Causal interaction between the mental and the physical.

[Gertie]

Nicol

Apologies for the tardy reply

Gertie wrote:
It is a problem tho, imo, because physical cause and effect which we do understand and can model and make predictions about, can theoretically account for any action we attribute to mental causation. So, for example, it seems like you can mentally will your own arm to rise (an action with causal physical correlates), but not mine, because there's no physical causal 'chain' between your brain and my arm.

It may be so, but it is not even remotely obvious to me that it is possible to understand and predict all kinds of phenomena with physical causation as a theoretical basis. If anything, to understand domains like linguistic discourse, social and economic processes, etc. many appeals have been made to psychological processes and mental causation (e.g. behavioural economics, Gricean semantics).

The difficulty with prediction can in principle be put down to the complexity involved tho can't it? The level of complexity is hard to imagine, but then human brains are the most complex things we know of.

If you accept that there are neural correlates of every mental state, which seems to be the case as far as we can tell, and that neurons interact through physical (bio-chemical) cause and effect, then theoretically these billions of complex physical interactions must be able to fully account for even such complex, symbolic and nuanced behaviour as the examples you give.

Also, it is possible for me to mentally will your arm raising: all that is required is to be able to communicate with you and convince you to do so. It does not even matter whether I ever succeed in my lifetime to do so. All that matters is that it is possible to do so, and that this process would involve mental events (me desiring, me willing, me talking, you perceiving what I said, you willing to act).

OK, I can just change it to a coffee mug then - will and persuade away .

You can potentially mentally 'cause' me to raise my arm by creating physical causal links. By speaking, creating disturbances in the air which physically affect my ear drum, which physically affects my aural systems, which physically affect my neural systems, which physically affect my motor systems to my arm. A physical causal 'chain' which correlates with the mental states which are involved in part of that process, but not all.

You can't do that with a coffee cup because a coffee cup doesn't have the necessary kit to create the physical causal chain.

Of course, you can say that any explanatory data involving mental entities could be reduced to more basic explanatory data involving only physical entities, but how is this claim justified? Is it self-evident in a way I don't see, or is it some sort of ubiquitous physicalist bias that tempts us to assume so?

If it was the other way around, that mental states alone could lift coffee cups (with no physical causal chain involved), and just some causal mental states had physical correlates, then we'd naturally wonder if the physical correlates were redundant, wouldn't we?

As it is we have the standard model, we have an observed system of stuff and how it works, which theoretically accounts for all causation, of minded and non-minded processes. So it's the mental causation apparently operating in only some systems which looks like the anomaly. Added to which we have no idea about how it could work, if it does. I think that explains the 'bias'.

Gertie wrote:
If it's true, as it seems, that physical causation can fully account for all our actions, then mental causation looks redundant. The problem of 'over-determinism'.

Indeed, over-determination is more of an issue, but my consideration extends only to assuming that mind/body interaction is a showstopper in itself.

Not sure what you mean?

My own view is that the relationship between the mental and physical is something we're struggling to get a handle on, conceptually or scientifically, at the moment at least. Observations like the correlation between mental states and neural states seem like a big clue, but raise more questions than they answer.

[Bohm2]

My own view is that the relationship between the mental and physical is something we're struggling to get a handle on, conceptually or scientifically, at the moment at least. Observations like the correlation between mental states and neural states seem like a big clue, but raise more questions than they answer.

The mind-body problem in its scientific form vanished as unformulable at least since Newton's time, because one of its terms, body/matter/physical, does not exist in any intelligible form.

[Papus79]

One of the really brutal problems I think we have with regard to the debates over whether such a thing as a mind-body problem is even valid (not so much meant in the idealist sense but from the materialist 'it's a hallucination' perspective) - the scientific community has barely experimented on or calculated enough to really have agreement on what the 'real' oddities are that should suggest frame-change for the major theories. Being that the state of knowledge is so tattered and tribalized at the moment it seems like most people (in the sciences or science PR) who have public opinions on this stuff are largely just going with what feels right to them. Here and there these days you're starting to hear people say things that are actually interesting and there are a few really high-quality materialists and high quality psy researches as well, people who really demonstrate clear thinking and high standards for what how or what they disqualify, just that unfortunately they're still - at least in terms of shaping the cultural attitudes and funding patterns - something of a rare breed.

[Fan of Science]

I know there has been a great deal written on this subject, going back centuries even, but I think Nicol has a point in her opening post about the issue being somewhat overblown. Of course, this is probably sacrilege among many philosophers, but I'm not sure its the huge issue some make it out to be.

