reducible. It's all the same thing. We can talk about it at the different levels of abstraction. But we can't have multiple causes here, because in the end all those levels of abstraction are really just the same thing.
But, the way I see it, Kim seems to be making a slightly different argument. Kim is highlighting a specific problem in how we understand mental causation within a physicalist framework.
The crux of Kim's argument seems to be about the irreducibility of mental properties. If mental properties are truly irreducible to physical properties (as non-reductive physicalists claim), then there are two things -- the mental and the physical -- we can't have two sufficient causes without either overdetermination or violating the principle of causal closure.
So would Kim argue that the cause of WWI was a single bullet from a gun or whatever killed Franz? It’s sufficient, it’s physically causal. But then how did that single bullet cause millions of bullets to shoot?
Yeah, but, as you point out, for Kim to avoid the conclusion that the Archduke's assassination was epiphenomenal he'd have to embrace full on reducibility: he'd have to say that WWI can be explained *entirely* in terms of particle physics and that descriptions at higher levels of abstraction don't add any new information. That's crazy. Frankly the idea that there's nothing more to WWI than subatomic particles colliding is even wackier than the idea that there's nothing more to beliefs and desires than neurons firing, even if you think that beliefs and desires are "mental" and WWI is "physical."
I think you're right to point out that a fully reductive view of WWI (explaining it solely in terms of particle physics) would be extreme and uninformative -- and perhaps crazy 😜
However, I wonder whether there's some conflating going on here -- conflating the usefulness of higher-level descriptions with causal efficacy. Higher-level descriptions (like historical narratives) can be extremely useful for understanding complex events, but I'm not sure this necessarily means they represent distinct causal forces. And just because a description is useful doesn't seem to mean it corresponds to a fundamentally distinct level of reality with its own causal powers.
I think the idea in the WWI case, is that higher-level descriptions are more informative and useful, but they're still describing the same underlying physical events. All levels of description are thought to be within the physical domain and are in principle reducible (even if such reduction isn't practical, informative, or even possible with our current understanding).
In the mental causation debate, however, the question is whether mental properties are truly irreducible to physical properties, which would make them fundamentally different from just another level of physical description. Even if we could account for all the physical stuff -- would there be still something left over?
The interesting question, it seems, is whether all higher-level phenomena can be reduced to lower-level processes, or do some have irreducible causal powers?
That is the question 🙋
Great post! Your Substack is quickly becoming my go-to when I want a quick and clear breakdown of various terms in philosophy of mind.
I haven't read Davidson himself—my understanding of him comes almost exclusively through editing husband's book, which isn't on the same topic—and I appreciate learning what he had to say on the mind-body problem without having to read him myself. From what you've outlined here, he seems quite fair-minded.
I think since the issue we're dealing with here doesn't belong to the realm of science proper, we have every right to take a hard look at our now-impoverished notions of causality and consider what we lost when we dumped Aristotle's formal and final causes. Overdetermination only seems to be a problem if you insist on looking at the matter exclusively through a scientific lens (which is a philosophical position, not a scientific one), but I don't see it as a problem for those who believe knowledge is much broader than science's reach. (Gasp! Sacrilege!)
Oh! Thanks so much. I'm truly honoured.
Gasp! Sacrilege, Indeed!
I agree that viewing overdetermination as a problem stems from a scientifically-focused philosophical stance. And your comment has me pondering why there isn't more discussion about challenges to our fundamental understanding of causation. One could argue that there's no universal concept of causation, so widening the notion of causation could be seen as a way to solve the problem of mental causation. This broader view of causation, perhaps incorporating ideas like Aristotle's formal and final causes as you mentioned, could provide new perspectives on the mind-body problem and mental causation.
But I see arguments like these potentially benefiting dualists, who might use it to defend the idea of separate mental and physical causation. However, I'm not sure it helps the non-reductive physicalists. They're committed to the causal closure of the physical, which asserts that all physical effects have sufficient physical causes. Rejecting a universal concept of causation might undermine this key principle of physicalism.
The point about viewing ontology through a scientific (quantitative, predictive) lens and assuming therefore that empiricism coupled with statistical analysis will give us a final answer—that’s a free choice. Where does your freedom to choose science come from if not your mind?
Perhaps we should conduct a rigorous double-blind study to determine if my choice to believe in science is scientifically sound. We could call it "A Quantitative Analysis of Why I Love Quantitative Analysis." 😉
I’m returning to Kierkegaard and the Knight of Faith aka the Knight of the Right Answer. How can we know something is false yet believe it is true—and act on that belief as if we know it were true? Which is it? The brain or the mind? Is folk psychology akin to philosophy in the empiricist epistemology? The challenge of existentialism factors in somehow…beyond just a casual o, I feel a spirit inside, there must be more…idk…Searle is a non-reductive materialist am I thinking right on this point?
Wow! I wasn't expecting to go from Kierkegaard to Searle in one comment! I like the link with existentialism.
The paradox of believing something we "know" is false is a mind-bender, isn't it? But I think this can happen. I understand that I have biases and I cannot be correct about everything -- so I know I must be wrong about somethings. But when I examine each belief individually, I think each belief is true. Just as Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith maintains belief in the face of absurdity, I feel like I'm maintaining individual beliefs while simultaneously holding a meta-belief about my own fallibility.
