I've started on a book called Dynamics in Action, Alicia Juarrero - one of the many books I've learned about here. She makes it freely available on her website.

What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory" the branch of philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries between action and non-action, and between voluntary and involuntary behavior has been unable to account for the difference.

Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike, underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions - as historical narrative, not inference - follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility. — Dynamics in Action

It mentions another volume, Mental Causation, but mainly to show what's wrong with it.

Must say, finding it a slog, but then, she does take to task many of the principles of 'action theory' which is a large topic in analytic philosophy.

Whether it's about the specific kind of causation you have in mind, i don't know, but I also don't know if there is such a book.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I'd settle for even an article, even a chapter, about mental-to-mental causation. Isn't it bizarre that the subject doesn't come up more often? We all know the experience of having a thought which then "makes us" think of something else. What's going on here? How should this be described? Simply to say "association" doesn't suffice, because what we want to know is, how can thoughts associate? Is it by virtue of their content? How does that work? And what is the relation between the "causality" of thoughts and the entailment of propositions?

I can give you some of Nietzsches thoughts on it, he doesn't think there is simple or direct causal link from one conscious thought to another, but that they seem to cause eachother because they come from a similar unconscious wellspring so to speak.

Josh quoted the following passage from his notebooks in another thread:

“Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! - Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment - thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.” “Supposing the world had at its disposal a single quantum of force, then it seems obvious that every shift in power at any point would affect the whole system - thus, alongside causality, one after the other, there would be dependency, one alongside and with the other.” — Nietzsche

That reminds me of the way the parts of a single sentence gain meaning relative to one another, even though it's expressed sequentially. In the middle of expressing a sentence, you may have a sense of freedom, the ability to say anything, but the beginning of the sentence limits the ways it can end. Toward the end, the possibilities narrow down to just one. At the end, there is no freedom, and the constraints are coming from the imperative to say something meaningful, and meaning is fundamentally holistic.

I wonder if that idea about sentences could be generalized to cover all of thought.

how can thoughts associate? — J

The focus of the OP seems to be how one thought leads to a subsequent second thought. That is an association between two thoughts. But another type of association may have to do with the nature of a single thought itself. Because it seems to me that thinking itself is the formation of associations. If we just think one thought like “that appears blue”, we are associating. This mindset, thinking as associating, might explain a bit of how one idea causes another.

That reminds me of the way the parts of a single sentence gain meaning relative to one another, even though it's expressed sequentially. — frank

Me too. A single sentence is like my idea of a single thought, and that single sentence contains its own, internal associations.

So associations between ideas, one idea causing another, may be a complex form of similarly creating a longer sentence, or making one complex idea filled with more and more associations. So one idea causing another is like one sentence moving towards its completion.

So maybe all I’ve done is reduced your question from one idea causing another, to one sentence subject being conjugated or predicated (albeit in a much more complicated way). I still don’t know how. Just that.

I'm not sure if contingent mental pathways are the same for everyone so it's kinda hard to detail mental to mental. It's not like pool, where you're "slapping balls around" (as I like to detail it). This starts running into Quine. Even if you say one thought causes another, the reference of each thought is inscrutable, so we can’t pin down in general what the causation amounts to beyond the idiosyncratic modality of belief.

Funny enough, I started saying that while playing pool with my wife. Which is kinda a double entendre if you get my drift... though, I think William James details it more like a flow state? Kinda like what's occuring to me right now.

Thinking about your question-> not like playing pool-> slappin balls around -> thinking about the phrase I made up to make my wife laugh while playing pool-> thinking about that double entendre -> giggling like a child -> thinking about flow states....

In a sense we're each our own little closed system capable of reconciliation with others to share understanding.

Do you mean in analytic philosophy of mind in particular (where that exact term tends to be used), or more generally?

Because of the exclusion problem and related problems, pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). There might be other areas of focus but I have not come across them.

