• Ignoredreddituser
    29
    Here is an excerpt from Materialism by Brown and Ladyman. I’m not quite sure how to parse their solution.


    The argument is called the causal exclusion argument. It challenges the intelligibility of mental causation, and it can be expressed like this: if a mental event M supervenes on a physical event P, and P causes a further physical event P* on which a further mental event M* supervenes, serious doubt can be cast on the claim that M causes M*. The account at the physical level of how P causes P*, together with the supervenient relations, is sufficient to account for the occurrence of M*. The M-to-M* doesn’t seem to be a genuine causal relation.
    The philosopher Jerry Fodor has expressed a personal response to the problem in no uncertain terms:
     … if it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying … if none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the end of the world.
    (Fodor, 1990, p. 156)

    Here’s a situation that may clarify what has worried Fodor so much. Imagine you are deciding whether or not to open the window. It seems as though the world has reached a fork in the road – on one possible future path the window stays shut, while on the other possible

    seems as if you hold in your hands, in your choice, which path the future will take. However, if the subvenient base of your deliberation stands in a causal role to the subvenient base of your subsequent decision – to open or not to open – then you would seem to lose your central place in the story. What happens – window opened or window kept shut – can be determined without reference to the supervenient story of you and your deliberations….

    Later in the chapter:

    This chapter concludes with the outline of an account of human choices and decisions intended to save the world. To begin, in addition to the supervenience of mental entities – thoughts, desires, deliberations and so on, there must too be actions. To clarify this idea, imagine a human being’s arm waving. This may be a simple event in the physical world, but it has become an action if it is a waving goodbye. An action is a physical motion of the body linked with an associated mental state.
    On this basis, the deliberation about opening the window could have this analysis: you decide you want the window open; put another way, the wish for the window to be open forms in your mind. You then entertain the fantasy of the window being open and you have thoughts about the means to it being opened. Finally, on this basis, the action is undertaken to open the window.
    It will not escape attention that this does not undermine the causal exclusion argument. Rather it simply provides a description of what is going on when we have the feeling that we hold the future in our hands. It does suggest that the opening of the window was based on our desire, but the roots of that desire can be traced at a sub-mental level. If the subvenient base of our minds is taken as our physical bodies, including the brain, it may be argued that this physical system ‘wanted’ the window open, and the mental wish expressed this. This perspective may explicate something of the identity theorist’s perspective, even if identity theory must be abandoned.
  • T Clark
    13.9k
    f a mental event M supervenes on a physical event P, and P causes a further physical event P* on which a further mental event M* supervenes, serious doubt can be cast on the claim that M causes M*.Ignoredreddituser

    I've looked up "supervene" but I found the definitions and examples confusing. Can you clarify. What does it mean that "M supervenes on P." Does that mean M causes P; P causes M; M and P are correlated; or what? Can you give us a real-life, realistic example of the relationships described in the first paragraph.
  • Daemon
    591
    I'm glad you said this. I've always found "supervene" confusing.
  • Ignoredreddituser
    29
    I always took it to mean that it something supervenes on something when it depends on it for its existence or function.

    As for the rest, I’m as lost in the sauce as you guys, this is all the book has in it. Hopefully, someone more familiar with this will come along and help us out.
  • Daemon
    591
    So is this right:

    If a mental event M is dependent upon on a physical event P, and P causes a further physical event P* on which a further mental event M* is dependent, serious doubt can be cast on the claim that M causes M*. The account at the physical level of how P causes P*, together with the dependency relations, is sufficient to account for the occurrence of M*. The M-to-M* doesn’t seem to be a genuine causal relation.

    ?
  • Ignoredreddituser
    29
    Yeah that should be in ball park, I believe
  • SophistiCat
    2.2k
    There is an article on supervenience in the SEP - probably more than you want to know, but relevant to this topic. Here is a handy definition from the opening:

    A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”.Supervenience
  • EnPassant
    667
    I think a non physical event can supervene/intervene in a physical chain of events-
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4458/determinism-and-mathematical-truth/p1

    Here is the main argument-

    Extreme determinsts maintain that the physical universe is just an outworking of the laws of nature and everything is predetermined by these laws. It is even argued that our brains are determined by neurological processes etc that are physically deterministic.

    There seems to be a way around this determinism. It involves making a list of possible actions and making a choice from that list in such a way that the choice is not determined by either neurological states or any physical state in the world.

    Here is how it works. Make a list of ordinary events and label them 0 to 9.

    0. Read a book
    1. Go to the library
    2. Play tennis
    3. Drive your car
    4. Go to the cinema
    5. Go to the supermarket
    6. Listen to the radio
    7. ...
    8. ...
    9. ...

    Next get the decimal expansion of an irrational number such as the square root of 11
    or 1/23.

    Let us take the square root of 11

    The square root of 11 is 3.3166247903554

    Now take the first digit in the decimal expansion, 3
    and go to your list;

    3 = Drive your car

    the next is 1

    1 = Go to the library

    6 = Listen to the radio

    etc.

    Now our choice is not determined by any physical or neurological state. It is determined by purely non physical mathematical entities. So we seem to have broken with any previously determinism by letting digits make our choice for us. If we are in the library, for example, we are engaged with a series of physical activities that, as a set, cannot be traced back to any previous physical state because the digit intervened and determined what set of physical events we would enter into.
  • SophistiCat
    2.2k
    In the quoted passage Brown and Ladyman give only a brief outline of a solution; do they go on to say more? From this one paragraph it's difficult to tell just where their solution is situated, but it does have some resemblance with identity theories (see for instance Mental Causation in the SEP).

