C Anastopoulos, Mind-body interaction and modern physics, , 2020.
The idea that mind and body are distinct entities that interact is often claimed to be incompatible with physics. The aim of this paper is to disprove this claim. To this end, we construct a broad mathematical framework that describes theories with mind-body interaction (MBI) as an extension of current physical theories. We employ histories theory, ie, a formulation of physical theories in which a physical system is described in terms of (i) a set of propositions about possible evolutions of the system and (ii) a probability assignment to …
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J Brian Pitts, The Mind-Body Problem and Conservation Laws: The Growth of Physical Understanding?, , 2019.
The success of science, especially physics, is often invoked as contrasting with the degeneration of world-views involving immaterial persons. A popular question from the 17th century to the 21st is how human minds/souls could interact with bodies in light of physical conservation laws. Leibniz invented this objection and wielded it to motivate his novel non- interactionist dualism, pre-established harmony. A historical treatment of how this objection has been made over the centuries vis-a-vis the growth of knowledge of physics and logical …
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J Brian Pitts, General Relativity, Mental Causation, and Energy Conservation, Arxiv.Org, 2019 1909.01083, physics.hist-ph.
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-19th 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 Schr\"{o}dinger'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 answers an objection to theories of causation involving conserved quantities, because energies-momenta would be conserved even in GR.
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Alfie Collins, Is the Causal Closure Argument devastating to dualism? Why/why not?, , 2019 pp. 1-12.
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Alin C Cucu, No Perfect Pass: How The Energy Conservation Objection Against Dualism Turns Out To Be Physicalism’s Own Goal , Philosophical Explorations, 2018 pp. 1-28.
In this paper, I aim to show (1) that the principle of energy conservation (PEC) cannot be used as an a priori argument against dualism; (2) that PEC constitutes a problem for physicalism because energy is probably not conserved in brains; and (3) to show that even if energy is conserved in brains, dualism is still the better framework to account for human volitional actions. To do that, I will first formulate a proper a priori version of the widely shared ‘objection from energy conservation’ (OEC). Second, I will refute its central premise, namely that energy is necessarily conserved. I then proceed to “turn the tables” on physicalism, i.e. I seek to show that empirically, energy is probably not conserved in brains, and explore the resources of physicalism to deal with such a scenario, which turn out to be scarce.
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Alin C Cucu and J Brian Pitts, How Dualists Should (Not) Respond to the Objection from Energy Conservation, Arxiv.Org, 2019 1909.13643v1, physics.hist-ph.
The principle of energy conservation is widely taken to be a serious difficulty for interactionist dualism (whether property or substance). Interactionists often have therefore tried to make it satisfy energy conservation. This paper examines several such attempts, especially including E. J. Lowe's varying constants proposal, showing how they all miss their goal due to lack of engagement with the physico-mathematical roots of energy conservation physics: the first Noether theorem (that symmetries imply conservation laws), its converse (that conservation laws imply symmetries), and the locality of continuum/field physics. Thus the "conditionality response", which sees conservation as (bi)conditional upon symmetries and simply accepts energy non-conservation as an aspect of interactionist dualism, is seen to be, perhaps surprisingly, the one most in accord with contemporary physics (apart from quantum mechanics) by not conflicting with mathematical theorems basic to physics. A decent objection to interactionism should be a posteriori, based on empirically studying the brain.
Published in: Mind and Matter 17 no. 1 (2019), pp. 95-121
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A C Cucu, Turning the Tables on Physicalism: the Energy Conservation Objection to Substance Dualism as a Two-Edged Sword, Behavior And Philosophy, .
In this paper, I aim to show (1) that the principle of energy conservation (PEC) cannot be used as an a priori argument against dualism;(2) that PEC constitutes a problem for physicalism because energy is probably not conserved in brains; and (3) to show that even if energy is conserved in brains, dualism is still the better framework to account for human volitional actions. To do that, I will first formulate a proper a priori version of the widely shared 'objection from energy conservation'(OEC). Second, I will refute its central premise …
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Dmytro Sepetyi, Interactionism vs Epiphenomenalism:
unclosing the causal closure of the physical, Filosofska Dumka, 2017.
