Abstract
The received view in physicalist philosophy of mind assumes that causation can only take place at the physical domain and that the physical domain is causally closed. It is often thought that this leaves no room for mental states qua mental to have a causal influence upon the physical domain, leading to epiphenomenalism and the problem of mental causation. However, in recent philosophy of causation there has been growing interest in a line of thought that can be called causal anti-fundamentalism: causal notions cannot play a role in physics, because the fundamental laws of physics are radically different from causal laws. Causal anti-fundamentalism seems to challenge the received view in physicalist philosophy of mind and thus raises the possibility of there being genuine mental causation after all. This paper argues that while causal anti-fundamentalism provides a possible route to mental causation, we have reasons to think that it is incorrect. Does this mean that we have to accept the received view and give up the hope of genuine mental causation? I will suggest that the ontological interpretation of quantum theory provides us both with a view about the nature of causality in fundamental physics, as well as a view how genuine mental causation can be compatible with our fundamental (quantum) physical ontology.
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Notes
- 1.
Metaphysical grounding is, of course, a subtle topic in contemporary metaphysics, and we will not here enter into a discussion about what exactly it might mean when one says that fundamental physical facts ground causal facts. But see Bliss and Trogdon 2016. An additional challenge is to spell out how physical facts could ground non-physical, conscious facts (thanks to Tuomas Tahko for pointing out this challenge).
- 2.
As I am not a physicist, I offer these proposals tentatively, to be discussed in more detail by those physicists specialized in Bohmian mechanics.
- 3.
Again, I am offering this proposal tentatively as a philosopher, to be discussed in more detail by physicists.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the Annual Colloqium of the Philosophical Society of Finland in Helsinki, January 2018; at The Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, USA, April 2018; at the Parmenides Foundation workshop “Rethinking Matter, Life and Mind”, Tegernsee, Germany, September 2018; and at the “Scientific metaphysics” workshop at the University of Helsinki, January 2019. I thank the participants of these events for valuable comments and questions. The work for this paper was partially funded by the Fetzer Franklin Fund of the John E. Fetzer Memorial Trust.
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Pylkkänen, P. (2019). Quantum Theory and the Place of Mind in the Causal Order of Things. In: de Barros, J.A., Montemayor, C. (eds) Quanta and Mind. Synthese Library, vol 414. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21908-6_14
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