1 / 11

Mental causation

maris
Download Presentation

Mental causation

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

    1. © Michael Lacewing Mental causation Michael Lacewing enquiries@alevelphilosophy.co.uk

    2. Mental causation Causation requires things to ‘happen’. ‘Things happening’ are events. A cause and its effect are both events, changes at a time (or over time) in the properties of objects. Like picking up the remote control

    3. Substance dualism If the mind is just thought, not in space, and matter is just extension, in space, how could one possibly causally affect the other? Perhaps causation is not ‘contact’, but ‘regular succession’, e.g. kick me and I will feel pain, and when I feel pain, I cry out. Hume thought that we needed to find a causal law, but it is very difficult to find laws involving mental states and events.

    4. Causal laws If causation requires laws, and we can’t find any for mental events, this is a problem for any theory of mind, not just dualism. Materialists might say that mental events are just events in the brain; and there are physical laws involving those.

    5. Picturing the problem

More Related