Most philosophers nowadays repudiate souls, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away.
The general form of the problem of mental causation is the problem of how the mind can produce causal effects on the physical world.
We have been treating the problem of mental causation as though it were a problem in applied metaphysics.
First, it substitutes values of explanatory variables with one lag, using time lag to overcome the problem of reciprocal causation.
The self-knowledge problem aforementioned, and the problem of "wide causation" (Fodor (1987), Kim (1995)), have also been used to motivate narrow content.
Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how an immaterial mind, a soul, could interact with the body.
This version of the problem of mental causation has appeared in various guises: Malcolm 1968 provides an early statement, subsequently refined in Kim 1989, 1993c, 1998, 2005.
This problem, which has different facets (see Kim 1998 for a discussion of the several facets of the problem of mental causation), turned out to be a difficult problem for Descartes' ontological dualism.
Understandably, some commentators have worried about the problem of deviant causation, and whether Locke has an answer to it (e.g., Lowe 1995: 122 123; Yaffe 2000: 104; Lowe 2005: 141 147).
(Of course, this response does not apply to those philosophers who take the view that qualia are irreducible, non-physical entities. However, these philosophers have other severe problems of their own. In particular, they face the problem of phenomenal causation. Given the causal closure of the physical, how can qualia make any difference? For more here, see Tye 1995, Chalmers 1996).