There are two kinds of mind-body dualism: epiphenomenalism and interactionism. The difference is concerned with the thesis that physical reality is causally closed: if any non- physical things or properties exist, they cannot influence the course of physical events. The causal closure thesis is often appealed to by materialists, and some dualists agree− they are epiphenomenalists. Conversely, interactionists contend that 1) there is no weighty reason why the non-physical cannot influence the physical and that 2) the mind is non-physical, and
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J C Eccles, Do mental events cause neural events analogously to the probability fields of quantum mechanics?, Proceedings Of The Royal Society Of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 227 (1986) 411-428.
If non-material mental events, such as the intention to carry out an action, are to have an effective action on neural events in the brain, it has to be at the most subtle and plastic level of these events. In the first stage of our enquiry an introduction to conventional synaptic theory leads on to an account of the manner of operation of the ultimate synaptic units. These units are the synaptic boutons that, when excited by an all-or-nothing nerve impulse, deliver the total contents of a single synaptic vesicle, not regularly, but probabilistically. This quantal emission of the synaptic transmitter molecules (about 5000-10 000) is the elementary unit of the transmission process from one neuron to another. In the second stage this refined physiological analysis leads on to an account of the ultrastructure of the synapse, which gives clues as to the manner of its unitary probabilistic operation. The essential feature is that the effective structure of each bouton is a paracrystalline presynaptic vesicular grid with about 50 vesicles, which acts probabilistically in vesicular (quantal) release. In the third stage it is considered how a non-material mental event, such as an intention to move, could influence the subtle probabilistic operations of synaptic boutons. On the biological side, attention is focused on the paracrystalline presynaptic vesicular grids as the targets for non-material mental events. On the physical side, attention is focused on the probabilistic fields of quantum mechanics which carry neither mass nor energy, but which nevertheless can exert effective action at microsites. The new light on the mind-brain problem came from the hypothesis that the non-material mental events, the 'World 2' of Popper, relate to the neural events of the brain (the 'World 1' of matter and energy) by actions in conformity with quantum theory. This hypothesis that mental events act on probabilistic synaptic events in a manner analogous to the probability fields of quantum mechanics seems to open up an immense field of scientific investigation both in quantum physics and in neuroscience.
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J Eccles, A unitary hypothesis of mind-brain interaction in the cerebral cortex., Proceedings Of The Royal Society Of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 240 (1990) 433-451.
A brief introduction to the brain-mind problem leads on to a survey of the neuronal structure of the cerebral cortex. It is proposed that the basic receptive units are the bundles or clusters of apical dendrites of the pyramidal cells of laminae V and III-II as described by Fleischhauer and Peters and their associates. There are up to 100 apical dendrites in these receptive units, named dendrons. Each dendron would have an input of up to 100,000 spine synapses. There are about 40 million dendrons in the human cerebral cortex. A study of the influence of mental events on the brain leads to the hypothesis that all mental events, the whole of the World 2 of Popper, are composed of mental units, each carrying its own characteristic mental experience. It is further proposed that each mental unit, named psychon, is uniquely linked to a dendron. So the mind-brain problem reduces to the interaction between a dendron and its psychon for all the 40 million linked units. In my 1986 paper (Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 227, 411-428) on the mind-brain problem, there was developed the concept that the operation of the synaptic microsites involved displacement of particles so small that they were within range of the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. The psychon-dendron interaction provides a much improved basis for effective selection by a process analogous to a quantal probability field. In the fully developed hypothesis psychons act on dendrons in the whole world of conscious experiences and dendrons act on psychons in all perceptions and memories. It is shown how these interactions involve no violation of the conservation laws. There are great potentialities of these unitary concepts, for example as an explanation of the global nature of a visual experience from moment to moment. It would seem that there can be psychons not linked to dendrons, but only to other psychons, creating what we may call a psychon world.
