Mental causation is not load-bearing
4 days ago
- #intelligible supervenience
- #epiphenomenalism
- #mental causation
- Mental causation refers to mental entities causing effects, especially physical ones, but physicalism and the causal exclusion principle challenge this by suggesting physical effects have sufficient physical causes.
- Epiphenomenalism denies mental causation (mental states don't cause physical effects) and faces epistemic problems, such as explaining evolutionary utility and correlations between experience and reports.
- Intelligible supervenience, where mental facts are non-mysteriously explained by physical facts (e.g., via grounding or functional realization), can address these epistemic issues without requiring mental causation.
- Epiphenomenalist functionalism denies mental causation but uses intelligible supervenience to explain correlations, avoiding epistemic problems by linking mental states to physical states via functional roles.
- Russellian monism incorporates mental causation (e.g., quiddities affect physics) but lacks intelligible supervenience, leading to similar epistemic problems as epiphenomenalism regarding mental-physical correlations.
- Type-identity physicalism supports mental causation by identifying mental kinds with physical kinds, but its a posteriori identities may not fully address epistemic concerns due to unintelligible supervenience.
- Structural realism questions causation in fundamental physics, suggesting causation may not be fundamental, which undermines the causal exclusion principle and supports non-causal explanations via intelligible supervenience.
- Intelligible supervenience, rather than mental causation, is argued to better explain mental-physical correlations and address epistemic issues in philosophy of mind, especially under physicalism.