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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Mental Causation
The Problem of Mental Causation has been with us at least since René Descartes claimed that mind and body are separate substances. If the body is only physical and material, how can a non-physical and immaterial mind possibly act on the body. More importantly, how can a "mental" action or event in the mind be the cause of a physical action by the body?

Mental causation is a specific case of the more general problem of downward causation, for example the downward control of the motions of a cell's atoms and molecules by supervening biological macromolecules. Is the molecular biology of a cell reducible to the laws governing the motions of its component molecules, or are there emergent laws governing motions at the cellular level, the organ level, the organism level, and so on up to the mental level?

Can emergent properties or laws at the higher levels of a physical-chemical-based biological system prevent those higher levels from being reduced to the properties and laws of the base physical level?

The idea of something like downward causation was implicit in the work of "emergentists" like John Stuart Mill, George Henry Lewes, C. Lloyd Morgan, Samuel Alexander, and C. D. Broad

Although Mill did not use the term "emergent," he made the concept clear enough:

The chemical combination of two substances produces, as is well known, a third substance with properties different from those of either of the two substances separately, or of both of them taken together. Not a trace of the properties of hydrogen or of oxygen is observable in those of their compound, water.

Lewes coined the term "emergent" in 1875:

Although each effect is the resultant of its components, the product of its factors, we cannot always trace the steps of the process, so as to see in the product the mode of operation of each factor. In the latter case, I propose to call the effect an emergent. It arises out of the combined agencies, but in a form which does not display the agents in action.

In his 1920 book Space, Time, and Deity Samuel Alexander cited Lloyd Morgan as the source of emergentism, and wrote:

Mind is, according to our interpretation of the facts, an 'emergent' from life, and life an emergent from a lower physico-chemical level of existence.

Later, in his 1922 Gifford Lectures and 1923 book Emergent Evolution, Lloyd Morgan defined emergent evolution and introduced the related "top-down" concept of hierarchical supervenience:

...in the physical world emergence is no less exemplified in the advent of each new kind of atom, and of each new kind of molecule. It is beyond the wit of man to number the instances of emergence. But if nothing new emerge - if there be only regrouping of pre-existing events and nothing more - then there is no emergent evolution.

Under emergent evolution there is progressive development of stuff which becomes new stuff in virtue of the higher status to which it has become raised under some supervenient kind of substantial gotogetherness.

Brian McLaughlin dubbed these thinkers the "British Emergentists." He developed an "idealized" version of British Emergentism and synthesisized what most of these thinkers had in common into a coherent and representative picture. He says:

British Emergentism maintains that everything is made of matter: There are, for example, no Cartesian souls, or entelechies, vital elan, or the like. And it holds that matter is grainy, rather than continuous; indeed, that it bottoms-out into elementary material particles, atoms or more fundamental particles...Moreover, on its view, nothing happens, no change occurs, without some motion of elementary particles. And all motion is to the beat of the laws of mechanics.

According to British Emergentism, there is a hierarchy of levels of organizational complexity of material particles that includes, in ascending order, the strictly physical, the chemical, the biological, and the psychological level. There are certain kinds of material substances specific to each level. And the kinds of each level are wholly composed of kinds of lower levels, ultimately of kinds of elementary material particles. Moreover, there are certain properties specific to the kinds of substances of a given level. These are the "special properties" of matter...

What is especially striking about British Emergentism, however, is its view about the causal structure of reality. I turn to that view in the following two paragraphs.

British Emergentism maintains that some special science kinds from each special science can be wholly composed of types of structures of material particles that endow the kinds in question with fundamental causal powers. Subtleties aside, the powers in question "emerge" from the types of structures in question...

Now, the exercise of the causal powers in question will involve the production of movements of various kinds. Indeed, Emergentism maintains that special kinds, in virtue of possessing certain types of minute internal structures, have the power to influence motion. And here is the striking point: They endow the kinds with the power to influence motion in ways unanticipated by laws governing less complex kinds and conditions concerning the arrangements of particles. Emergentism is committed to the nomological possibility of what has been called "downward causation".