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George F R Ellis, On Effective Field Theories and Emergence: A Response to Luu and Meissner, , 2020.
The paper "On the Topic of Emergence from an Effective Field Theory Perspective" by Luu and Meissner [arXiv:1910.13770] criticizes claims of strong emergence in physics and biology, such as those in [Ellis 2016], inter alia challenging the idea that there is purpose in living systems. They argue on the basis of the power of Effective Field Theories in calculating low energy phenomena in a bottom-up way. However this line of argument fails to account for cases of strong emergence in condensed matter physics and soft matter physics, where broken symmetries or topological effects are key to what happens. By distinguishing four different types of symmetry breaking, I demonstrate that strong emergence takes place in condensed matter physics, physical chemistry, biology, and at the foundations of physics, where it is needed to explain the direction of the arrows of time. The domain of application of effective field theories of the kind considered by Luu and Meissner is strictly limited, because they do not allow symmetry breaking. They therefore do not apply to condensed matter physics or soft matter physics, and have nothing to say about strong emergence in organic chemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, or neuroscience.
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Ellen Fridland, Intention at the Interface, , 2019 pp. 1-25.
I identify and characterize the kind of personal-level control-structure that is most relevant for skilled action control, namely, what I call,
'practical intention'. I differentiate between practical intentions and general intentions not in terms of their function or timing but in terms of their content. I also highlight a distinction between practical intentions and other control mechanisms that are required to explain skilled action. I maintain that all intentions, general and practical, have the function specifying (and thus guiding according to those specifications), sustaining, and structuring action but that several functions that have been attributed to proximal intentions are actually implemented by other control mechanisms that are not themselves best identified as intentions. Specifically, I will claim that practical intentions do not initiate, monitor, specify or guide the fine-grained, online, kinematic aspects of action. Finally, I suggest that the way in which practical and general intentions should be differentiated is in terms of their content, where general intentions specify the overall goal, outcome, or end of an action as it is conceived of by the agent at a time, and practical intentions determine the means to that end. I conclude by providing empirical evidence to support this way of characterizing the intentions that “interface” with the mechanisms of motor control. Though this discussion has repercussions for action in general, I will limit my discussion to cases of skill.
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Jeffrey Koperski and Evangelical Philosophical Society, Breaking Laws of Nature, Philosophia Christi,
19 (2017) 83-101.
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Bob Larking, Does the Conservation of Energy Principle prove the falsity of Interactionistic Dualism?, , 2013 pp. 1-28.
This paper will explore the argument that the conservation of energy principle (CEP) proves interactionistic dualism wrong. The principle is often posited as showing that there cannot be bilateral causal interaction between a non-physical mind and physical body, because the energy transfer in such causal situations would violate the conservation law of classical physics that for any loses or gains there must be the opposite gains or losses respectively. I consider redistribution counterarguments to the CEP, primarily that of quantum indeterminacy. I believe these counterarguments show that it is far from certain that the CEP proves interactionistic dualism wrong.
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A Nichvoloda, Quantum Uncertainty Reduction (QUR) Theory of Access and Phenomenal Consciousness, Journal Of Consciousness Studies,
.
Consciousness is widely perceived as a phenomenon that poses a special explanatory problem for science. The problem arises from the apparent rift between immediate first-person acquaintance with consciousness and our inability to provide an objective/scientific third-person characterization of consciousness. In this paper, I outline a theory of perceptual consciousness called the ‘Quantum Uncertainty Reduction (QUR)1 Theory of Access and Phenomenal Consciousness’. The theory offers a functional solution to the hard problem of con- sciousness in terms of quantum information processing in a Bayesian- brain-inspired information processing system. I argue that the central aspect/step of information processing, namely, quantum uncertainty reduction, gives rise to qualitative properties of phenomenal and access consciousness.
