Topics Mind

Question If every distinct mental state has a distinct ("corresponding") physical state, how could we tell which was causing which at any given moment? I'm sure that in certain contexts it would be more practical to answer that the mental state was caused by the physical state (e.g., "P is just irritable because he hasn't eaten"), and that in certain other contexts it would be more practical to answer that the mental state caused the physical (e.g., "P moved his hand because he decided to")--but is there any context-free answer to this question, i.e., the question as to whether the mind controls the body or whether the body controls the mind at any given moment?

Accepted:
October 23, 2005

Comments

Any answer to the mind-body problem struggles to account plausibly for the causal relations that seem obviously to run in both directions between mind and body. For the dualist, who holds that mental states and physical states are distinct, your question is accute: how could a mental state really cause a physical state if physical states bring about one another comprehensively (or even deterministically). The effects of a given mental state seem pre-empted by the physical state that corresponds with it. Some dualists--"epiphenomenalists"--embrace this problem and hold that mental states, though caused, are themselves causally ineffective. But many have found this problematic: for one thing it's unclear how we could know about mental states (or any entities) that have no causal effects; more damaging, though, is just the sense that this does a deep injustice to the way our mental states present themseleves to us from the inside. You seem to experience mental causation consciously when you decide to lift your arm, and then actively lift it. It's hard to believe that this is just an illusion.

There may be better ways out for the dualist, but it seems to me that the "materialist", who holds that (in some way or other) the mental and the physical are one and the same, has a much easier time with your question. The materialist can say, for example, that some states and events can be described in both psychological terms and physical (e.g., physiological) terms. There are, to be sure, interesting questions about when (and for what explanatory purposes) we chose to describe things psychologically and when physiological. (And it is, of course, a difficult positive project to say in what sense the mental and the physical are the same.) But the materialist needn't--and indeed, can't--answer your "context-free" question: since there are two vocabularies, but not two distinct realms of states and events that they describe, we can't say that it is either the mind or the body that is exclusively in control. They are one and the same.