12]Mind–body interaction and mental causation [edit]
Philosophers David L. Robb and John H. Heil introduce mental causation in terms of the mind–body problem of interaction:
Mind–body interaction has a central place in our pre-theoretic conception of agency... Indeed, mental causation often figures explicitly in formulations of the mind–body problem.... Some philosophers... insist that the very notion of psychological explanation turns on the intelligibility of mental causation. If your mind and its states, such as your beliefs and desires, were causally isolated from your bodily behavior, then what goes on in your mind could not explain what you do... If psychological explanation goes, so do the closely related notions of agency and moral responsibility... Clearly, a good deal rides on a satisfactory solution to the problem of mental causation [and] there is more than one way in which puzzles about the mind's "causal relevance" to behavior (and to the physical world more generally) can arise.
[René Descartes] set the agenda for subsequent discussions of the mind–body relation. According to Descartes, minds and bodies are distinct kinds of substance. Bodies, he held, are spatially extended substances, incapable of feeling or thought; minds, in contrast, are unextended, thinking, feeling substances... If minds and bodies are radically different kinds of substance, however, it is not easy to see how they could causally interact... Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia puts it forcefully to him in a 1643 letter… how the human soul can determine the movement of the animal spirits in the body so as to perform voluntary acts—being as it is merely a conscious substance. For the determination of movement seems always to come about from the moving body's being propelled—to depend on the kind of impulse it gets from what sets it in motion, or again, on the nature and shape of this latter thing's surface. Now the first two conditions involve contact, and the third involves that the impelling thing has extension; but you utterly exclude extension from your notion of soul, and contact seems to me incompatible with a thing's being immaterial...
Elizabeth is expressing the prevailing mechanistic view as to how causation of bodies works... Causal relations countenanced by contemporary physics can take several forms, not all of which are of the push–pull variety.[13]— David Robb and John Heil, "Mental Causation" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Contemporary neurophilosopher, Georg Northoff suggests that mental causation is compatible with classical formal and final causality.[14]
Biologist, theoretical neuroscientist and philosopher, Walter J. Freeman, suggests that explaining mind–body interaction in terms of "circular causation" is more relevant than linear causation.[15]
In neuroscience, much has been learned about correlations between brain activity and subjective, conscious experiences. Many suggest that neuroscience will ultimately explain consciousness: "...consciousness is a biological process that will eventually be explained in terms of molecular signaling pathways used by interacting populations of nerve cells..."[16] However, this view has been criticized because consciousness has yet to be shown to be a process,[17] and the "hard problem" of relating consciousness directly to brain activity remains elusive.[18]