Minute internal (information-processing) structures that control the motions and arrangements of the component particles is the signature aspect of British Emergentism, one that we have demonstrated with ribosomal control of the twenty kinds of amino acids in living systems and ion channel control over the ions two and three at a time in the brain's neural network.

Vitalists like Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch also implicitly supported the idea of emergent or non-physical causes, without which they thought that life and mind could not have emerged from physical matter, and without which mind could not be a causal force in the world.

The Mind-Brain Identity Theory
In the mid-twentieth century a number of philosophers proposed a monistic and physicalistic solution to the mind-body problem by simply identifying the mind and brain as one physical thing, subject to the normal laws of physics.

Holistic critics attacked this view as reducing the mind to the brain, leaving the mind merely an epiphenomenon or illusion. This fit well into the reductionist program of the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle, who promoted the idea of the Unity of Science. All events should be reducible to physical events, and in particular, all explanations should be traceable to causes originating in the physical material components of the universe.

The first philosophers to argue for an identity of mind (or consciousness) and brain include Ullin T. Place (1956), Herbert Feigl, and J.J.C.Smart (1959).

Place explicitly describes "consciousness as a brain process," specifically as "patterns" of brain activity. He does not trivialize this identity as a succession of individual "mental events and physical events" in some kind of causal chain. He compares this identity to the idea that "lightning is a motion of electrical charges."

Herbert Feigl's work was independent of Place's, but he said that the fundamental idea had been held by many earlier materialist (monist) thinkers. He thought it was stated clearly by Vienna Circle philosopher Rudolf Carnap in 1925. Feigl describes his own thesis:

The identity thesis which I wish to clarify and to defend asserts that the states of direct experience which conscious beings "live through" and those which we confidently ascribe to some of the higher animals, are identical with certain (presumably configurational) aspects of the neural processes in these organisms.

J.J.C.Smart clarified and extended the identity theory of his colleague U.T.Place

When I say that a sensation is a brain process or that lightning is an electric discharge, I am using "is" in the sense of strict identity. (Just as in the — in this case necessary — proposition "7 is identical with the smallest prime number greater than 5.") When I say that a sensation is a brain process or that lightning is an electric dis- charge I do not mean just that the sensation is somehow spatially or temporally continuous with the brain process or that the lightning is just spatially or temporally continuous with the discharge.

Smart is a strong materialist. He says "A man is a vast arrangement of physical particles, but there are not, over and above this, sensations or states of consciousness." (ibid.) Compare Anthony Cashmore, who says we are "just a bag of chemicals."

In the 1960's the neuroscientist Roger Sperry claimed that higher levels in a hierarchy could act causally on the base level. He cited a wheel rolling downhill as an example of what he called "downward causal control." The atoms and molecules are caught up and overpowered by the higher properties of the whole. Sperry compared the rolling wheel to an ongoing brain process or a progressing train of thought in which the overall properties of the brain process, as a coherent organizational entity, determine the timing and spacing of the firing patterns within its neural infrastructure. A few years later (1974), Donald Campbell coined the phrase "downward causation."

The locus classicus of recent discussions of mental causation is Donald Davidson's 1970 essay "Mental Events," which was revisited in his 1993 essay, "Thinking Causes," published together with 15 critical essays on Davidson's work in the 1993 book Mental Causation, edited by John Heil and Alfred Mele.

Davidson claimed three things:

  1. That mental events are causally related to physical events
  2. That causal relations are normally backed by strict (deterministic) laws
  3. But that there are no such strict laws for mental events acting on physical events

Davidson's goal is to deny the reducibility of mental events to physical events in the lower levels, even to deny the physicist's claim that the motions of the atoms and molecules at the lowest level are causally determinative of everything that happens at higher levels.

