Mental Causation Research Articles

Overdetermination, Causal Exclusion, and the Insufficiency of Mental Causation

Overdetermination, Causal Exclusion, and the Insufficiency of Mental Causation

Précis: The Mind-Body Politic

The Mind-Body Politic is a study in the new discipline of political philosophy of mind, that aims to develop an embodied and enactive theory of social institutions, building on our 2009 study of the mind-body relation and mental causation, Embodied Minds in Action. In this sequel, we distinguish between (i) destructive, deforming social institutions–characteristic of contemporary neoliberal nation-states, and (ii) constructive, enabling social institutions, and defend what we call the mindshaping thesis and the enactive-transformative principle. The upshot is an activist, transformative philosophical theory.

Our “Cognitive Limitations” and the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Abstract Philosophers have conjectured that human cognitive limitations might preclude our ever resolving the hard problem of consciousness. Few, however, have offered suggestions as to what it might be about our conceptual apparatus that poses the problem. I do so in this essay, arguing that our central difficulties lie with two conceptual categories that pervade philosophical discussion of the hard problem. They are compositional concepts -- part/whole, constituents/constitution, and the like – and instantiational concepts: properties/objects, universals/particulars, and the like. I look at the uses of these two conceptual categories in four contexts in which the hard problem is considered: multiple realizability, zombies, mental causation, and panpsychism. I show that the two conceptual categories run into the same kinds of obstacles in each case, which suggests that they might be key to the cognitive limitations about which some have speculated

Proportionality, Determinate Intervention Effects, and High-Level Causation

AbstractStephen Yablo’s notion of proportionality, despite controversies surrounding it, has played a significant role in philosophical discussions of mental causation and of high-level causation more generally. In particular, it is invoked in James Woodward’s interventionist account of high-level causation and explanation, and is implicit in a novel approach to constructing variables for causal modeling in the machine learning literature, known as causal feature learning (CFL). In this article, we articulate an account of proportionality inspired by both Yablo’s account of proportionality and the CFL account of variable construction. The resulting account has at least three merits. First, it illuminates an important feature of the notion of proportionality, when it is adapted to a probabilistic and interventionist framework. The feature is that at the center of the notion of proportionality lies the concept of “determinate intervention effects.” Second, it makes manifest a virtue of (common types of) high-level causal/explanatory statements over low-level ones, when relevant intervention effects are determinate. Third, it overcomes a limitation of the CFL framework and thereby also addresses a challenge to interventionist accounts of high-level causation.

Growing Confidence and Remaining Uncertainty About Animal Consciousness

While the study of consciousness has had a controversial history and, until recently, a pessimistic prognosis, recent views within the neuroscientific community suggest that a maturing if incomplete scientific understanding of consciousness is close at hand. The purpose of this essay is to specify the major points on which in my opinion there is widespread though not universal agreement, as proposed benchmarks for the current state of consciousness research across the phylogenetic spectrum. Most published definitions of consciousness boil down to a focus on it as a process arising in a nervous system engaged with a body and its environment, giving rise to subjective (personal) experience. A broad consensus on the phenomenology of consciousness sees it consisting at a minimum of (1) awareness_ _and focused attention, (2) unity of perception, (3) qualitative variations in content, (4) mental causation, and (5) a sense of self. There is also broad agreement that the substrate of consciousness requires sizeable, complex nervous systems organized into several hierarchical levels of processing. Further insight is gained by reconstructing the evolution of subjective phenomenological experience ― most likely from multiple origins, hosted by a diversity of body and brain architectures, and diverging into markedly different forms across the animal kingdom. However, three major mysteries about phenomenological experience that remain unresolved are (1) the neurological correlates of consciousness, (2) the apparent gap between phenomenology and mechanism, and (3) the process that monitors the brain activity admitted into consciousness.

Mental causation, interventionism, and probabilistic supervenience

Mental causation is notoriously threatened by the causal exclusion argument. A prominent strategy to save mental causation from causal exclusion consists in subscribing to an interventionist account of causation. This move has, however, recently been challenged by several authors. In this paper, we do two things: We (i) develop what we consider to be the strongest version of the interventionist causal exclusion argument currently on the market and (ii) propose a new way how it can in principle be overcome. In particular, we propose to replace strict supervenience in the assumption that the mental supervenes on the physical by probabilistic supervenience and show how this move has the potential to license the inference to mental causation. Finally, we argue that probabilistic supervenience captures some of the most important intuitions that strict supervenience captures and discuss possible objections to weakening strict supervenience in the way we suggest.

On the probabilistic character of irreducible mental causation

On the probabilistic character of irreducible mental causation

Does Panpsychism Explain Mental Causation?

