scholarly journals Mary Does Not Learn Anything New

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-55
Author(s):  
Adam Khayat
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Knowledge Argument ◽  
Phenomenal Concept ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Jaegwon Kim ◽  
Special Sciences ◽  
Reductive Physicalism ◽  
Mental Properties

Within the discourse surrounding mind-body interaction, mental causation is intimately associated with non-reductive physicalism. However, such a theory holds two opposing views: that all causal properties and relations can be explicated by physics and that special sciences have an explanatory role. Jaegwon Kim attempts to deconstruct this problematic contradiction by arguing that it is untenable for non-reductive physicalists to explain human behavior by appeal to mental properties. In combination, Kim’s critique of mental causation and the phenomenal concept strategy serves as an effectual response to the anti-physicalist stance enclosed within the Knowledge Argument and the Zombie Thought Experiment.

Mary Does Not Learn Anything New

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 44-55
Author(s):  
Adam Khayat ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Knowledge Argument ◽  
Phenomenal Concept ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Jaegwon Kim ◽  
Special Sciences ◽  
Reductive Physicalism ◽  
Mental Properties

Within the discourse surrounding mind-body interaction, mental causation is intimately associated with non-reductive physicalism. However, such a theory holds two opposing views: that all causal properties and relations can be explicated by physics and that special sciences have an explanatory role. Jaegwon Kim attempts to deconstruct this problematic contradiction by arguing that it is untenable for non-reductive physicalists to explain human behavior by appeal to mental properties. In combination, Kim’s critique of mental causation and the phenomenal concept strategy serves as an effectual response to the anti-physicalist stance enclosed within the Knowledge Argument and the Zombie Thought Experiment.

Criticism of D.B Volkov’s Teleofunctional Solution to the Problem of Mental Causation

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-135
Author(s):  
Anton V. Kuznetsov
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Physical Factors ◽  
Multiple Realizability ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Local Properties ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
First Editions

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.

The Knowledge Intuition and the Ability Hypothesis

Dialogue ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huiming Ren
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Knowledge Argument

ABSTRACT: I argue that the Ability Hypothesis cannot really accommodate the knowledge intuition that drives the knowledge argument and therefore fails to defend physicalism. When the thought experiment is run with, instead of Mary, an advanced robot Rosemary, for whom there presumably is no distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, proponents of the Ability Hypothesis would have to give a far-fetched and counterintuitive explanation of why Rosemary wouldn’t learn anything new upon release.

Knowledge argument

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torin Alter
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Colour Vision ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Argument ◽  
Frank Jackson ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Television Monitor ◽  
Physical Chemical ◽  
The World

The knowledge argument is an argument against physicalism, the view that the world is wholly physical. It was developed by Frank Jackson (1943–) and is based on the following thought experiment. Everything that can be known through the physical, chemical, and biological sciences – the complete physical truth – has been discovered. Mary is a brilliant scientist who is raised in a black-and-white room. She has never had colour experiences. But she learns the complete physical truth, which includes the completed science of colour vision, by reading books and watching lectures on a black-and-white television monitor. Then she leaves the room and sees colours. Jackson’s argument runs roughly as follows. When Mary leaves the room, she learns something new. She learns what it is like to see in colour. Evidently, the complete physical truth is not the complete truth about the world. Ergo, physicalism is false. Some react by denying that Mary learns anything when she leaves the room. Others react by accepting that she learns something but denying that this refutes physicalism. Still others accept the argument as sound. The ensuing discussion has led to a variety of insights about consciousness and its place in the natural world.

Mental causation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Loewer
Keyword(s):  
Physical Properties ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
Completeness Of Physics

Both folk and scientific psychology assume that mental events and properties participate in causal relations. However, considerations involving the causal completeness of physics and the apparent non-reducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena have challenged these assumptions. In the case of mental events (such as someone’s thinking about Vienna), one proposal has been simply to identify not ‘types’ (or classes) of mental events with types of physical events, but merely individual ‘token’ mental events with token physical ones, one by one (your and my thinking about Vienna may be ‘realized’ by different type physical states). The role of mental properties (such as ‘being about Vienna’) in causation is more problematic. Properties are widely thought to have three features that seem to render them causally irrelevant: (1) they are ‘multiply-realizable’ (they can be realized in an indefinite variety of substances); (2) many of them seem not to supervene on neurophysiological properties (differences in mental properties do not always depend merely on differences in neurophysiological ones, but upon relations people bear to things outside their skin); and (3) many of them (for example, ‘being painful’) seem inherently ‘subjective’ in a way that no objective physical properties seem to be. All of these issues are complicated by the fact that there is no consensus concerning the nature of causal relevance for properties in general.