[Gertie]

My own view is that the relationship between the mental and physical is something we're struggling to get a handle on, conceptually or scientifically, at the moment at least. Observations like the correlation between mental states and neural states seem like a big clue, but raise more questions than they answer.

The mind-body problem in its scientific form vanished as unformulable at least since Newton's time, because one of its terms, body/matter/physical, does not exist in any intelligible form.

Can you explain what you mean?

[Bohm2]

Can you explain what you mean?

We basically do not know what matter/body/physical is because our understanding of what matter/physical/body is remains provisional and constantly changes as our physics/sciences evolve. Since we do not have some definite, a priori definition of what matter/physical/body is, how can we say that some phenomena (i.e. mental) must lie beyond its boundary. One can't argue that some phenomena like the mental/consciousness, etc. cannot be material/physical, if one has no clear, definite understanding of what the physical/material is. One of many papers summarizing this:

Newton... introduced a different approach to the methodology of science. The aim now was not to follow the dictates of a predetermined conception of what the physical (or material or body) is, but rather to posit attributes and powers with a view to achieving adequate explanation of the manifest principles operating in nature. Science was no longer concerned to reduce phenomena to some prior understanding of the physical, but rather:

To construct intelligible explanatory theories, taking as “real” what we are led to posit in this quest, and hoping for eventual unification with the “core” natural sciences: unification, not necessarily reduction.

http://teorievedy.flu.cas.cz/index.php/ ... ew/271/293

[Gertie]

Can you explain what you mean?

We basically do not know what matter/body/physical is because our understanding of what matter/physical/body is remains provisional and constantly changes as our physics/sciences evolve. Since we do not have some definite, a priori definition of what matter/physical/body is, how can we say that some phenomena (i.e. mental) must lie beyond its boundary. One can't argue that some phenomena like the mental/consciousness, etc. cannot be material/physical, if one has no clear, definite understanding of what the physical/material is. One of many papers summarizing this:

Newton... introduced a different approach to the methodology of science. The aim now was not to follow the dictates of a predetermined conception of what the physical (or material or body) is, but rather to posit attributes and powers with a view to achieving adequate explanation of the manifest principles operating in nature. Science was no longer concerned to reduce phenomena to some prior understanding of the physical, but rather:

To construct intelligible explanatory theories, taking as “real” what we are led to posit in this quest, and hoping for eventual unification with the “core” natural sciences: unification, not necessarily reduction.

http://teorievedy.flu.cas.cz/index.php/ ... ew/271/293

Thanks. I agree Mind vs Body, Mental vs Physical and suchlike are very crude terms, and I think we agree that we need a more fundamental understanding of reality which accommodates the differences those terms try to encapsulate.

I do see real differences tho, at the very least in how they manifest at the human organism level of granularity. And what we call 'the mind body problem' is a legit problem.

And I don't necessarily think a framing designed to discover a fundamental unity is anymore scientific than a framing like the Standard Model. Maybe reality isn't fundamentally unified, maybe we're just cognitively biased to seek that sort of fundamental unity? Maybe we're not even cognitively equipped to understand the most fundamental nature of reality, and our types of framing are way off the mark? For the here and now, the 'mind body problem' looks intractable without some paradigmatic leap.

[Togo1]

If you accept that there are neural correlates of every mental state, which seems to be the case as far as we can tell, and that neurons interact through physical (bio-chemical) cause and effect, then theoretically these billions of complex physical interactions must be able to fully account for even such complex, symbolic and nuanced behaviour as the examples you give.

I'm not sure where the must comes from, but even taking your statement as sound, that doesn't suggest that mental events are superfluous, it just suggests that mental events are physical. If all there is are physical interactions, then any model that doesn't include mental events is physically incomplete.

(Note this achieves the same conclusion as Bohm was suggesting, but from a slightly different route.)

As it is we have the standard model, we have an observed system of stuff and how it works, which theoretically accounts for all causation, of minded and non-minded processes.

But it doesn't. 'Minded' processes still have observed characteristics that aren't being explained at all, such as causal intentionality. We can theorise that one day we may find an account that explains things in such a way to as to preserve our existing physical models, but that doesn't 'account' for minded processes any more than religion or conspiracy theories do.

Gertie wrote:

My own view is that the relationship between the mental and physical is something we're struggling to get a handle on, conceptually or scientifically, at the moment at least. Observations like the correlation between mental states and neural states seem like a big clue, but raise more questions than they answer.

Quite so. There are some other interesting observations though. Most recently, there's been some great work done on communicating with people in a persistent vegatative state, by asking the (entirely non-responsive) patients to imagine different activities, and then picking up the neural correlates of those activities with a brain scanner. It's an interesting view of observing conscious or 'minded' processes occuring in isolation of physical action.