More broadly speaking, the Stoics talk a lot about the flow of thoughts from phantasiai (impressions) to thoughts (logismoi). Another big early influence is Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia, which spawned many commentaries by the Islamics and Scholastics. This stuff develops into a more semiotic theory that relies a lot on the causality specific to signs. John of St. Thomas is normally given as the final culmination of this tradition before it is picked up again in different ways by C.S Peirce and Brentano (phenomenology). But since none of these are super accessible, John Deely is a better place to start even if I think there are some flaws in his treatment. His "Dialogue With a Realist" and Red Book are short and accessible. A key idea is that physical phenomena can act as signs but there are also formal signs (internal, like concepts or species intelligibiles) that generate interpretants, so mental causality isn't necessarily distinct from the physical.

Now if you're focused more on discourse and demonstration, that's a whole different can of worms but there is a lot of interesting stuff there.

In more of the Stoic mode (loosely speaking), there is a ton of detailed stuff from Byzantium and the larger "East" (Christian and Islamic) but it tends to be far more focused on practice, so for the theoretical portions you have to wade through a lot of other material, and the modern overviews I have found are all still written with spiritual practice in mind over theory.

Edit: Deely's Four Ages of Understanding is longer but a neat historical look at how understandings of mental causality evolved and eventually led to the turn to "epistemology as first philosophy" and empiricism/physicalism versus idealism as a defining struggle within modern thought.

Because of the exclusion problem and related problems, pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). — Count Timothy von Icarus

It would seem that the idea of "mental to mental causation" requires a physicalist paradigm, insofar as one is thinking in terms of isolated mental events and such thinking is inherently mechanistic and materialistic. Apart from a physicalist paradigm the study of "mental to mental causation" is actually called logic, but it is about thinking and not about material mental events. It seems highly misleading to speak about mental events apart from agents and minds, as if they were physical atoms bouncing around and interacting with each other.

Good, the Nietzsche passage is right on target, thanks.

The focus of the OP seems to be how one thought leads to a subsequent second thought. — Fire Ologist

Appreciate your response. What you describe would be the OP I want to write, but I need more background! This one was just a plea for help.

In a sense we're each our own little closed system capable of reconciliation with others to share understanding. — DifferentiatingEgg

Indeed. I'd like to understand how the closed system works, to begin with. But I'll lay out what I see as the problem in more depth, once I've found some good target literature.

Twilight of Idols has the 4 great errors concerning causality. Maybe something from there can help out, but good luck, should be an interesting OP once you flesh your thoughts out on it.

Doesnt Deleuze detail a thought like an event that is subject to various forces? A thought is like a transverse of connections across multiple machines desiring machines?

From Anti-Oedipus:

Every "object" presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object. Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the perspective of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy that flows from it: the eye interprets everything—speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking—in terms of seeing. But a connection with another machine is always established, along a transverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current of the other or "sees" its own current interrupted.

I'll dig up a few more.

pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly, and I find that unsatisfactory. Even if the m's and p's are correlated, it doesn't necessarily mean that "p1 causes p2" is a good explanation of my how my thought of Plato makes me think of Socrates. Indeed, it sounds like a terrible explanation. We can't even cash out "p1" as "Plato" without some theory of how mental and physical events supervene.

So yes, that's what I want to explore, once I pull enough material together. As @Leontiskos mentions, we could just rule out the physical entirely and claim that "mental to mental causation" is the same thing as propositional entailment, but I don't think that works, for a variety of reasons I'll go into eventually. Just with this example, it's clear that "Plato" doesn't entail "Socrates" in any logical way, yet surely we want to say that the one thought, as an event in my mind, not as a proposition, caused or influenced the second. How? It can't only be a matter of neurons, but nor does it really resemble the "causality" of entailment. That's just a sample of the headaches involved in this topic.

there are also formal signs (internal, like concepts or species intelligibiles) that generate interpretants, so mental causality isn't necessarily distinct from the physical. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sounds interesting, thanks. I'll check it out.

