Mental Causation: Kim's Dilemma

Abstract

The crucial problems to which all theories of mind, not only the physicalistic, have to plausibly answer in order to successfully solve the mind-body problem are those that are related to causation. The problem of causal exclusion is particularly closely connected with physicalism, which under the assumption that every physical event also has a physical cause, threatens to exclude mental events from causal explanations. It questions thereby the causal efficacy of mental properties, which poses a serious problem for those who are looking for such answers to the question of the relation between mind and body that preserve physicalism as well as the special nature of the mental. Some physicalists have hoped that the mind-body problem might be solved with the help of supervenience but, in Kim's opinion, they are wrong. Kim namely argues that under the assumption of supervenience we end up with a dilemma whose horns, for such supervenient physicalists, do not represent a true alternative at all.