Intralevel mental causation

The articles examines the teleofunctional solution to the problem of mental causation, presented by Dmitry Volkov in his recently published book Free Will. An Illusion or an Opportunity. D.B. Volkov proposes solutions to three big metaphysical problems – mental causation, personal identity, and free will. Solving the first problem, Volkov creatively combines the advantages of Dennett’s teleofunctional model and Vasilyev’s local interactionism. Volkov’s teleofunctional model of mental causation seeks to prove the causal relevance of mental properties as non-local higher order properties. In my view, its substantiation is based on three points: (a) critics of the exclusion problem and Kim’s model of mental causation, (b) “Library of first editions” argument, (c) reduction of the causal trajectories argument (CTA 1) by Vasilyev to the counterpart argument (CTA 2) by Volkov. Each of these points faces objections. Kim’s criticism is based on an implicit confusion of two types of reduction – reduction from supervenience and from multiple realizability. The latter type does not threaten Kim’s ideas, but Volkov uses this very type in his criticism. The “Library of first editions” argument does not achieve its goal due to compositional features and because non-local relational properties are a type of external properties that cannot be causally relevant. The reduction of CTA 1 to CTA 2 is unsuccessful since, in the case of this reduction, important features of CTA 1 are lost – these are local mental properties, due to which the influence of non-local physical factors occurs. My main objection is that the concept of causally relevant non-local properties is incompatible with the very concept of cause. The set of causally relevant properties of cause can only be local.

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Mental Causation - Problems And Buddhist Response

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.3640722 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Aakash Guglani

Keyword(s):

Mental Causation

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Pragmatic Explanations of the Proportionality Constraint on Causation

10.1093/oso/9780198746911.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Cei Maslen

Keyword(s):

Mental Causation ◽

Different Levels

This chapter examines the case for a proportionality constraint on causation. A range of examples seem to show that we prefer causes to be proportional to their effects. To use Yablo and Williamson’s example, when investigating causes of an injury we tend to judge ‘being hit by a red bus’ to be too specific, ‘being hit’ to be too general, and ‘being hit by a bus’ to be about right. In this chapter, some pragmatic explanations of this preference are presented and compared to each other. It is then argued that a version of a contrastivist approach to causation gives the best explanation. Some consequences for mental causation and causal claims at different levels are also discussed.

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