Error Theorist’s Reviews > Neither Brain Nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory > Status Update

On my second read through, I'm noticing some ambiguity in the author's chapter on causation. He never explicitly endorses determinism or indeterminism, so his view on where exactly the causal nexus ends for particular mental events is obscure. Also, he gestures to any particular causal event being identified for pragmatic reasons. But does this apply to the mental causal nexus? I assume yes, but he never clarifies.

I may be jumping the gun (probably so), but it seems like the causal nexus can easily create problems if extended to outside the body. In social interactions, does another person's causal nexus become 'one' with mine, thus creating 1 consciousness? Or do we both become engrossed in one causal nexus and somehow become 2 modes of 1 consciousness? The first option seems to entail a hegelean world-spirit.

Rockwell shifts his focus to the notion of causation motivating the cartesian materialist view. An atomistic notion of causation in which we can always isolate a ceteris paribus statement has been refuted by JS Mill (according to Rockwell).

Instead, we ought to view ceteris paribus statements as pragmatic causation accounts needed for different scientific discourses.

Rockwell so far has done a good job at exposing the brain-body dualism that still plagues a lot of modern philosophy of mind. An early rebuttal to such a dualism is accepting that the mind is also hormonal as well as neural.