Mental Causation, Physical Causation, and the Exclusion Problem

Common sense has it that sometimes our minds have physical effects, such as

when my thirst causes me to reach for a glass of water. The exclusion problem

challenges this commonsensical claim: my reaching for the glass already has

physical causes in my brain, which don’t seem to leave any room for distinct

mental causes. In the talk, I argue that the exclusion problem is a genuine

problem only if it uses a certain notion of causation. On that notion of causation,

however, the causation of physical events by other physical events (especially the

causation of bodily movements by brain events) turns out to be as problematic as

the causation of physical events by mental events.