Now if you're focused more on discourse and demonstration, that's a whole different can of worms but there is a lot of interesting stuff there. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, that's different, though equally interesting. My problem is about how we can justify using "causality" talk -- as we do -- when discussing how one mental event leads to another. To highlight the problem, it's probably better to leave out questions of entailment or demonstration entirely, and focus on the much more ordinary linkages we discover between our thoughts.

John Deely is a better place to start even if I think there are some flaws in his treatment. His "Dialogue With a Realist . . . " — Count Timothy von Icarus

Getting back to this . . . Is this the piece you're recommending?

I'm having a surprisingly hard time locating any discussions in the literature of mental-to-mental causation -- that is, the idea that one thought or image could cause another thought or image. I've looked through the usual suspects on causation but haven't nailed it yet. Can anyone on TPF help? — J

That is exactly the topic of Peter Tse's book (from a physiicalist perspective), The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Yup, that's the one. There is even an abridged version that is acted on YouTube, although it is not particularly easy to follow lol.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Have you read Locke or Hume? Hume speaks about this quite a bit (not using modern terminology).

There are others too, but I suppose I'm not clear on what the issue is such that it constitutes a problem.

I also thought David Bentley Hart's "All Things Are Full of Gods" was pretty good on this topic too, if not particularly original. But it covers a very wide array of topics in a quite long dialogue, and in a somewhat rambling manner, so it might not be ideal for this particular subject.

Hume speaks about this quite a bit (not using modern terminology). — Manuel

Are you talking about the "association of ideas" thing? I'm looking for someone who actually tries to explain what that means, how it would work, especially with reference to whether an idea can cause another idea.

Thanks!

Are you talking about the "association of ideas" thing? — J

That's a part of it. But he also talks about how certain ideas cause us to react in certain ways, a lot of it on his Passions and Ethics section of his Treatise.

But I think you want something contemporary, so it might not be what you're looking for.

No, it's worth a look, thanks for the reminder.

In the one paper I’ve read about Frege, he describes logic as ‘the laws of thought’. ‘Frege on Knowing the Third Realm’, Tyler Burge. The thing is, logic connects thoughts by way of necessity. Causation itself is physical.

Yes, this is a big part of what I'm trying to write about in the OP I'm drafting. Does logic connect thoughts, necessarily or otherwise? As you perhaps know, Frege used "thought" to mean "proposition," and with that usage, I think we'd agree that logic describes how propositions may be connected. But "thought" can also mean -- and more usually does mean -- a psychological event that happens in a particular brain at a particular time. (Popper's World Two versus World Three, if you like.) How do these two conceptions relate? Could it be the case that a proposition, as "contained" or "expressed" in a thought (it's hard to find a neutral word for it) does have some lawlike power to produce the next, entailed thought?

As for causation, we spend a lot of time trying to understand physical-to-physical causation, and trying to make a case for mental-to-physical causation, and its reverse. Mental-to-mental causation is assumed to be either the same thing as logic, when it happens at all, or explainable by redescribing thoughts (in the psychological sense) as physical brain-events, thus giving them a foot in the causal world. I don't think any of that is obvious and possibly not even coherent.

Also, as you remember from Rodl, this whole subject is very much a part of the "what is p?" question. How do we understand the idea of a proposition which is somehow not in a thought? etc.

- It seems like you want to talk about how one thought can follow from another in a non-logical way (i.e. via psychological association).

It's a bit odd to try to set out on a grand quest for all "mental to mental causation," and then immediately dismiss logic. Logic is obviously one way that "mental to mental causation" occurs. There are other ways too, such as association. But if you want to talk about association rather than logic, then you want to talk about per accidens causality rather than per se causality, which is less philosophical than psychological. It's also less interesting, because the answers are less intelligible. "But why did his ice-cream thought follow upon his grasshopper-thought?" "Because he associates ice cream with grasshoppers, likely because of the Grasshopper cocktail."

