Maverick Philosopher

Causal Interaction: A Problem for the Materialist Too!

Ed Feser has been giving Paul Churchland a well-deserved drubbing over at his blog and I should like to join in on the fun, at least in the in the first main paragraph of this post.

One of the standard objections to substance dualism in the philosophy of mind is that the substance dualist cannot account for mind-body and body-mind causal interaction. I have already quoted Dennett and Searle to this effect. Here is Paul M. Churchland repeating for the umpteenth time a standard piece of materialist boilerplate:

How is this utterly insubstantial 'thinking substance' to have any influence on ponderous matter? How can two such different things be in any sort of causal contact? (Matter and Consciousness, p. 9)

 

Churchland apparently thinks that a substance, to be 'substantial,' must be material. Churchland thereby betrays his inability to conceive of (which is not the same as to imagine) an immaterial substance.  Note that 'immaterial substance'  is not an oxymoron like 'immaterial matter.' Feser in his series of posts shows just how ignorant Churchland is of the history of philosophy, so it is no surprise that he cannot wrap his eliminativist head around the concept of substance as used by Descartes et al.   But let that pass. The issue for now is simply this: How can two things belonging to radically disjoint ontological categories be in causal contact? But here again, Churchland seems to be laboring under a false assumption, namely, that causation must involve contact between cause and effect. But why should we think that this 'billiards ball' model of causation fits every type of causation? Why must we think of causation as itself a physical process whereby a physical magnitude such as energy is transferred from one physical object to another? On regularity and  counterfactual theories of causation there is no difficulty in principle with the notion of a causal relation obtaining between two events that do not make physical contact.

Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite? That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions -- say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

Hume: Occasionalism Without God?

I wonder if I can get any of my esteemed readers to swallow the following suggestion. Ten years or so ago it came into my head that Hume's analysis of causation in terms of (i) temporal precedence, (ii) spatiotemporal contiguity, and (iii) constant conjunction can be reasonably viewed as occasionalism without God.

Ducasse on the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation

0. Herewith, some interpretative notes on Curt Ducasse, "On the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation," in Causation, eds. Sosa and Tooley, Oxford 1993, pp. 125-136.

 

1. Assuming that causality is a relation (not entirely obvious!), the question arises as to what sorts of entity can serve as its relata. Following Schopenhauer, whom he cites, Curt Ducasse holds that in strict propriety only events can be causes and effects. An event is either a change or an absence of a change. Thus a tree's losing its leaves is an event, but a tree is not. In strict propriety, it makes no sense to say that Bill was killed by a mountain lion. One has to say something like: Bill was killed by the attack of a mountain lion. In the attack the lion is the agent as Bill is the patient, but the latter is no more the effect than the former is the cause. The cause is the lion's attack, the effect is Bill's death. Some theorists distinguish between agent-causation and event-causation, but for Ducasse, there is no such thing as agent-causation: causation just is event-causation.

A Hylomorphic Solution to the Interaction Problem?

Interactionist substance dualism in the philosophy of mind is supposed to face a devastating objection, the interaction objection. In the first part of this post I will present this objection in its traditional form and suggest that it is not all that serious. In the second part, however, I take the objection seriously and consider whether Aristotelian- Thomistic hylomorphism has the resources to counter it.