AbstractIn the contemporary literature on panpsychism, one often finds the claim that a Russellian-monist version of panpsychism, i.e., Russellian panpsychism, is a superior view compared to alternative non-physicalist theories. The argument for this claim is that while Russellian panpsychism can integrate consciousness in the causal order and explain mental causation, alternative theories fail to do so. If this is correct, panpsychism deserves its place as a main contender in solving the mind-body problem. In this paper, I argue that Russellian panpsychism’s superiority in explaining mental causation over competing accounts is illusory. On one reading, the proposed explanation is not an explanation of the phenomenon that is at stake in the mental causation debate. On an alternative reading, it is an explanation of the right phenomenon, but analogous explanations are available to competing accounts with less counterintuitive commitments. While there may be other considerations supporting panpsychism, explaining mental causation is not one.

Mental causation: an evolutionary perspective.

The relationship between consciousness and individual agency is examined from a bottom-up evolutionary perspective, an approach somewhat different from other ways of dealing with the issue, but one relevant to the question of animal consciousness. Two ways are identified that would decouple the two, allowing consciousness of a limited kind to exist without agency: (1) reflex pathways that incorporate conscious sensations as an intrinsic component (InCs), and (2) reflexes that are consciously conditioned and dependent on synaptic plasticity but not memory (CCRs). Whether InCs and CCRs exist as more than hypothetical constructs is not clear, and InCs are in any case limited to theories where consciousness depends directly on EM field-based effects. Consciousness with agency, as we experience it, then belongs in a third category that allows for deliberate choice of alternative actions (DCs), where the key difference between this and CCR-level pathways is that DCs require access to explicit memory systems whereas CCRs do not. CCRs are nevertheless useful from a heuristic standpoint as a conceptual model for how conscious inputs could act to refine routine behaviors while allowing evolution to optimize phenomenal experience (i.e., qualia) in the absence of individual agency, a somewhat counterintuitive result. However, so long as CCRs are not a required precondition for the evolution of memory-dependent DC-level processes, the later could have evolved first. If so, the adaptive benefit of consciousness when it first evolved may be linked as much to the role it plays in encoding memories as to any other function. The possibility that CCRs are more than a theoretical construct, and have played a role in the evolution of consciousness, argues against theories of consciousness focussed exclusively on higher-order functions as the appropriate way to deal with consciousness as it first evolved, as it develops in the early postnatal period of life, or with the conscious experiences of animals other than ourselves. An evolutionary perspective also resolves the problem of free will, that it is best treated as a property of a species rather than the individuals belonging to that species whereas, in contrast, agency is an attribute of individuals.

Mental Causation for Standard Dualists

ABSTRACT The standard objection to dualist theories of mind is that they seemingly cannot account for the obvious fact that mental phenomena cause our behaviour. On the plausible assumption that all our behaviour is physically necessitated by entirely physical phenomena, there appears to be no room for dualist mental causation. Some argue that dualists can address this problem by making minimal adjustments in their ontology. I argue that no such adjustments are required. Given recent developments in philosophy of causation, it is plausible that mental phenomena cause behaviour in standard dualist ontologies.

Irruption and Absorption: A 'Black-Box' Framework for How Mind and Matter Make a Difference to Each Other.

Cognitive science is confronted by several fundamental anomalies deriving from the mind-body problem. Most prominent is the problem of mental causation and the hard problem of consciousness, which can be generalized into the hard problem of agential efficacy and the hard problem of mental content. Here, it is proposed to accept these explanatory gaps at face value and to take them as positive indications of a complex relation: mind and matter are one, but they are not the same. They are related in an efficacious yet non-reducible, non-observable, and even non-intelligible manner. Natural science is well equipped to handle the effects of non-observables, and so the mind is treated as equivalent to a hidden 'black box' coupled to the body. Two concepts are introduced given that there are two directions of coupling influence: (1) irruption denotes the unobservable mind hiddenly making a difference to observable matter, and (2) absorption denotes observable matter hiddenly making a difference to the unobservable mind. The concepts of irruption and absorption are methodologically compatible with existing information-theoretic approaches to neuroscience, such as measuring cognitive activity and subjective qualia in terms of entropy and compression, respectively. By offering novel responses to otherwise intractable theoretical problems from first principles, and by doing so in a way that is closely connected with empirical advances, irruption theory is poised to set the agenda for the future of the mind sciences.