Information is neither matter nor energy. It is sometimes embodied in matter and sometimes communicated as pure energy. It is the scientific basis for an immaterial, causally open, non-physical mind that can nevertheless affect the physical world. Information is the
modern spirit.
Jaegwon Kim says that Davidson's goal of "non-reductive physicalism" is simply not possible. The physical world is "causally closed," says Kim:
what options are there if we set aside the physicalist picture? Leaving physicalism behind is to abandon ontological physicalism, the view that bits of matter and their aggregates in space-time exhaust the contents of the world. This means that one would be embracing an ontology that posits entities other than material substances — that is, immaterial minds, or souls, outside physical space, with immaterial, nonphysical properties.

Kim diagrams Davidson's view of mental events supervening on physical events, to illustrate his claim that having both mental and physical causes would be "overdetermination" and thus one is redundant and must be excluded.

M1   M2
supervenes
on
  supervenes
on
P1 - causes - P2
By causal closure of the physical world, Kim says it is the mental events that are superfluous and must go. (ibid., pp.44-45)

This view of the physical and biological world as made up of isolatable and discrete events is too simplistic. A physical "event" is subjectively singled out by a human observer from a practically infinite number of objective physical events at the atomic and molecular level. Its "cause" is arbitrarily abstracted from complex processes with enormous numbers of possible causes. A mental event is embedded in a biological system beyond "astronomical" complexity.

Recap of the Problem of Mental Causation according to Kim.
While the original mind-body problem was simply the puzzle of how an immaterial mind could cause an material body to move, lately the problem of mental causation has been recast as the logical resolution of one basic premise and a conclusion, which we might call the standard argument against mental causation:
  1. The only causes are physical causes. (These causes need not be deterministic. An indeterministic quantum statistical event gives us the probabilities for subsequent events, "causing" them in a way that is not pre-determined.)
  2. Therefore, mental events cannot cause physical events.

The Emergence of Life from Matter and Mind from Life.
According to British Emergentism, there is a hierarchy of levels of organizational complexity of material particles that includes, in ascending order, the strictly physical, the chemical, the biological, and the psychological level. As we have seen, upper hierarchical levels have the power to influence motion in ways unanticipated by laws governing less complex kinds and conditions concerning the arrangements of particles. Emergentism is committed to the nomological possibility of what has been called "downward causation," control by an upper level of the component particles of the lower levels. We can now demonstrate that the Emergentists' hypothesis is actually realized in biological systems.

The informational analysis of non-reductive physicalism must show exactly how information does not move in the upward direction between hierarchical levels (fundamentally because noise in the lower level makes motions incoherent), but that information does move down as the higher-level information-processing system uses it to manipulate individual physical particles (maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio in the upper level), as the British empiricists imagined.

Quantum Randomness Blocks "Bottom-Up" Causation,
Information-Processing Structures Enable Downward Causation

We shall now see that quantum and thermal noise breaks any upwardly causal deterministic chains between the physics of the atomic and molecular level and the biophysics of the organic world. It also breaks any upward deterministic chains between the neurobiological brain and the mind, replacing them with a statistical causality that provides us with what William James called “some looseness in the joints.”

We present two processes that exhibit randomness in the component atoms and molecules, thus blocking any organized upward influences. The first is present in every biological cell. The other is critically important in the operation of neurons. The first separates the living from the simply material. The latter is at the mind/brain boundary.

Ribosomes Build Hemoglobin from Randomly Moving Amino Acids (Life from Matter)

The twenty amino acids move about randomly in a cell, the consequence of thermal and quantum noise. Attached to them are tiny bits of transfer RNA, each with three letters of the genetic code that identify them. They bump randomly into the ribosome, which may be moving along a sequence of the genetic code written in messenger RNA sent from the cell nucleus, which has noticed that more of a specific protein or enzyme is needed. This random motion shows us that no organized or coherent information is present in the unattached tRNAs that could cause something from the bottom up to emerge at a higher level.

[Look at the animation of mRNA translation] Notice the absurdity of the idea that the random motions of the transfer RNA molecules (green in the video at right), each holding a single amino acid (red), are carrying pre-determined information of where they belong in the protein.