Realization

Philosophy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umut Baysan
Keyword(s):  
Physical Properties ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Dependence Relation ◽  
Functional Roles ◽  
Special Sciences ◽  
Painful Sensation ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
The Mind

“Realization” is a technical term used by philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, and metaphysicians to denote some dependence relation that is thought to exist between higher-level properties or states and lower-level properties or states. Some philosophers of mind hold that mental properties, such as believing that it is raining, having a painful sensation, and so on, are realized by physical properties. Understood this way, the term was introduced to philosophy of mind literature with the thesis that mental properties are multiply realizable by physical properties. Since different physical properties could realize the same mental property, it is thought that the phenomenon of multiple realization shows that the identity theory, namely the view that mental properties are identical with physical properties, is false. For similar reasons, some philosophers of the special sciences think that higher-level properties, such as biological properties, are realized by properties that are invoked in lower-level sciences such as physics. Some metaphysicians suggest that determinable properties, such as color properties (e.g., being red) are realized by their determinate properties (e.g., being crimson, being scarlet). Some argue that dispositional properties, such as being fragile, are realized by non-dispositional, categorical microstructural properties. It has been customary to think that functional properties, such as being a carburetor, are realized by first-order properties that play the specified functional roles. Due to the widely different usages of “realization,” it is difficult to determine if there should be one relation or several relations that this term denotes. Any relation that is denoted by this term can be seen as a realization relation. This article is about such relations. Whereas some theories explicitly formulate realization relations, some tangential theories that concern related issues (e.g., the mind-body problem) make crucial claims as to what counts as a case of realization. This article introduces the central questions about realization and clarifies the main issues and concepts that are invoked in the relevant literature.

Determinables, Determinates, and Causal Relevance

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Walter
Keyword(s):  
Physical Properties ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Causal Exclusion ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Exclusion Argument ◽  
The World ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Manifest Image

Mental causation, our mind's ability to causally affect the course of the world, is part and parcel of our ‘manifest image’ of the world. That there is mental causation is denied by virtually no one. How there can be such a thing as mental causation, however, is far from obvious. In recent years, discussions about the problem of mental causation have focused on Jaegwon Kim's so-called Causal Exclusion Argument, according to which mental events are ‘screened off’ or ‘preempted’ by physical events unless mental causation is a genuine case of overdetermination or mental properties are straightforwardly reducible to physical properties.

Closet Dualism and Mental Causation

1998 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter ◽  
Alexander Miller
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Multiple Realizability ◽  
Jaegwon Kim ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nonreductive Materialism ◽  
Tyler Burge ◽  
Argumentative Strategy ◽  
Stephen Yablo

Serious doubts about nonreductive materialism — the orthodoxy of the past two decades in philosophy of mind — have been long overdue. Jaegwon Kim has done perhaps the most to articulate the metaphysical problems that the new breed of materialists must confront in reconciling their physicalism with their commitment to the autonomy of the mental. Although the difficulties confronting supervenience, multiple-realizability, and mental causation have been recurring themes in his work, only mental causation — in particular, the specter of epiphenomenalism — has really captured the interest of philosophers in general in recent years.This growing attention has spawned a large body of literature, which it is not our aim here to explore or assess. Rather, we want to call attention to what we believe is a new and quite different argumentative strategy against epiphenomenalism voiced in some recent articles by Tyler Burge and Stephen Yablo. Each has challenged two central assumptions of the existing mental causation debate.

scholarly journals Epiphenomenalism for Functionalists

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Beebee
Keyword(s):  
Functional Properties ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Natural Consequence ◽  
Causal Relevance ◽  
Exclusion Problem ◽  
Mental Properties

This chapter focuses on an assumption implicitly made by most recent attempts to solve the exclusion problem for mental causation, that mental (and so multiply realized) properties are ‘distinct existences’ from their alleged effects. Without that assumption, no such solution can work, since we have excellent grounds for thinking that there is no causation between entities that are not distinct from one another. But, assuming functionalism—which, after all, constitutes the grounds for thinking that mental properties are multiply realized in the first place—mental properties are not distinct from the effects to which they are alleged to bear causal relevance, since functional properties are defined in terms of the causal roles of their realizers. The chapter argues, however, that the natural consequence—epiphenomenalism with respect to mental properties—is not as problematic as many philosophers tend to assume.

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