Abstract
The conservation of energy and momentum have been viewed as undermining Cartesian mental causation since the 1690s. Modern discussions of the topic tend to use mid-nineteenth century physics, neglecting both locality and Noether’s theorem and its converse. The relevance of General Relativity (GR) has rarely been considered. But a few authors have proposed that the non-localizability of gravitational energy and consequent lack of physically meaningful local conservation laws answers the conservation objection to mental causation: conservation already fails in GR, so there is nothing for minds to violate. This paper is motivated by two ideas. First, one might take seriously the fact that GR formally has an infinity of rigid symmetries of the action and hence, by Noether’s first theorem, an infinity of conserved energies-momenta (thus answering Schrödinger’s 1918 false-negative objection). Second, Sean Carroll has asked (rhetorically) how one should modify the Dirac–Maxwell–Einstein equations to describe mental causation. This paper uses the generalized Bianchi identities to show that General Relativity tends to exclude, not facilitate, such Cartesian mental causation. In the simplest case, Cartesian mental influence must be spatio-temporally constant, and hence 0. The difficulty may diminish for more complicated models. Its persuasiveness is also affected by larger world-view considerations. The new general relativistic objection provides some support for realism about gravitational energy-momentum in GR (taking pseudotensor laws seriously). Such realism also might help to answer an objection to theories of causation involving conserved quantities, because energies-momenta would be conserved even in GR.
Highlights
The energy conservation objection to nonphysical mental causation has been made starting from Leibniz in the 1600s (Leibniz 1997, 1981, Book I, chapter 1, section 73, 1985, p. 156; Schmaltz 2008, p. 172) until today and has engaged Wolff, Knutzen, Crusius, the young Kant, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Broad and many more modern authors
Non-conservation is a fact about interactionist dualism, at least insofar as physics is described by the principle of least action
Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.”. When it comes to gravitational energy-momentum pseudotensors, publishers, and flags, the mediating conventions might well be strongly correlated with the message. If one takes these conservation laws seriously, the situation for General Relativity, one might think, is basically the same as for other field theories; the dualist still can appeal to theconditional nature of conservation laws to deflect the objection. People who find it absurd that General Relativity should be a resource for dualists, as I do—in my experience physicists tend to recoil from Collins’s inference when confronted with it (Pitts 2009b)—could take that judgment as a motivation to take gravitational energy-momentum pseudotensor conservation laws more seriously
Summary
The energy conservation objection to nonphysical mental causation has been made starting from Leibniz in the 1600s (Leibniz 1997, 1981, Book I, chapter 1, section 73, 1985, p. 156; Schmaltz 2008, p. 172) until today and has engaged Wolff, Knutzen, Crusius, the young Kant, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Broad (not all on the same side) and many more modern authors. Quite a few dualists, not grasping the relevance of the converse of Noether’s first theorem or of the locality of conservation laws in modern physics (Pitts 2019), have tried to argue that mind-to-body causation is compatible with the conservation laws. (The symmetry-to-conservation law link in Noether’s theorem is common knowledge among philosophers of physics, though the converse was perhaps less well known until recently.) A more interesting question for interactionists is whether their view violates conservation laws badly enough to run afoul of experiment. Noether’s theorem leaves the door open to mental causation; the traditional Leibnizian energy conservation objection assumes what needed to be proven. He and other logical empiricists would have been interested in the bearing of General Relativity on the philosophy of mind (if there is one) and likely would have been pleased to find therein some evidence against interactionism
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