It is the information processing of the higher-level ribosome that is in control. As the ribosome moves along the string of mRNA, it reads the next three-letter codon and waits for a tRNA with the matching anti-codon to collide randomly. With over 60 codons for the 20 amino acids, it might be some time before the desired amino acid shows up. Note that it is the high speed of random motions that allows this process to proceed rapidly. Consider the case of hemoglobin.

When a ribosome assembles 330 amino acids in four symmetric polypeptide chains (globins), each globin traps an iron atom in a heme group at the center to form the hemoglobin protein. This is downward causal control of the amino acids, the heme groups, and the iron atoms by the ribosome. The ribosome is an example of Erwin Schrödinger's emergent "order out of order," life "feeding on the negative entropy" of digested food.

When 200 million of the 25 trillion red blood cells in the human body die each second, 100 million new hemoglobins must be assembled in each of 200 million new blood cells . With the order of a few thousand bytes of information in each hemoglobin, this is 10 thousand x 100 million x 200 million = 2 x 1020 bits of information per second, a million times more information processing than today's fastest computer CPU.

The ribosome is an information-processing biological system that has emerged from the lower level of chemistry and physics to exert downward causation on the atomic and molecular components needed to manufacture hemoglobin.

Ion Pumps in Neurons Organize Randomly Moving Individual Atoms (Mind from Life)

When a single neuron fires, the active potential rapidly changes the concentration of sodium (Na+) ions inside the cell and potassium (K+) ions outside the cell. Within milliseconds, thousands of sodium-potassium ion transporters in the thin lipid bilayer of the cell wall must move billions of those ions, two or three at a time between inside and outside the cell wall, to get the neuron ready to fire again.

All the individual ions, atoms, and molecules in the cell are moving rapidly in random directions. The indeterministic motions of the ions randomly move some near the pump opening, where quantum collaborative forces can capture them in a lock-and-key structure. The idea that the physical/chemical base level contains enough information in the motion of its atoms and molecules to cause and completely explain the operations of the higher levels of life and mind is simply absurd.

The emergent biological machinery of a sodium-potassium pump exerts downward causation on the ions, powered by ATP energy carriers (feeding on negative entropy).

The sodium-potassium pump in our neurons is as close to a Maxwell's Demon as anything we are ever likely to see.

When many motor neurons fire, innnervating excitatory post-synaptic potentials (EPSPs) that travel down through the thalamus and the spinal cord where they cause muscles to contract, that is as literal as downward causation gets between the mind and the body. When the emergent mind decides to move the body, mental causation is realized as downward causation.

The Information Solution to the Problem of Mental Causation.
Information philosophy understands mental events as immaterial thoughts, which are normally only unrealized possibilities for action. Thoughts are embodied in the neural information structures of the brain, where they are stored along with memories of past experience. As such, they are physical and are temporarily even material, in some sense.

But when they are transferred (communicated) to other parts of the brain, out to other minds, or for storage in the external environment, thoughts are converted from a material substrate to various forms of energy. Temporarily, they are quite non-material, as philosophers for centuries have imagined thoughts in an immaterial mind might be. Once stored, they are again embodied in matter.

Of course, thoughts or ideas can be unpredictably altered before storage, by noise in the communication. They can also be altered randomly by irreducibly indeterministic errors in the retrieval of the information. Here lies the basis for creative mistakes, to be evaluated by a process of intelligent selection. (As Augustine noted, the Latin intelligere means "to select.")

The information solution to the mind-body problem can be interpreted as providing a non-reductive physical interpretation of mind. This model of mind supervenes on the neural brain structures that embody the information (while it is being stored). But the intellectual content of the information is not the resultant of whatever physical processes are coming from lower layers in a hierarchical structure. The physical brain is a plastic storage medium adequately determined to store the information content of these immaterial thoughts, and normally to store it accurately.

With reference to popular (if flawed) computational theories of mind, we note that the "software" contents of a computer program, as well as the execution of the program, is in no way determined or "caused" by the computer "hardware." Similarly, ideas are not determined by the ink on a printed page or the pixels on a computer screen, but by the human minds that put them there.

