Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Part I Physicalism
- Part II Physicalist Discontents
- Part III Physicalism and Consciousness: A Continuing Dialectic
- 13 Mental Causation and Consciousness: The Two Mind-Body Problems for the Physicalist
- 14 How Not to Solve the Mind-Body Problem
- 15 Deconstructing New Wave Materialism
- 16 In Defense of New Wave Materialism: A Response to Horgan and Tienson
- 17 Physicalism Unfalsified: Chalmers's Inconclusive Conceivability Argument
- References
- Index
13 - Mental Causation and Consciousness: The Two Mind-Body Problems for the Physicalist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Part I Physicalism
- Part II Physicalist Discontents
- Part III Physicalism and Consciousness: A Continuing Dialectic
- 13 Mental Causation and Consciousness: The Two Mind-Body Problems for the Physicalist
- 14 How Not to Solve the Mind-Body Problem
- 15 Deconstructing New Wave Materialism
- 16 In Defense of New Wave Materialism: A Response to Horgan and Tienson
- 17 Physicalism Unfalsified: Chalmers's Inconclusive Conceivability Argument
- References
- Index
Summary
Mental Causation and Consciousness
Schopenhauer famously called the mind-body problem a “world-knot,” or “Weltknoten,” and he was surely right. However, the mind-body problem is not really a single problem; it is a cluster of connected problems about the relationship between mind and matter. What these problems are depends, of course, on a broader framework of philosophical and scientific assumptions and presumptions in which the questions are posed and potential solutions are formulated. For the contemporary physicalist, I believe that there are two problems that truly make the mind-body problem a Weltknoten, an intractable and perhaps ultimately insoluble puzzle. These problems concern mental causation and consciousness. The problem of mental causation is to answer this question: How can the mind exert its causal powers in a world that is fundamentally material? The second problem, that of consciousness, is to answer the following question: How can there be such a thing as a mind, or consciousness, in a material world? Moreover, as I will argue, the two problems are interconnected – the two knots are intertwined, and this makes it all the more difficult to unsnarl either of them.
Giving an account of mental causation has been, for the past three decades, one of the main preoccupations of philosophers of mind who are committed to physicalism in one form or another. The problem, of course, is not new: As every student of western philosophy knows, Descartes, who arguably invented the mind-body problem, was confronted forcefully by his contemporaries on this issue. But this does not mean that Descartes's problem is our problem.
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- Physicalism and its Discontents , pp. 271 - 283Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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