John Campbell (UC Berkeley) "The Mind-Body Problem in Psychiatry"

Abstract: This paper proposes a way of reframing the mind-body problem.  Insofar as it is explicitly formulated, the mind-body problem is usually thought of in terms of some belief in the unity and comprehensiveness of science:  the idea is that mentalistic phenomena must be covered by science, and that science must be thought of as unified. Then the main options are thought to be some kind of physicalist reduction of the mental, or some (e.g. panpsychist) expansion of fundamental science to accommodate the mental.

When it’s set up in this way, the mind-body problem faces some obvious lines of dismissal.  One is to say that the mental is not properly thought of as an object of scientific study at all.  The other is to say that there can be no a priori presumption of the unity of science; perhaps science is pluralistic, even if there are sciences of the mind.

These ways of framing the mind-body problem and the lead responses to it seem to me to miss the inescapable problem:  what to make of mind-body causation.  We know how to interpret talk about physical causation of the mental, or mental causation of the physical, in terms counterfactuals about what would have happened under interventions.  But we also seem to need a conception of cause in terms of processes and mechanisms. And while we can make sense of the idea of specifically mental processes, and we can make sense of idea of specifically physical processes, we have no way of explaining what might be meant by physical-mental causal processes.

This issue comes up anyway, but it comes up with particular force in psychiatry, where we need to be able to talk in terms of physical-mental causal processes.  And the problem is not addressed by either panpsychist dualism or reductionist identities. We need a third way of thinking about causal processes.