Apologies for the tardy reply
The difficulty with prediction can in principle be put down to the complexity involved tho can't it? The level of complexity is hard to imagine, but then human brains are the most complex things we know of.Gertie wrote:
It is a problem tho, imo, because physical cause and effect which we do understand and can model and make predictions about, can theoretically account for any action we attribute to mental causation. So, for example, it seems like you can mentally will your own arm to rise (an action with causal physical correlates), but not mine, because there's no physical causal 'chain' between your brain and my arm.
It may be so, but it is not even remotely obvious to me that it is possible to understand and predict all kinds of phenomena with physical causation as a theoretical basis. If anything, to understand domains like linguistic discourse, social and economic processes, etc. many appeals have been made to psychological processes and mental causation (e.g. behavioural economics, Gricean semantics).
If you accept that there are neural correlates of every mental state, which seems to be the case as far as we can tell, and that neurons interact through physical (bio-chemical) cause and effect, then theoretically these billions of complex physical interactions must be able to fully account for even such complex, symbolic and nuanced behaviour as the examples you give.
OK, I can just change it to a coffee mug then - will and persuade away .Also, it is possible for me to mentally will your arm raising: all that is required is to be able to communicate with you and convince you to do so. It does not even matter whether I ever succeed in my lifetime to do so. All that matters is that it is possible to do so, and that this process would involve mental events (me desiring, me willing, me talking, you perceiving what I said, you willing to act).
You can potentially mentally 'cause' me to raise my arm by creating physical causal links. By speaking, creating disturbances in the air which physically affect my ear drum, which physically affects my aural systems, which physically affect my neural systems, which physically affect my motor systems to my arm. A physical causal 'chain' which correlates with the mental states which are involved in part of that process, but not all.
You can't do that with a coffee cup because a coffee cup doesn't have the necessary kit to create the physical causal chain.
If it was the other way around, that mental states alone could lift coffee cups (with no physical causal chain involved), and just some causal mental states had physical correlates, then we'd naturally wonder if the physical correlates were redundant, wouldn't we?Of course, you can say that any explanatory data involving mental entities could be reduced to more basic explanatory data involving only physical entities, but how is this claim justified? Is it self-evident in a way I don't see, or is it some sort of ubiquitous physicalist bias that tempts us to assume so?
As it is we have the standard model, we have an observed system of stuff and how it works, which theoretically accounts for all causation, of minded and non-minded processes. So it's the mental causation apparently operating in only some systems which looks like the anomaly. Added to which we have no idea about how it could work, if it does. I think that explains the 'bias'.
Not sure what you mean?Gertie wrote:
If it's true, as it seems, that physical causation can fully account for all our actions, then mental causation looks redundant. The problem of 'over-determinism'.
Indeed, over-determination is more of an issue, but my consideration extends only to assuming that mind/body interaction is a showstopper in itself.
My own view is that the relationship between the mental and physical is something we're struggling to get a handle on, conceptually or scientifically, at the moment at least. Observations like the correlation between mental states and neural states seem like a big clue, but raise more questions than they answer.