"Bottom-up" Physical Processes Are Not Deterministic
When small numbers of atoms and molecules interact, their motions and behaviors are indeterministic, governed by the rules of quantum mechanics.

However, when large numbers of microscopic particle get together in aggregates, the indeterminacy of the individual particles gets averaged over and macroscopic adequately deterministic laws "emerge."

Determinism is an emergent property that shows up in the macroscopic world.

The "laws of nature," such as Newton's laws of motion, are all statistical laws, however close they appear to being certain. They "emerge" when large numbers of atoms or molecules get together. For large enough numbers, the probabilistic laws of nature approach practical certainty. But the fundamental indeterminism of component atoms never completely disappears.

It therefore follows that physical brain events are not pre-determined by the events in lower hierarchical levels, not events in the base physical level, nor even in the biological level.

And the world is not "causally closed" by deterministic physical laws of nature, as assumed by so many philosophers (e.g., Feigl, Smart, Kim).

Moreover, since some "mental events" are large enough information structures to be adequately determined, these mental events can act causally on lower biological and physical levels in the hierarchy, in particular, the mind can move the body and all its contained physical particles, thus solving the mind-body problem.

A specific example of the mind causing an action, while not itself being caused by antecedent events is the following. Faced with a decision of what to do next, the mind considers several possible alternatives, at least some of which are creatively invented based on random ideas that just "come to mind." Other possible alternatives might be familiar options, even habits, that have frequently been done in earlier similar situations.

All these alternatives show up as "neural correlates" - brain neurons firing. When the alternatives are evaluated and one is selected, the selected action results in still other neurons firing, some of which connect to the motor cortex that signals muscles to move the body.

Apart from the occasional indeterministic generation of creative new alternative ideas, this whole causal process is adequately determined and it is downwardly causal. Mental events are causing physical body events.


Quantum Physics and the Problem of Mental Causation". Presented June 6, 2013 at a conference in Milan on "Quantum Physics Meets the Philosophy of Mind".
For Teachers
References
  • Burge, Tyler (1979). "Individualism and the Mental," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 4, pp. 73-121.
  • Broad, C.D. (1925). The Mind and Its Place in Nature, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp.
  • Campbell, D.T. (1974c). "Downward causation" in hierarchically organized biological systems. In F .J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology. London: Macmillan, 179-186.
  • Dardis, Anthony (2008). Mental Causation: The Mind-Body Problem. New York: Columbia University Press. (link)
  • Davidson, Donald (1970). "Mental Events," reprinted in Davidson (1980), pp. 207-227.
  • Davidson, Donald (1980). Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Descartes, René (1642/1986). Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by John Cottingham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Feigl, Herbert (1958). "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'" in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. II, pp. 370-497.
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  • Fodor, Jerry (1980).
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  • Kim, Jaegwon (1998). Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  • Kim, Jaegwon (2005). Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
  • Putnam, Hilary (1967). "The Nature of Mental States" in Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. II (Cambridge University Press (1975).(Functionalism)
  • Putnam, Hilary (1975). "The Meaning of 'Meaning'", in Putnam's Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers 2, 1975, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-71.
  • Putnam, Hilary (1967). "The Nature of Mental States" in Representation and Reality (Cambridge. MIT Press (1988). (Abandons Functionalism)
  • Robb, David (2003). "Mental Causation," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward Zalta (ed.). (link)
  • Sperry, Roger (1966). "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. XXII, No. 7, September 1966
  • Walter, Sven; and Heinz-Dieter Heckmann (eds.) (2003). Physicalism and Mental Causation. Exeter, England: Imprint Academic. ISBN 0-907845-47-9.
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  • Yoo, Julie (2006). "Mental Causation," The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, James Fieser and Bradley Dowden (eds.). (link)
For Scholars

Chapter 3.7 - The Ergod Chapter 4.2 - The History of Free Will
Part Three - Value Part Five - Problems
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