    They are being a bit coy though in that it is not clear how seriously they take the causal exclusion argument and whether they think that mental causation does have its place. When they switch from subvenient to supervenient, from physical to mental, they no longer talk about causation and instead use the word "description." But is it a causal description that parallels a description in terms of physical causes?

    They also use the word "express," which hints at realization.
  • EnPassant
    667
    if a mental event M supervenes on a physical event P, and P causes a further physical event P* on which a further mental event M* supervenes, serious doubt can be cast on the claim that M causes M*. The account at the physical level of how P causes P*, together with the supervenient relations, is sufficient to account for the occurrence of M*. The M-to-M* doesn’t seem to be a genuine causal relation.Ignoredreddituser

    It depends on whether M causes P. If M does not happen and as a result P does not happen then P* does not happen and M* does not happen. This means that M* does not happen unless M happens, which sounds suspiciously like M indirectly causing M*
  • Ignoredreddituser
    29
    @SophistiCat
    Not in this chapter its very brief which makes it kind of opaque as to what they’re solution actually entails. It sounded to me like they were taking the advantages of identity theory and adding them to an non-reductive view. Here below is the middle part of the chapter I cut out that might something.

    Fodors’s anxieties are not without foundation was looking very promising. In outline: the materialist relinquishes the search for what exists to the scientist, and simply predicts, on good inductive evidence, that the scientist will not posit psychological phenomena beyond those we are already familiar with. The materialist designates all phenomena, from quarks to thoughts, as things that exist but which are supervenient on some more, yet-to-be-discovered, fundamental level of reality. The materialist seems to have kept everything, including mental entities, at no cost. But in fact the cost, from Fodor’s perspective, is very high. But is it so high? Is it the end of the world?
    The first point to be made is that this problem was always lurking in the shadows of materialism. Epicurus, and Lucretius after him, pointed to the swerve as the key explanatory feature of the reality of atoms in the void that would account for our freedom of will. However, no such account was forthcoming. Our intuitive account of ourselves as human beings seems to be implicitly a dualist picture where the individual can stand outside the material order and make free choices. It was observed above that the identity theorists demand a radical rethink of our intuitions about mental entities. What is clear now is that all materialist theories demand a radical rethink of what it is to be a human being.
  • SophistiCat
    2.2k
    By the way, I am afraid that when they talk about "Fodors’s anxieties" [over epiphenomenalism] they are misrepresenting him. Perhaps they mistook a rhetorical setup for his actual position. For example, here is the opening of the essay that concludes with that vivid wanting-reaching-itching-scratching passage ("Making Mind Matter More"):

    An outbreak of epiphobia (the fear that one is turning into an epiphenomenalist) appears to have much of the philosophy of mind community in its grip. Though it is generally agreed to be compatible with physicalism that intentional states should be causally responsible for behavioral outcomes, epiphobics worry that it is not compatible with physicalism that intentional states should be causally responsible for behavioral outcomes qua intentional. So they fear that the very successes of a physicalistic (and/or a computational) psychology will entail the causal inertness of the mental. Fearing this makes them unhappy. In this chapter, I want to argue that epiphobia is a neurotic worry; if there is a problem, it is engendered not by the actual or possible successes of physicalistic psychology, but by two philosophical mistakes: (a) a wrong idea about what it is for a property to be causally responsible, and (b) a complex of wrong ideas about the relations between special science laws and the events that they subsume. — Fodor

    Fodor exposes the causal exclusion argument (as it is used here) for the obvious nonsense that it is with a couple of examples, such as:

    Consider, for example, the property of being a mountain; and suppose (what is surely plausible) that being a mountain isn't a physical property. (Remember, this just means that "mountain" and its synonyms aren't items in the lexicon of physics.) Now, untutored intuition might suggest that many of the effects of mountains are attributable to their being mountains. Thus, untutored intuition suggests, it is because Mount Everest is a mountain that Mount Everest has glaciers on its top; and it is because Mount Everest is a mountain that it casts such a long shadow; and it is because Mount Everest is a mountain that so many people are provoked to try to climb it... and so on. But not so, according to the present line of argument. For, surely the causal powers of Mount Everest are fully determined by its physical properties, and we've agreed that being a mountain isn't one of the physical properties of mountains. So then, Mount Everest's being a mountain doesn't affect its causal powers. So then - contrary to what one reads in geology books - the property of being a mountain is causally inert. Geoepiphobia! — Fodor

    It should be noted that Fodor explicitly stipulates "property dualism" as a precondition for the line of argument that he mocks. That's why he says in this example that "being a mountain" is a non-physical property: just as mental or intentional properties are held to be non-physical because they aren't "items in the lexicon of physics," any property that is not in the lexicon of physics must be ipso facto treated as non-physical on this account.

    Fodor's own solution rejects the principle of causal exclusion in favor of causal sufficiency:

    P is a causally responsible property if it's a property in virtue of the instantiation of which the occurrence of one event is nomologically sufficient for the occurrence of another. — Fodor

    On his "covering law" account there can be multiple causes for the same event, and the epiphenomenalist worry stemming from causal exclusion is dissolved. Thus, if we accept that there are mental, or intentional laws of some sort, then the mental is not epiphenomenal. That there are such laws is implicit in the very attitude towards the epiphenomenalist threat that Fodor satirizes: "if it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching ... it’s the end of the world." That is, we ordinarily assume that it is true my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching. We treat this connection between wanting and reaching as a law-like regularity. You don't have to call these laws physical if you don't like, but that doesn't matter for the argument.
  • T Clark
    13.9k


    Thanks. I saw that and still couldn't figure out what it was talking about.
  • Ignoredreddituser
    29
    @SophistiCat
    Good stuff! Very impressive and well explained.
  • SophistiCat
    2.2k
    I'll take the bow on behalf of the late Jerry Fodor :)
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