4 - Realization and Mental Causation

Summary

The problem of mental causation is at the heart of the mind-body problem. And for physicalist or materialist views of mind, the key to solving the problem of mental causation is getting a satisfactory understanding of how the mental is realized in the physical. Recent discussions of physicalism have focused on the notion of supervenience; but I think that the focus should instead be on the notion of realization. Supervenience comes in a variety of forms – and the form we need to understand, in order to understand mental causation, is that in which the properties in the supervenience base can be said to realize the properties that supervene on them. Any physicalist theory, whether or not it is a functionalist theory, needs to maintain that the mental is realized in the physical, and so needs an account of realization. But my main focus will be on the realization of functional properties.

I take as my point of departure a recent paper by George Bealer that attempts to show that functionalist accounts of mind cannot give a satisfactory account of self-consciousness. Although Bealer's primary target is functionalism, he takes his arguments to establish a version of property dualism. They are supposed to show that mental properties are “first-order properties,” not the higher-order properties functionalists take them to be. And because Bealer thinks that there are decisive reasons for rejecting type physicalism, he thinks that the only way for mental properties to be first order is for them to be nonphysical.