You seem to be very confused regarding what mental causation actually means.
No one is saying that a belief is an "agent" on its own. I completely agree with you when you say "A belief does play a role in the agent's behavior in the sense that a rational being will take his beliefs into consideration when deciding how to act". That is the DEFINITION of mental causation - mental states playing a role in an agent's behavior. The alternative is epiphenomenalism, where a person behaves according to the laws of physics with their mental states being absolutely irrelevant to their behavior.
I think that's because I see the mind as a concrete thing while you see it as more of an abstract concept we use to decribe abilities people have. Just because something is not physical does not mean that it is abstract and causally impotent.
Once you make the assumption that that mental causation is true then you are trapped in the quagmire of mind body dualism. How do you explain the interactions between the mind and the body? Good luck with that one.
I see no problem with mind-body interaction at all. As William Hasker said, the interaction problem is probably the single most overrated objection to a philosophical position of all time - it may have been applicable in a time when causation was seen as requiring physical contact, but that problem no longer exists. Conservation of energy is also an obsolete objection - conservation of energy has not been a universal "law" for almost 100 years. The more we learn from physics, the less mysterious mind-body interaction seems - how is it any more "unintelligible" than two particles instantaneously affecting each other from opposite ends of the universe without any type of contact whatsoever?
That depends on whether you consider the ability to cause things in the physical world a "physical property" by definition. However, mental causation should not be modeled after physical causation in the sense of billiard balls bouncing off each other - the mind-brain interaction is best seen on my view as analogous to quantum entanglement (i.e. one of them changing causes the other to change correspondingly without there necessarily being physical contact).
3 comments:
Hal,
You seem to be very confused regarding what mental causation actually means.
No one is saying that a belief is an "agent" on its own. I completely agree with you when you say "A belief does play a role in the agent's behavior in the sense that a rational being will take his beliefs into consideration when deciding how to act". That is the DEFINITION of mental causation - mental states playing a role in an agent's behavior. The alternative is epiphenomenalism, where a person behaves according to the laws of physics with their mental states being absolutely irrelevant to their behavior.
Hal,
I think that's because I see the mind as a concrete thing while you see it as more of an abstract concept we use to decribe abilities people have. Just because something is not physical does not mean that it is abstract and causally impotent.
Once you make the assumption that that mental causation is true then you are trapped in the quagmire of mind body dualism. How do you explain the interactions between the mind and the body? Good luck with that one.
I see no problem with mind-body interaction at all. As William Hasker said, the interaction problem is probably the single most overrated objection to a philosophical position of all time - it may have been applicable in a time when causation was seen as requiring physical contact, but that problem no longer exists. Conservation of energy is also an obsolete objection - conservation of energy has not been a universal "law" for almost 100 years. The more we learn from physics, the less mysterious mind-body interaction seems - how is it any more "unintelligible" than two particles instantaneously affecting each other from opposite ends of the universe without any type of contact whatsoever?
That depends on whether you consider the ability to cause things in the physical world a "physical property" by definition. However, mental causation should not be modeled after physical causation in the sense of billiard balls bouncing off each other - the mind-brain interaction is best seen on my view as analogous to quantum entanglement (i.e. one of them changing causes the other to change correspondingly without there necessarily being physical contact).
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