As for causation, we spend a lot of time trying to understand physical-to-physical causation, and trying to make a case for mental-to-physical causation, and its reverse. Mental-to-mental causation is assumed to be either the same thing as logic, when it happens at all, or explainable by redescribing thoughts (in the psychological sense) as physical brain-events, thus giving them a foot in the causal world. I don't think any of that is obvious and possibly not even coherent. — J

It depends on the stance. Sustance dualists have a completely different view to monists.

Mental to mental causation is not possible, granting that mental phenomena are coherent, even if we accept that one mental event, let's call it A, can create another mental event, let's call it B. Each mental event has a certain mental content (MC), let's call MCA and MCB, respectively, as the MC of A and the MC of B. The information about what B should be in the future is extra content, and it is necessary at the moment when A creates B. This information, however, changes the content of A, which is not acceptable. Therefore, mental to mental causation is not possible if mental phenomena are coherent.

It depends on the stance. Substance dualists have a completely different view to monists. — I like sushi

Sure. I don't want to get ahead of myself, as I'm still drafting the OP, but one of the difficult issues is that you need to first lay out some plausible positions on how the mental relates to the physical, before you can then posit solutions for how to understand (alleged) mental-to-mental causation.

The other big issue, which has already come up in some of the responses to this query, is that words like "mental" and "thought" can be taken from the point of view of logicism, or of psychologism. We do both, in our ordinary talk, so it's easy to accidentally confute them. I think Frege was right in wanting to keep them strictly separate. I'll have more to say about that. But could the concept of causation figure in either construal? We don't usually talk about the premises of a syllogism causing the conclusion, whereas the much weaker link of "association" (a very unfortunate term, but we seem to be stuck with it) does carry some causal weight, at least in common parlance, because we imagine this happening in a particular mind, not in Proposition World.

Anyway, to be continued, and thanks for everyone's interest and help -- even those of you who think m2m causation is impossible!

I also thought David Bentley Hart's "All Things Are Full of Gods" was pretty good on this topic too — Count Timothy von Icarus

Reminds me:

Psyche: ...Mechanical processes are series of brute events, determined by purely physical causes, obedient to impersonal laws, whereas thinking is a process determined by symbolic associations and rational implications. Yes, perhaps the electrical events in the neurology of the brain can serve as vehicles of transcription for thoughts; but they can’t be the same things as the semeiotic and logical contents of those thoughts. The firing of one neuron might induce another neuron to fire, which leads to another firing in turn, as a result of physical necessity, but certainly not as the result of logical necessity. The strictly consecutive structure of a rational deduction— that simple equation, that elementary syllogism— simply isn’t, and can’t be reduced to, a series of biochemical contingencies, and the conceptual connections between a premise and a conclusion can’t be the same thing—or follow the same “causal” path—as the organic connections of cerebral neurology. One can’t be mapped onto the other. Nor, by the same token, should the semantics and syntax of reasoning be able to direct the flow of physical causes and effects in the brain. Not, at any rate, if anything like the supposed “causal closure of the physical” is true. So, really, the syllogism as an event in the brain should, by all rights, be quite impossible. And, while we’re at it, I might note that consecutive reasoning is irreducibly teleological: one thought doesn’t physically cause its sequel; rather, the sequence is guided by a kind of inherent futurity in reasoning— the will of the mind to find a rational resolution to a train of premises and conclusions— that elicits that sequel from its predecessor. Teleology is intrinsic to reasoning and yet repugnant to mechanism.

Oh, really, don’t you see the problem here, Phaesty? There can’t be both a complete neurophysiological account of a rational mental act and also a complete account in terms of semeiotic content and logical intentionality; and yet physicalism absolutely requires the former while every feat of reasoning consists entirely in the latter. The predicament becomes all the more utterly absurd the more one contemplates it. If, for instance, you seem to arrive at a particular belief as a result of a deductive argument— say, the belief that Socrates is mortal— physicalist orthodoxy obliges you to say that that belief is actually only a neurological event, mindlessly occasioned by some other neurological event. On the physical ist view of things, no one has ever really come to believe anything based on reasons; and yet the experience of reaching a conclusion tells us the opposite.

Thanks, but what are you quoting?