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Epiphenomenalism is a position in the philosophy of mind on the mind–body problem.It holds that subjective mental events are completely dependent for their existence on corresponding physical and biochemical events within the human body, but do not themselves influence physical events.
In philosophy, events are objects in time or instantiations of properties in objects. On some views, only changes in the form of acquiring or losing a property can constitute events, like the lawn's becoming dry. [1] According to others, there are also events that involve nothing but the retaining of a property, e.g. the lawn's staying wet.
Weaker forms of physical causal closure are synonymous with the causal completeness, [6] the notion that "Every physical effect that has a sufficient cause has a sufficient physical cause." [5] That is, weaker forms allow that in addition to physical causes, there may be other kinds of causes for physical events.
Universal causation is the proposition that everything in the universe has a cause and is thus an effect of that cause. This means that if a given event occurs, then this is the result of a previous, related event. [1] If an object is in a certain state, then it is in that state as a result of another object interacting with it previously.
Retrocausality, or backwards causation, is a concept of cause and effect in which an effect precedes its cause in time and so a later event affects an earlier one. [1] [2] In quantum physics, the distinction between cause and effect is not made at the most fundamental level and so time-symmetric systems can be viewed as causal or retrocausal.
Dualists either, like Descartes, avoid the problem by considering it impossible for a non-physical mind to conceive the relationship that it has with the physical, and so impossible to explain philosophically, or assert that the questioner has made the fundamental mistake of thinking that the distinction between the physical and the non ...
Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that, although the world is constituted of just one kind of substance—the physical kind—there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties. In other words, it is the view that non-physical, mental properties (such as ...
Indeterminism is the idea that events (or certain events, or events of certain types) are not caused, or are not caused deterministically. It is the opposite of determinism and related to chance. It is highly relevant to the philosophical problem of free will, particularly in the form of metaphysical libertarianism.