[Papus79]

I really like going back to Robert Sapolsky's lectures on chaos and neural bifurcation, the thoughts of a lot of the ontic structural realists on thinking outside the box and considering certain forms of chaos to be coherent forces in the shaping of what we see and experience. I caught a really interesting conversation that Sam Harris had with Geoffrey West on his Waking Up Podcast #86 where Geoffrey was talking about trying to bring the standards of physics to the realm of biology (a daunting task for sure but it might be the next step needed). A lot of great discussion on living systems and other areas that really need to be explored.

As it is I have great difficulty with the concept that matter as it stands lacks the necessity to be conscious if its not in a high enough quantity of neurons. Aside from a lot of computational power optimized for communication we're really not anything that special, I remember hearing someone recently mentioning that certain monkeys have far superior short-term memory to our own but simply lack the frame of build to think the way we do and build cities, bridges, etc.. At first we were the center of the universe and everything revolved around the earth, then our planet was in a solar system, then we found ourselves in a sprawling universe of sizes and proportions that boggle the mind. I think some of our last vanities we'll be giving up along these lines is some kind of exceptionalism to our consciousness, possibly even having to concede to a lot of things that animists seemed to know all along without trying. That's part of why I think the scientific endeavor needs as much humility as it does discipline - without the humility there are plenty of trying times, like physicists having to bow to animists for pardon, that could have otherwise been avoided. The moral of the story seems to be that nature really doesn't care what we believe or what our social structures or current organizational wisdom would suggest that we need us to believe.

[Gertie]

Togo

Gertie wrote:
If you accept that there are neural correlates of every mental state, which seems to be the case as far as we can tell, and that neurons interact through physical (bio-chemical) cause and effect, then theoretically these billions of complex physical interactions must be able to fully account for even such complex, symbolic and nuanced behaviour as the examples you give.

I'm not sure where the must comes from,

The Must comes from the specified Ifs.

but even taking your statement as sound, that doesn't suggest that mental events are superfluous, it just suggests that mental events are physical. If all there is are physical interactions, then any model that doesn't include mental events is physically incomplete.

At face value, it suggests mental experience is either superfluous (non-causal) or there is some more fundamental explanation for causal over-determination which we don't yet understand.

'Minded' processes still have observed characteristics that aren't being explained at all, such as causal intentionality.

Your assertion that at least some causal events can't be explained except by mental causation means you have to reject either physical causation or neural correlation, or both.

If you dismiss causal over-determination you're dismissing a primary reason for believing we need a more fundamental explanation of the relationship between what we call 'the mental' and 'the physical', and why monism looks like a conceptually attractive way to resolve the problem.

[Togo1]

Togo

(Nested quote removed.)



I'm not sure where the must comes from,

The Must comes from the specified Ifs.

I really don't see how.

Here are the IFs:
P1) (If you accept that) there are neural correlates of every mental state
P2) (If you accept that) neurons interact through physical (bio-chemical) cause and effect

and the conclusion

C1) then theoretically these billions of complex physical interactions must be able to fully account for <complex behaviours>

There's nothing about the mere existance of neural correlates plus the existance of biochemical cause and effect that would logically lead to an ability to explain a set of behaviours. It just doesn't follow.

It doesn't follow because there are two hidden assumptions in there. The first being that a neural correlate of a state has the same information content as the state itself. This is not only not demonstrated, it seems likely to be false. And the second hidden assumption being that a cause and effect relationship between X and Y implies that X fully accounts for Y. That's only true for very particular formulations of cause and effect, and there is no reason to suspect that those particular formulations occur in the brain, or indeed in the universe more generally.

To put it another way, the reasoning presented assumes that Neural Correlates encompass mental experience, and that all the information (not just the pertinent information, but all of it) is transmitted via cause and effect relationships between neural links. There's no reason to believe this to be the case, since that's not what correlation or correlates means, and it's not what cause and effect generally means either.

but even taking your statement as sound, that doesn't suggest that mental events are superfluous, it just suggests that mental events are physical. If all there is are physical interactions, then any model that doesn't include mental events is physically incomplete.

At face value, it suggests mental experience is either superfluous (non-causal) or there is some more fundamental explanation for causal over-determination which we don't yet understand.

I don't see that the first is an option. If mental experience is superfluous, then it's not being transmitted. And if it's not being transmitted, if the neurology doesn't contain all of the experience, then there is no reason remaining to even suggest that the neurology necessarily accounts for it. You're also stuck with dualism, in order to contain the residual mental experience that you've labelled as superfluous. Labelling something non-causal doesn't help you explain it, so if you're ignoring it in your physical model, you're pre-supposing a parallel mental universe to put it into instead.

