Mental Causation and Free Will. Derk Pereboom

Problems of Mental Causation and Free will are very similar, but aren't identical. Often people confuse free will with the ability of mental states to cause behaviour. Derk Pereboom discusses differences between Mental Causation and Free Will and how these problems relate to each other.

[MonisticIdealism]

1. There's a distinction between mental causation and free will. Agents still have a will even if it isn't free, and minds would still be the cause of various things.
2. Causal closure can be seen in a more neutral way: _every event must have a cause that is the same in type._ This preserves the intuition of closure without presupposing any ontology, like physicalism. From here it's possible to run an argument for idealism: since every event must have a cause that is the same in type, and the mental is irreducible and has causes in the universe, then the universe (along with anything else that can be interacted with) must itself be mental in type. If the universe is not mental in type then causal closure will cut off mental causation and will land any non-idealist position back into the mind-body problem.