more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
If we regard a Volvo car as a higher-level entity with its own independent reality, something distinct from its constituents (arranged in particular ways and variously connected to other things), we render mysterious how Volvos could do anything at all.
Gist of Idea
If a car is a higher-level entity, distinct from its parts, how could it ever do anything?
Source
John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 02.3)
Book Ref
Heil,John: 'From an Ontological Point of View' [OUP 2005], p.20
A Reaction
This seems to me perhaps the key reason why we have to be reductionists. The so-called 'bridge laws' from mind to brain are not just needed to explain the mind, they are also essential to show how a mind would cause behaviour.
| 14042 | The soul cannot be incorporeal, because then it could neither act nor be acted upon [Epicurus] |
| 20816 | A body is required for anything to have causal relations [Zeno of Citium, by Cicero] |
| 3941 | How can that which is unthinking be a cause of thought? [Berkeley] |
| 22100 | Experienced time means no two mental moments are ever alike [Bergson] |
| 6383 | Cause unites our picture of the universe; without it, mental and physical will separate [Davidson] |
| 6620 | Davidson sees identity as between events, not states, since they are related in causation [Davidson, by Lowe] |
| 3438 | Reductionists deny new causal powers at the higher level [Kim] |
| 3440 | Without reductionism, mental causation is baffling [Kim] |
| 7856 | It is absurd to think that physical effects are caused twice, so conscious causes must be physical [Papineau] |
| 4073 | Overdetermination occurs if two events cause an effect, when each would have caused it alone [Crane] |
| 7012 | If a car is a higher-level entity, distinct from its parts, how could it ever do anything? [Heil] |
| 4596 | The appeal of the identity theory is its simplicity, and its solution to the mental causation problem [Heil] |
| 2535 | The main argument for physicalism is its simple account of causation [Sturgeon] |