Mental Causation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Mental Causation - Essay Example The problem of mental causation is one that has been described to be an intuitive one, focusing on the possibility that mental events cause physical events and physical events cause mental events. The major problem put forward by mental causation has to do with how mental events have causal effects on physical events, given the fact that the body, which is responsible for physical events is deemed to be independent of the mind. The main issue with mental causation has to do with a non-correspondence in explanation that seems to underline the understanding that the body is only physical and material. This is because if the body is only physical and material, then it should be controlled only by physical and material motivations for the body to act. For example, a person should decide to buy a certain color of a shoe because the leg has the material urge to wear that shoe. But once the problem of mental causation is brought into the argument, a new position is taken that it is possible for the mind, rather than the leg to be the source of motivation as to why a person would want to buy the said color of the shoe. This makes the problem of mental causation a highly dualistic situation, whereby the mind and the body are seen to relate together and affect each other.The whole problem of mental causation has been claimed by some to be a dualist philosophy rather than a generalized philosophy of mind. This is because as the name implies, dualism takes the position that the mind and the body are not identical.