For Thursday, read (and write about) Barry Loewer’s “Mental Causation, or Something Near Enough” (chapter 12).

NR-Materialism Leads to Strong Epiphenomenalism Mental events supervene on physical ones. This is an asymmetric, synchronic (thus noncausal) relation. Typically each event has only one sufficient cause (no widespread causal overdetermination). All mental events have a sufficient physical cause insofar as there is a physical event that causes the physical event on which the mental event supervenes. Therefore, mental events have no causes and are not themselves causes of anything.

Two Theories of Causation: Nomological Theory and Counterfactual Dependence The nomological/regularity account (often traced back to Hume and called the ‘constant conjunction’ account): Token event a caused token event b if and only if a precedes b, a and b are contiguous in time and space, and events of type A regularly precede and are contiguous in time and space with events of type B.

Standard Objection: Correlation by Common Cause A virus may well cause both headaches and, shortly after, nausea. The headache doesn’t cause the nausea, though. They are the products of a common cause, the virus. This is the sort of thing people have in mind when they say, “Correlation is not causation.”

Manipulationist Response Manipulate variables to pull real causes apart from phony ones. Damp one of the symptoms of the virus, the other persists. And so on. In the cases in which our intuitions tell us there is no real causation, manipulation will disrupt the regularity necessary for causation, according to the regularity theory.

Kim’s Further Worry: Superficial Manifestation A and B might satisfy the requirements of the regularity theory even though A is a manifestation of C, B is a manifestation of D, and Cs cause Ds. Consider the possibility that As and Bs are mental states and Cs and Ds are neural ones. This is closely related to the concern about epiphenomenalism (and supervenient causation).

Counterfactual Dependence Simple version: Token event a caused token event b if and only if had a not occurred, b would not have occurred. A challenge to mental causation: if the physical events in my brain had occurred without my mental state, my behavior would still have occurred; so my mental state didn’t cause my behavior.

Nearest Possible Worlds A standard way to understand counterfactuals: In the nearest possible world in which I’m not in that mental state, I still behave in the way I did in the actual world. But what determines the nearness of possible worlds? Lewis: Avoid large-scale violations of the laws of nature; maximize the area of spatio-temporal overlap (minimize particular changes); avoid small violations of the laws of nature. (AND no backtracking!)

Sameness of laws? Kim wants you to notice that if the law-based account of causation is in trouble, then the counterfactual one is too. The truth-conditions of the counterfactuals rest on the sameness (or near-sameness of laws). But how could these be sufficient to ground such counterfactuals if laws alone don’t ground causal facts?

Productive-Generative Causation Kim thinks that in order for agency to be preserved, mental causes must produce or generate their effects. Here he appeals to the conserved-quantity theory of causation. Put roughly: a bears a productive causal relation to b if and only if a’s and b’s world-lines intersect and there is, at the point of intersection, transfer of a conserved quantity (e.g., momentum or energy) from a to b.

Kim’s Solution The only way to preserve mental states and their causal efficacy is via local (roughly, species-specific) reductions. Mental state types are identical to physical state types and thus have just as much causal efficacy as the physical state-types do.