ABSTRACT
Resolving the Ghost in the Mirror: The Structure of Authentic Mental Causation in a Physical World
Jessica Heineman-Pieper
In its global form, the "problem" of mental causation raises the specter of essential incompatibilities between mind and world, and usually leads theorists either to respond to the pull of (their theories of) the material world by emaciating the causal power of the mind, or else to reconcile themselves to an enduring mystery regarding the mind's connections to physical reality. However, rather than reflecting an incompatibility of real causal structures, the global problem of mental causation instead arises only from the lack of fit between two different views of ourselves Ð one through the lens of science, and the other through an experientially immediate personal perspective. This paper aims to correct prevalent misconceptions responsible for this apparent tension and to outline the causal structure of genuine regulatory agency in the world. A complementary account of meaning, which is necessary for elucidating how we can understand, choose and be guided by ideals 'all the way up' to the level of our highest regulatory ideals, will be touched on briefly as time allows. Unlike the tensions between notions of physical causality and of a 'mysterious' (obscurely causal) mental realm, which were based on conceptual error, the 'meaning-based' and the 'causal' viewpoints are indeed two distinct perspectives on our personal existence in the world. On my account, it turns out that there are striking and non-accidental isomorphisms between these two (meaning-based and causal) perspectives: They are two ineliminable and systematic perspectives on the same functional (human) systems in the world.