Mental causation

In philosophy, mental causation refers to the hypothetical possibility that the mind or mental acts can influence physical events.

A recent monograph on this subject proposes the "canonical" formulation of the problem of mental causation:
 * Premise 1: Mental events cause physical events.
 * Premise 2: The realm of the physical is causally complete. (All physical events have sufficient causes that are other physical events.)
 * Premise 3: Mental events are not identical with physical events.
 * Premise 4: Physical events are not pervasively or systematically causally overdetermined. (That is, a physical event only very rarely might have two or more causes. This point cannot be established by appeal to experiment - it is an hypothesis.)

It is the problem of mental causation that it seems impossible that all four of these premises can hold simultaneously. So, for instance, if a mental event invariably could cause a physical event, and yet every physical event has a physical cause, then either Premise 3 is false, or Premise 4 is false.

Challenging the concept of causality
There are other approaches to this topic. One involves a more careful examination of what is meant by causality. The proposal is made that the usual cause-effect intuition of "cause" is inadequate to the study of mental events.

For example, another description of this issue is by Northoff: These observations suggest the possibility that "mental causation" and neurology inhabit different realms, and it is confusion to try to explain "mental causation" using a neurological approach that by its very nature excludes the effects of observation upon what is observed.

Complementarity
In quantum mechanics the notion of complementarity arises, that is, different aspects of a description that are mutually exclusive. Bohr (1922 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics) suggested complementarity is useful outside of quantum theory. In asking whether one can perform an action, one is both observer and subject, which is posited to be an untenable situation: one must adopt one or the other stance. To quote Niels Bohr: These observations are echoed by experimentalists studying brain function:

Generalizations of feedback
Freeman introduces the replacement of "causality" by what he calls "circular causality" to "allow for the contribution of self-organizing dynamics", the "formation of macroscopic population dynamics that shapes the patterns of activity of the contributing individuals", applicable to "interactions between neurons and neural masses...and between the behaving animal and its environment": Freeman's usage for the term circular causality appears akin to the views of Kelso, and is more radical than the common use of this term, which refers to causality in a system with feedback. A more specific use of this term is as follows: