Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Angrboda]

You're too cryptic for me to make out here.  What reductionist objection are you referring to?

The interaction problem, i.e. that if material substances and mental substances have entirely different natures then they cannot interact without appealing to a third substance that in turn requires a fourth and fifth intermediating substance, and so on and so forth. Similarly, if A is considered the cause of B because B habitually follows A and if only events qualify as causes, then either B follows A for no reason at all or there is an intermediate cause C...and so on and so forth.

Thank you for the clarification. I had not looked at it in that light. I think causality is another one of those thought structuring properties that Kant discussed at length. I don't know that one can get a rational handle on the nature of causality because it is a pre-rational notion. In short, we infer causality when we can build a story of physical interaction out of local events. It is an evolutionary short cut to picking out important relationships in the environment. We don't see causal relationships so much as construct them. It's a fruitful short cut, but not without its flaws. One is that it leaves us unprepared for the causality concepts in quantum entanglement and the like. Another is that it leaves us with no insight as to what we actually mean by causality at the introspective level.