Mental Causation: What? Me Worry?

Abstract

The problem of mental causation, broadly, is that of explaining how it is possible for mental events to enter into causal relations with other events, whether mental or physical. Somewhat more narrowly, it is the problem of explaining how it is possible for mental events to causally affect the (physical) behavior of physical systems. Although the problem was coeval with the mind-body problem (Descartes, arguably, invented both) and was thought to be a special difficulty of Cartesian substance dualism, it has recently re-emerged, with a vengeance, within the largely materialist/physicalist framework which most of us accept today. The problem has been under intense debate during the past dozen years or so; it has been one of the focal points of controversy in recent philosophy of mind and psychology. The outcome of the debate is often thought to have implications for some issues of fundamental importance, such as the reality of the mental, the nature of psychological explanation both in everyday life and in systematic psychology, the status of psychology as a science and its relation to the physical-biological sciences, and our conception of ourselves as deliberators and agents. To some of us, the problem of mental causation, along with the problem of the