Dose The Mental Cause The Physical?

Mental causation is used to refer to the causal relation between mental properties and physical behavior.Since the 1950 s,physicalism has increasingly become the mainstream of philosophy of mind.The mental causation theory advocates that mental properties have causal power,and physicalism is the mainstream framework of current philosophy of mind.Thus,the key to the issue of mental causation is to find a position for the mind in a physical world.Reductive physicalism holds that mental properties can be reduced to physical properties,so that all mental properties are physical properties.However,philosophers who support non-reductive physicalism disagree with this kind of reduction,and they argue that the special status of mental properties should be saved.In order to prove that mental reasons are excluded from mental causation under the theory of non-reductive physicalism,reductionists propose the exclusion problem.Non-reductionists have proposed a variety of solutions to resolve the exclusion problem,and compatibilism and autonomy solutions are the two most active theories in recent years.Compatibilism holds that the "non-overdetermination principle" constituting the exclusion argument does not apply to the issue of mental causation,so mental and physical causes are compatible.A type of compatibilism choose to analyze the concept of "overdetermination" by distinguishing between independent overdetermination and dependent overdetermination;and the other is represented by Karen Bennett,who constructs a possible world compatibilism using the counterfactual conditional causal model.Philosophers who hold autonomy theory construct a sophisticated version of the exclusion argument based on the original version.In his version of the argument,there is no downward causation from the high-level properties to the low-level properties.Therefore,the non-reductive physicalism can only support the claim of autonomy solution.That is,there is a causal relation between the high-level properties,thereby not only saving the causal power of the mental properties,but also avoiding the causal competition between the mental and the physical properties.I try to challenge the autonomy theory from the concept of realization and the pairing problem.However,after further analysis,it shows that these doubts cause damage to the autonomy theory.Therefore,for non-reductive physicalism,the autonomy theory is still a mental causation picture worth considering.