Yes, Searle's ideas could be considered a form of non-reductive materialism. He argues that consciousness is a real, irreducible phenomenon, but one that emerges from the physical brain. Negal would also be a non-reductive materialist.
Haha...I wonder why there isn't more discussion about causation too! I actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on the topic of causation and teleological understanding, although there I was looking at the issue by contrasting Plato and Descartes. Aristotle would have been the more obvious choice, but as I told the outside examiner, "Plato is way more fun." I also came across a very similar thesis in David Bentley Hart's book, "The Experience of God", but I doubt scholars in philosophy of mind are paying much attention to the likes of him. That said, Phillip Goff seems to be advocating for psychophysical harmony, which seems in line with a teleological view. I haven't read any of his books, though, so I don't have a clear idea where he stands on that. And most will dismiss him right off the bat because he's a panpsychist. (I'm not, but I'm open to it and find it intriguing).
Embracing a broader causality wouldn't necessarily mean insisting on keeping the mental separate from the physical in support of dualism. One could interpret it that way, but then what would be the point? To me it seems intuitive that for certain explanations a purely physical causation suffices, but for others, it wouldn't be enough. I think if we're being honest, we'd agree we experience ourselves as affecting things in the world, call it what you will, but a purely physical causal explanation, such as we see that today, can't accommodate the super strong intuition we have that our mental lives, our private thoughts, matter in the physical world. Any theory that dismisses this intuition will be fighting uphill, if not doomed. The reason isn't logical, exactly, but simply that it fails to satisfy. It doesn't do the job. If someone asked why I'm sitting at the bus stop, I'd say, "I'm waiting to ride the bus", (or maybe, "What do you mean? Isn't the bus coming?") but not "my brain state is such and such." And yet saying that I'm sitting at the bus stop to get to the other part of town wouldn't be pitting one form of explanation over another, but simply responding appropriately to the question. It would be taken for granted that 'atoms arranged in such and such a way' make it possible for me to be waiting for a bus, but that alone would make for an asinine answer to the question. I give Plato the credit for the point I'm making here; he has Socrates say something like his "bones and sinews" could be well on their way to Megara if he didn't think staying put in prison was the right thing to do.
"Rejecting a universal concept of causation might undermine this key principle of physicalism."
I'm not sure a broader causation couldn't be universal, but you're right, it undermines the physicalist stance if that stance entails scientism, or rejecting all but a scientific understanding. But then again, I'm not a physicalist. I'm okay with saying the limited physicalist notion of causation can't adequately explain everything, and that the physical sciences don't get the final word on absolutely everything there is to know.
Though I certainly agree with Jaewon Kim’s argument against non-reductive physicalism, to me it also seems a bit complicated and abstract. I’ve developed a more general way to potentially protect science from such unnatural influences.
I believe that science needs a respected community of professionals which provide it with various agreed upon principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology from which to work. The metaphysical position that I think would help in this regard begins by observing that science itself becomes obsolete to the extent that systemic causality fails. Given this observation it should be prudent for scientists in general to adopt a metaphysics by which it never fails so as not to undermine their discipline itself. But then some scientists should decide not to accept this principle since it might actually be wrong. Here we’d have two different forms of science — a purely “natural” form, and a “natural plus” form.
The net effect of this is that when a person like Donald Davidson comes along with an idea which mandates a violation of systemic causality (such as “there are no psychophysical laws”), a standard sort of response from general scientists should be expected. This might be something like “Actually the premise of my own work mandates that causality never fails, and so professionally I must reject your position for violating this tenant. It might actually be true however. Fortunately there are scientists I can refer you to who do explore that sort of thing.”
Fascinating idea! I'm intrigued and I have questions!
I'm really intrigued by your concept of 'natural' and 'natural plus' forms of science. It's got me thinking about the practical aspects of how this might work.
How would a 'natural plus' form of science implement the scientific method? What happens to falsifiability?
How do you envision these two approaches coexisting in practice? Would you suspect there'd be different journals, conferences, or institutions for each? What about in different fields of science? How would this principle apply in fields like quantum mechanics, where traditional notions of causality sometimes seem to break down?
Thanks Suzi! Regarding the practical effects for things like journals, conferences, and institutions, I’d let that evolve however it does. My guess however is that scientists in general would perceive themselves to be full naturalists, though sometimes their work would effectively get them demoted to the “natural plus” form where systemic causality is presumed to ultimately fail. These scientists would still work under the scientific method as much as possible, but this could also be fudged when sufficiently inconvenient. Note that inherently unfalsifiable proposals would be more acceptable here given that non-causal dynamics needn’t even have any evidence in order to be true.
I’m not ultimately concerned about what these scientists would find however. Instead I suspect that if standard scientists were to work under the mandate that causality never fails, then they’d be able to do their jobs better than they currently do. Quantum mechanics is a great example. Today scientists are able to effectively cheat without much in the way of professional consequences. As I understand it for example, in order to account for quantum funkiness Sean Carroll posits that bajillions of literal worlds like ours emerge from ours each second. So here we have an unfalsifiable notion that seems to make a mockery of the concept of “systemic causality”. But if scientists faced the threat of being demoted to a “natural plus” form of science for proposing such things, then they might think twice about doing so. And in truth it’s not physics that worries me, but rather our generally soft mental and behavioral forms of science. I consider them to be in need of all sorts of metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological help.