Mind, Causality, and Ur-monism*

Mental events are sometimes described as if they are causal products of physical events. The following are examples of prima facia causal reports about familiar mental events: (1) I felt pain from stabbing my finger with a knife. (2) I was surprised by the ringing sound. (3) I was embarrassed by his behavior Seemingly, in these statements, the causes of the mental events are uniquely and definitely referred to. It also seems that, in all of these statements, the causes are physical or quasi-physical matters or events, while the effects are all mental. Thus the causal theory of perception (or the causal theory of consciousness in general) is easily accepted as the theoretical reconstruction of these ordinary ways of speech. However, the causality here supposed to exist is called into question in some theoretical context. One of the main reasons to deny it is based on the doubt that we do not have any authorized medium to causally correlate the phenomena or events which are described in terms of physical predicates such as "stabbing my finger", "the ringing sound", .... with the phenomena or events which are described in terms of mental predicates such as "feel pain", "was surprised", or "was embarras sed". Take the case of the report "I was surprised by the sound". We often connect "the sound" and "my surprise" causally, and it is assumed that some scientific knowledge such as optics and neurophysiology will provide the causal detail to bridge the gap between the sound and my surprise (cf. Figure 1 below). Serious doubt regarding this causality will be focused on the both edges of the causal sequence. Firstly why and how can "the sound" be the cause_??_ There is a suspi