Growing Confidence and Remaining Uncertainty About Animal Consciousness

While the study of consciousness has had a controversial history and, until recently, a pessimistic prognosis, recent views within the neuroscientific community suggest that a maturing if incomplete scientific understanding of consciousness is close at hand. The purpose of this essay is to specify the major points on which in my opinion there is widespread though not universal agreement, as proposed benchmarks for the current state of consciousness research across the phylogenetic spectrum. Most published definitions of consciousness boil down to a focus on it as a process arising in a nervous system engaged with a body and its environment, giving rise to subjective (personal) experience. A broad consensus on the phenomenology of consciousness sees it consisting at a minimum of (1) awarenessand focused attention, (2) unity of perception, (3) qualitative variations in content, (4) mental causation, and (5) a sense of self. There is also broad agreement that the substrate of consciousness requires sizeable, complex nervous systems organized into several hierarchical levels of processing. Further insight is gained by reconstructing the evolution of subjective phenomenological experience ― most likely from multiple origins, hosted by a diversity of body and brain architectures, and diverging into markedly different forms across the animal kingdom. However, three major mysteries about phenomenological experience that remain unresolved are (1) the neurological correlates of consciousness, (2) the apparent gap between phenomenology and mechanism, and (3) the process that monitors the brain activity admitted into consciousness.

Does Free Will Really Exist? The Motivational Congruence Theory's Perspective.

Free will plays a critical role in human motivation. Recent advances in science and technologies have had a significant impact on free will. They have raised serious concerns regarding the threatening effects of such advancements on perceived autonomy. However, there is still a longstanding debate on the existence of free will, known as the problem of free will. Philosophers have provided contrasting views regarding the existence of free will and its relationship with causal determination and mental causation problems. These problems are related to the underlying dualistic approach between mental and physical factors. Similar to the philosophy literature, the motivation literature is concerned with the problem of free will and its influence on motivation and performance. Cognitive evaluation and self-determination theories are the most renowned theories which assert the effect of autonomy (i.e., free will) on intrinsic motivation. However, these theories have mainly focused on the effect of the need for autonomy as an underlying driver of intrinsic motivation. They have not been able to address the fundamental question about the existence of actual free will and its effect on motivation and performance. This is mainly due to their dualistic approach in the form of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation dichotomization. Motivational congruence theory addresses the problem of free will and substantiates its effect by going beyond such a dualistic approach and resolving the related problems of mental causation and causal determination. The theory does this by taking a cotextualist and dialectical approach to the interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivational mechanisms and context.

Growing Confidence and Remaining Uncertainty About Animal Consciousness

While the study of consciousness has had a controversial history and, until recently, a pessimistic prognosis, recent views within the neuroscientific community suggest that a maturing if incomplete scientific understanding of consciousness is close at hand. Most published definitions of consciousness boil down to a focus on it as a process arising in a nervous system engaged with a body and its environment, giving rise to subjective (personal) experience. A broad consensus on the phenomenology of consciousness sees it consisting at a minimum of (1) awarenessand focused attention, (2) unity of perception, (3) qualitative variations in content, (4) mental causation, and (5) a sense of self. There is also broad agreement that the substrate of consciousness requires sizeable, complex nervous systems organized into several hierarchical levels of processing. Further insight is gained by reconstructing the evolution of subjective phenomenological experience ― most likely from multiple origins, hosted by a diversity of body and brain architectures, and diverging into markedly different forms across the animal kingdom. The three major mysteries that remain about phenomenological experience are (1) the neurological correlates of consciousness, (2) the apparent gap between phenomenology and mechanism, and (3) the agent that monitors the brain activity admitted into consciousness.

Mental Causation and Motivation: The Motivational Congruence Theory's Perspective.

Mental causation is a deep-rooted debate in the philosophy and psychology literature. It relates to the causal role of mind on the physical world and is tightly linked with the Descartes' dualistic approach towards mind-body interaction. While the role of mental properties might seem obvious in our everyday interaction with the world, there are many arguments that make mental causation inefficacious or redundant within the physical world. In the motivation literature, the issue of mental causation is pivotal. It substantiates the causal role of intrinsic motivation on human behavior. However, the main theoretical streams in the motivation literature take a dualistic approach by dichotomizing different types of motivation into extrinsic and intrinsic ones. This creates a fundamental challenge on the possibility of mental causation in the relationship between motivation and behavior. The three main theoretical streams in the motivation literature consider intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as distinct and independent types of motivation and give a higher weight to one type over the other. This approach makes the role of intrinsic motivation as a mental factor on behavior difficult to interpret. Motivational congruence theory resolves this issue by taking a contextualist and dialectical stance on the relationship between intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and the context. In a dynamic interaction with each other and the context, the two distinct yet intertwined types of motivation (i.e., intrinsic and extrinsic ones) produce overall motivation which in turn induces behavior. The theory resolves the issue of mental causation both at the surface and deep levels.

