Topics Mind

Question I am curious about the philosophy behind popular cliches such as "the power of positive thinking" or "self-fulfilling prophecies". How is it that mental processes are able to influence physical outcomes? Is this an issue that would fall under the "Philosophy of Mind" category?

Accepted:
August 13, 2006

Comments

We all believe that mental processes influence physical outcomes. For example, right now my mental processes are (I hope) influencing the movement of my fingers on the keyboard. How is that possible? Well, if mental processes just are physical brain processes, then there is no special mystery. If on the other hand they are non-physical, then there may be a special problem in seeing how such different sorts of things -- the mental and the physical -- could be causally related. But I'm not even sure there is a special problem in this case. It's difficult to understand causation even in the simplest physical-physical case, but it is not clear that a big difference between cause and effect raises a special additional problem. After all, those moving fingers of mine are causes all sorts of changes to the world wide web, a digital realm very different from my digits.

It's true that the expressions 'the power of positive thinking' and 'self-fulfilling prophecies' are cliches, but it seems likely that sometimes believing that you will do something increases the chances that you will do it, both in situations where you want to do that thing and in situations where you don't.