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Token Monism, Event Dualism and Overdetermination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
The argument from causal overdetermination (‘the CO-argument’) is considered to be the shortest route to token monism. It only assumes that:
1. Efficacy: Mental events are causes of physical events.
2. Closure: Every physical event has a sufficient physical cause (if it has any sufficient cause).
3. Exclusion: Systematic Causal Overdetermination (CO) is impossible: if an event x is a sufficient cause of an event y then no event x* distinct from x is a cause of y.
4. Identity: Therefore, mental events are physical events.
Exclusion does not deny the possibility of two gunmen that fi re at a victim at the same time. But event-dualism is like a systematic fi ringsquad case — whenever I want to raise my arm, my arm is raised, and that is intolerable.
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