Dualists and physicalists agree, free will is incompatible with determinism

ABSTRACT Belief in substance dualism, the idea that mind and matter are two different kinds of substances, has been found to be a strong predictor of belief in free will. Why? Here, we test whether believing that mind and matter are different kinds of substance correlates with differences in how people think of free will and/or differences in how people interpret the scenarios used to test their conceptions. We provided participants (N = 515) with two hypothetical scenarios where the world was presented either as deterministic or not and asked them whether they thought that a given decision could be free in that world. Incompatibilist free will requires that determinism, the idea that at any instant only one possible future can follow from the state of the world, is false. Compatibilists hold that free will is possible even if determinism is true. In this study, we investigate if substance dualists are more compatibilist. We find that they are not, and that both dualists and physicalists agree that free will is incompatible with determinism. In addition, we show that dualists and physicalists are equally likely to commit bypassing, i.e., to misinterpret determinism as excluding mental causation. We also show that dualists have a stronger tendency to commit intrusion, i.e., to misinterpret determinism by importing indeterministic metaphysics into their interpretation of deterministic descriptions.

Mental Causation

The article analyzes the issue of mental causation from the point of view of linguistics and simultaneouslyit discusses the interaction of languages, the influence of one language on another.In most sources, mental causation is interpreted as an object of investigation of analytic philosophy.But in our current work, we analyzed mentality based on the meaning of this term. As a consequence, when mentality is studied linguistically, we observed that language is connected with all social spheres.The concept of mentalism significantly overlapped with the direction of psychologism.That is why the term «mentalism» was originally introduced into linguistics by L.Bloomfield, the founder of descriptivism, as a sign of protest against the fields of «intelligence», which aimed to study the inner world of a person, denying the role of language. Eventually, not only psychological, but also philosophical, logical, cultural-anthropological, archaeological, geographical concepts are examined in the basis of the term «mentalism».This shows that the language is related to these areas.

Tatsṛṣṭvā Tadevānuprāviśat : Toward an Advaita Vedantic Approach to Cosmopsychism

Abstract: This essay draws attention to some of the ideas and discussions in the classical Advaita Vedantic literature that have a direct bearing on contemporary debates concerning the existence of consciousness in the empirical world. Section 1 makes the case for pursuing a non-eliminativist reading of Advaita Vedanta by clarifying its position on the existence of the empirical world. The idea here is to lay the background for approaching Advaita Vedanta from a cosmopsychist perspective. Section 2 shows, first, how the position of Advaita Vedanta that macro-level consciousnesses are reflections of the universal consciousness (Brahman) in the intellects ( buddhi ) of empirical selves sets it apart from the prevailing cosmopsychist theories. It then goes on to discuss how this idea of reflection can at once offer an elegant solution to the decombination/derivation problem, suggest a promising way to bridge "the explanatory gap" and explain the phenomena of mental causation.

The Mental Causality Exclusion Argument and the Levels of Organization of Living Objects

The paper aims to demonstrate the possibility of consistently accepting the existence of effective mental causality in the fundamentally physical world. We suppose that the concept of causality in J. Kim’s exclusion argument against mental causation, which implies а generative conception of causal relations, can be revised taking into account the specificity of the multilevel organization of living objects. Rejection of the mechanistic model of causality as a linear process, allows you to maintain commitment to the principle of causal closure of the physical world and at the same time explain how top-down causality at the macro level is possible. For this, we use the model of a fractal tree of causal chains by J. Lowe, in which mental causality plays the role of an indirect cause of a fact. We carry out a meaningful distinction between the causality of facts and events by resorting to the multilevel model of J. Ellis, in which mental causality can be considered as a macro-level fact that has a selective effect on physical events of lower levels, taking into account a wide environmental context.

A new solution to the problem of luck

AbstractThe issue of whether and how we have the control necessary for freedom and moral responsibility is central to all control accounts of freedom and moral responsibility. The problem of luck for libertarians aims to show that indeterministic agents are ill‐equipped with the control required for freedom and moral responsibility. In view of this, we must either endorse scepticism about the possibility of free and morally responsible agents, or make some form of, possibly revisionary, compatibilism work.In this paper, I shall offer a new solution to the problem of luck for libertarians. After outlining the problem of luck, I shall argue that, given a particular approach to mental causation, indeterminism can be viewed as an essential requirement of free and morally responsible action. After this, I shall distinguish between different types of inability and show how this provides us with a solution to the problem of luck. Finally, I shall consider some advantages and objections to the proposed solution.