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Deciding the Mind–Body Problem Experimentally

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Abstract

A Bell-type strategy of decision for the long-standing question of the nature of psychophysical correlations has been previously presented in a recent article published in Mind and Matter. This strategy of decision is here applied to experimental data on psychophysiological correlations, namely, correlations between cardiovascular and emotional variables that have been reported in several independent publications. This statistical analysis shows that a substantial majority of these correlations cannot be interpreted as an exchange of signals or a mere “interaction”, whatever its form, but that these correlations could a priori be explained classically, as the result of a common preparation during the evolution process. A discussion on the scope and the limitations of this result will then be provided. In particular, alternative explanations of the psychophysical correlations that do not appeal to a notion of signalling (on which we focus here) will be discussed.

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Notes

  1. By the Gelfand and Naimark theorem (1943), any C*-algebra is isomorphic to a closed *-algebra of the bounded operators B(H) of a Hilbert space H, the involution * being in correspondence with the operation of taking the adjoint sub-space for any subspace of B(H). Thus, to any generalized system can be associated a complex Hilbert space defined from the algebra of its observables and the set of its states.

  2. This can be done according to several very reliable methods, for example by using imagery (Lang 1979). The emotional state of the subject after such a conditioning can be roughly regarded as a “pure” state.

  3. Buhrman and Massar have established this result from general considerations on the physical structure of quantum mechanics (unitarity and linearity), and Choudhary et al. from the possibility, for quantum systems, of performing joint measurement and from a no signaling condition.

  4. Let us emphasize that the latter assertion does not challenge Popescu’s and Rohrlich’s assumption according to which super-quantum correlations (which violate the Tsirelson bound) could exist between two non-signaling systems that are supposed not to be describable by the quantum-like formalism (Popescu and Rohrlich 1994; Popescu 2015). The reason is that we have used here a quantum-like formalism (C* algebra of observables and Hilbert space representation) to deal with the question under consideration and within this formalism the violation of the Tsirelson bound characterizes exactly the exchange of signals (see the previous note).

  5. The distinction between mental and bodily properties is here conceived of pure phenomenal order since it refers to what we experience in every-day life and not necessarily to ontologically distinct “substances”.

  6. In some sense, this conclusion echoes with Spinoza’s parallelism of aspects (Spinoza 1675: Ethics). According to Spinoza’s philosophy, the irreducibility of the bodily and mental features of the individual is kept even though their strong correlation is not explained by the existence of a direct, causal connexion but by the existence of a common cause -for Spinoza, these correlations would have God or Nature as their only cause while here it is the evolution process that plays this role.

  7. According to physicalism, everything in our world derives from matter and could ultimately be explained by the physical laws.

  8. The reason is that a sufficient physical cause of any brain or bodily event, which necessarily exists in virtue of the causal closure of the physical world, would pre-empt its alleged mental cause (Kim 2005).

  9. And asserting that it would be “inappropriate to control for supervenience bases in asserting the causal efficacy of supervening properties” (Woodward 2011, p. 13) can only confirm the inapplicability of the interventionist account of causation for interpreting the notion of mental causation.

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  1. Laboratory of History and Philosophy of Science, SPHERE, UMR 7219 CNRS, University Paris-Diderot, Building Condorcet, Case 7093, Street Thomas Mann, 5, 75205, Paris Cedex 13, France

    Pierre Uzan

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Uzan, P. Deciding the Mind–Body Problem Experimentally. Axiomathes 27, 333–354 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-016-9320-4

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