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G Pareti, Hans Driesch's Interest in the Psychical Research. A Historical Study, Medicina Historica,
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In recent times the source of interest in psychical research in Germany has been subject of relevant studies. Not infrequently these works have dealt with this phenomenon through the interpretation of the various steps and transformations present in Hans Driesch’s thought, from biology and medicine to neovital- ism, and finally to parapsychology. However these studies identified the causes of this growing involvement in paranormal research either in the historical context of “crisis” of modernity (or “crisis” in psychology), or in an attempt to “normalize” the supernatural as an alternative to the traditional experimental psychology. My paper aims instead at throwing light on the constant effort by Driesch to conceive (and found) psychical re- search as a science of the super-normal, using the methodology successfully adopted by the scientific community (especially German) in the late nineteenth century.
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Peter Rauschenberger, The dogma of physical closure, , 2016 pp. 1-48.
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J Brian Pitts, Conservation Laws and the Philosophy of Mind: Opening the Black Box, Finding a Mirror, ,
2019 pp. 1-35.
Since Leibniz’s time, Cartesian mental causation has been criticized for violating the conservation of energy and momentum. (Non-epiphenomenalist property dual- ism is analogous.) Many dualist responses clearly fail. But conservation laws have important neglected features generally undermining the objection. Conservation is local, holding first not for the universe, but for everywhere separately. The energy (or momentum, etc.) in any volume changes only due to what flows through the bound- aries (no teleportation). Constant total energy holds if the global summing-up of local conservation laws converges; it probably doesn’t in reality. Energy (momentum) con- servation holds if there is symmetry, the sameness of the laws over time (space). Thus, if there are time-places where symmetries fail due to nonphysical influence, conservation laws fail there and then, while holding elsewhere, such as refrigerators and stars. Noether’s converse first theorem shows that conservation laws imply sym- metries. Thus conservation trivially nearly entails the causal closure of the physical. But expecting conservation to hold in the brain (without looking) simply assumes the falsehood of Cartesianism. Hence Leibniz’s objection begs the question. Empirical neuroscience is another matter. So is Einstein’s General Relativity: far from providing a loophole, General Relativity makes mental causation harder.
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J Brian Pitts, Conservation of Energy: Missing Features in Its Nature and Justification and Why They Matter, Foundations Of Science,
90 (2020) 102-46.
Misconceptions about energy conservation abound due to the gap between physics and secondary school chemistry. This paper surveys this difference and its relevance to the 1690s-2010s Leibnizian argu- ment that mind-body interaction is impossible due to conservation laws.
Justifications for energy conservation are partly empirical, such as Joule’s paddle wheel experiment, and partly theoretical, such as La- grange’s statement in 1811 that energy is conserved if the potential energy does not depend on time. In 1918 Noether generalized results like Lagrange’s and proved a converse: symmetries imply conserva- tion laws and vice versa. Conservation holds if and only if nature is uniform.
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Louis J Swingrover, Why Interactionism is not Defeated by Objections from the Law of Conservation of Energy, ,
2018 pp. 1-22.
Philosophers continue to debate the metaphysics of the mind, dividing over even such fundamental questions as whether the mind is physical, and if so, in what sense is it physical? Does it causally interact with the body? If so, how? The view that a substantial, non-physical mind causally interacts with a physical body is called “Interactionism”. “The Interaction Problem” heads a class of objections to Interactionism that take aim at the nature of the relationship between mind and body on the Interactionist account. The most general objection is that Interactionism lacks a fully-explicated mechanism of mental causation. However arguments that a phenomenon such as interaction occurs need not explain how the phe- nomenon works in order to be successful. A more forceful objection is that any interaction between a physical and a non-physical substance would vi- olate the Law of Conservation of Energy, a fundamental tenant of physics. However the laws of physics, even if properly described by scientists, are not true by necessity and therefore may not be universal, our current understanding of physics is provisional anyway, and mind-body interaction can be modeled to be consistent with the Law of Conservation of Energy. I propose two models: Discrete Spatial Transitioning, which posits mental control of the locations of physical components, and Physically Underdetermined Routing, which posits mental control of the behaviors of physical components.
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