Again, the only conclusion you can reach from a monist (physical) universe is that subjective mental experiences are physical, because they can't be anything else. And if they're physical, far from being excluded from a physical model they must by logical necessity form a part of it.

'Minded' processes still have observed characteristics that aren't being explained at all, such as causal intentionality.

Your assertion that at least some causal events can't be explained

Didn't say can't be explained. I said aren't being explained. Physicalism can still work - it just that a physicalism based on our existing intuitions of cause and effect, doesn't.

If you dismiss causal over-determination you're dismissing a primary reason for believing we need a more fundamental explanation of the relationship between what we call 'the mental' and 'the physical', and why monism looks like a conceptually attractive way to resolve the problem.

I'm happy to dismiss the traditional split between mental and physical (i.e. dualism) if necessary. I see it as a semantic issue. I'm also happy to reject the idea that monism is an inutitively attractive way of solving the problem, because I don't think there are any intutively obvious forms of monism that really help us solve it.

[SteveII]

Doesn’t this have significant impact on the Free Will debate? If the mind is not separate from the brain, we don’t really have free will. On the other hand if there exists an independent, non-material mind that has causal powers over the brain, then free will real. Is ‘compatibilism’ philosophically supported or is it just redefining what free will is?

[Bohm2]

Doesn’t this have significant impact on the Free Will debate? If the mind is not separate from the brain, we don’t really have free will.

Why do you feel that dualism is necessary for free will?

Again, the only conclusion you can reach from a monist (physical) universe is that subjective mental experiences are physical, because they can't be anything else. And if they're physical, far from being excluded from a physical model they must by logical necessity form a part of it.

In my opinion, the term physical is a vacuous term. Sure, once we understand something well enough we may call it physical but what is considered physical today would have been considered mysticism a few 100 years ago. We are likely in the same boat today. We can't conceive how mental stuff occurs from our present understanding of the physical but who knows what changes will occur to our understanding of our future conception of the physical? If past history is any indication, our conception of the physical will be changed as our physics/science progresses and for the same reason reason terms like physical, material or even monism, dualism are pretty vacuous/empty.

[Togo1]

Doesn’t this have significant impact on the Free Will debate? If the mind is not separate from the brain, we don’t really have free will. On the other hand if there exists an independent, non-material mind that has causal powers over the brain, then free will real.

Looks like you're assuming incompatibalism (the idea that determinism and free will are incompatible), and physical determinism (the idea that anything physical must be (pre)determined). If you hold to both of those assumptions, then yes, the problem reduces to whether the mind is physical and thus determined (monism/physicalism) or whether the mind is non-physical (dualism).

However if you reject either assumption, then things change. If you reject the first one, then you have to consider compatibalism, the idea that free will is compatible with determinsm. This does involve adopting a more restrictive definition of what free will is. If you reject the second one, then you need to consider whether the physical universe is, in fact, not (pre)determined.

I tend to regard determinism as problematic, and potentially incoherant. Hence I tend to reject the assumption that the universe is determined. At that point most of the objctions to free will disappear.

[Gertie]

Welcome Steve

Doesn’t this have significant impact on the Free Will debate? If the mind is not separate from the brain, we don’t really have free will. On the other hand if there exists an independent, non-material mind that has causal powers over the brain, then free will real. Is ‘compatibilism’ philosophically supported or is it just redefining what free will is?

Yeah. My view is that free will is a genuine quandary, because our current understanding of the relationship between 'the physical' and 'the mental' is inadequate to give a coherent answer. Or at least the answers only raises more fundamental questions. Ideas like monism and dualism can give us a conceptual handle on the issue, but imo unless/until we get to that more fundamental understanding, such ideas might be on the wrong track completely, as might be the way we think about free will itself.

And we have to bear in mind we're critters whose evolution was driven by utility, so we perceive tables as 'solid stuff' because that's the level of utility required to navigate the world. We also evolved to cognitively understand cause and effect based on utility, it works for us. Science can extrapolate from our observations to create different types of framing, and suggest how things might work differently at different granular levels, but there's no reason to believe that where science is at right now is anything more than the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately we might not even have the cognitive toolkit to answer our questions.

That doesn't mean we should give up of course, we can make inferences from what we do know about things like neural correlation, but in my view it does mean we should be humble in our assertions. I don't find compatibilism very constructive in this context, I see it as conceptual fudge with no underlying explanation, which doesn't really get us any further.