Last Friday the SMU philosophy of mind reading group read Sydney Shoemaker’s “Realization and Mental Causation” (in Gillet and Loewer (eds.) Physicalism and Its Discontents, reprinted in the 2nd edition of Shoemaker’s collection Identity, Cause, and Mind (2003). I am something of a fan of Shoemaker’s work, having written about and followed his work on phenomenal content very closely. I had not read his more metaphysical work in the philosophy of mind as carefully. But I found this paper of Shoemaker’s to be insightful in the ways that characterize the rest of his work.

According to Shoemaker, what it is for a property X to realize a property Y is for the conditional powers bestowed by Y to be a a subset of the conditional powers bestowed by X. A conditional power of a thing is one that, together with other properties the thing has, will determine a power simpliciter.

In the case of multiple realizability, “the conditional powers bestowed by it [the realized property] will be a proper subset of the sets bestowed by each of the realizer properties.”

There are at least three ways of understanding this view, and it was not clear to me which was Shoemaker’s intended view. It is quite possible that a more careful reading might eliminate my uncertainty about which view was intended. But I think all three views may in fact have difficulties, so that my worries about Shoemaker’s proposal might be expressed as a dilemma.

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I’ve been thinking about the following hypothesis:

(Hype) In terms of their colors, fire hydrants seem to Laverne the way grass seems to Shirley.

According to Hype, while things seem to Laverne the way they seem to us, the way things seem are for Shirley systematically inverted. According to Gibbons, this hypothesis entails a contradiction and isn’t a genuine possibility.

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As David Chalmers pointed out in his cool summary presentation at the end of the Time & Consciousness Conference in Sydney last month (see here and also Dave’s blog here), 3 issues need to be distinguished when thinking about the connection between temporal experiences and the metaphysics of time:

i) A-PROPERTIES OF WORLDLY EVENTS: do the events we perceive actually have A-properties (namely, can such events be present, past, or future? Is there such a thing as temporal passage?)?

ii) REPRESENTED A-PROPERTIES: do our experiences of worldly events represent them as having A-properties? (In particular, are events represented in experience as being present? Is temporal passage represented in experience?)

iii) A-PROPERTIES OF EXPERIENCES: do our experiences have A-properties? Or do they present themselves as having A-properties? (In particular, do experience feel to be present when we introspect them?).

Dave nicely spelt out some of the relations between these three issues. Here I’m interested in (ii) in connection with (i). Also, I’ll try to leave (iii) aside, if possible. There is a familiar argument going from how experience represents the world to the A-theory of time—Craig Callender calls it the “Argument from Experience”. Presumably, the argument (a fairly detailed version of it, that is) goes something like this:

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In their recent Nous piece “The Non-Existence of Determinables: Or, A World of Absolute Determinates as a Default Hypothesis,” Carl Gillett and Bradley Rives argue, you guessed it, that there are no determinables in the world, and that determinates get us all we need in our ontologies. Aside from its metaphysical importance, this would be relevant to mental causation debates, because it would imply that Yablo-like views, according to which mental properties are determinables, would not get off the ground. What follows is a puzzle for the Gillett/Rives view…

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I want to raise a different sort of worry about Pereboom’s view in “Robust Nonreductive Materialism” than has been discussed by Robert and Philippe. The concern arises from roughly the second half of that paper, where he discusses multiple realizability and develops the idea that mental states of a particular type might all have in common an abstract intrinsic structure.

Whether or not mental properties are identified with functional properties, it at least seems plausible that for at least most mental state types M, there is some functional role R such that necessarily if something is an instance of M then it occupies role R. Let’s call this “principle F”. This is not, of course, a sufficient condition for functionalism, since one can accept the claim without identifying M with R. One might be an identity theorist and identify M with the realizer of R, for example. And in the face of multiple realizability, one might opt for species-specific reductions.

How are we to understand Pereboom’s position with regard to principle F? As far as I can tell, Pereboom says nothing to suggest that he would reject the principle. And his sensitivity to the possibility of multiple realizability suggests he may accept principle F. For it is not clear when we would take ourselves to have encountered an example of multiple realizability, except when we find a creature that has states that occupy the functional roles associated with various types of mental states, but without being in the physical states that realize those functional roles in us.
So let us suppose that Pereboom accepts principle F. (If he doesn’t accept the principle, I still think some of the below might give reason for why one should). …..

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On one of a string of one-hundred and five degree days, at the end of a summer that has seen only a thimbleful of rain in Dallas, one might find oneself wondering whether Gore and his army of scientists are right—do we have ten more years? Is the earth’s greenhouse ahead of schedule, making Texas even more uninhabitable than it already is?

Or, one might find oneself wondering whether there is any truth to the claim that there are irreducible mental causal powers despite the fact that mental states are apparently constituted by physical states….

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