Quantum Physics and Mental Causation

By Robert O. (“Bob”) Doyle

A paper prepared for a conference on Quantum Physics and the Philosophy of Mind, Milan, Italy, June 4-6, 2013.

Abstract:

The problem of mental causation depends heavily on the idea of “causal closure” of the world under deterministic laws of nature. The central question in the classic mind-body problem is how can an immaterial mind move a material body if the “causal chains” are limited to interactions between physical things.

We propose a model or theory of mind as the pure information in the biological information-processing system that is the brain and central nervous system. We show how this model can support a non-reductive physicalism. Information is physical, but immaterial. Quantum physics produces breaks in the strict “causal chains” that have been used to “reduce” biological phenomena to physics and chemistry and mental events to neural events. But statistical causes remain.

Biological information processors are quite different from the digital computers analogized in computational theories of mind.

We argue against neurobiological reductionism and strictly determined “bottom-up causation.” At the same time, we defend a supervenient statistical “downward causation” that allows free thoughts (mental events that are not pre-determined) to cause willed actions. Actions are ultimately statistical but “adequately determined” by our motives, reasons, intentions, desires, and feelings, in short, by our character.

Introduction:

Quantum mechanical events have generally been thought to be unhelpful by philosophers of mind. Adding indeterminism to mental events apparently would only make our actions random and our desires the product of pure chance. If our willed actions are not determined by anything, they say, we are neither morally responsible nor truly free. Whether mental events are reducible to physical events, or whether mental events can be physical events without such a reduction, the interposition of indeterministic quantum processes apparently adds no explanatory power. And of course if mental events are epiphenomenal, they are not causally related to bodily actions. Epiphenomenal access to quantum physics would not help.

[Some philosophers of mind (e.g., John Searle David Chalmers Christoph Koch?) have considered the “mystery” of quantum indeterminism as potentially relevant to philosophy of mind, for example specifically to the problem of consciousness,

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because it too is a “mystery. “ But explaining one mystery with another mystery is questionable, at best.]

Our challenge is to admit some quantum indeterminism into a “statistical” causality (an indeterminism which renders our mental causes merely “statistical”) yet nevertheless allow us to describe mental causes as “adequately determined.” That is to say, mental causes are essentially - and for all practical purposes - “determined,” because the statistics in most cases are near to certainty. Even more importantly, our thoughts - and subsequent actions – are in no way completely “pre-determined,” neither from causal chains that go back before our birth such as our genetic inheritance, nor from the immediate events in the “fixed past,” which together with assumed deterministic “laws of nature,” are thought by most compatibilist philosophers to completely explain our actions.

In part I of this paper we explore a mental causation model of non-reductive physicalism that treats the mind as physical, but nevertheless immaterial. Specifically, we identify the mind as the information in a brain. We regard the brain and central nervous system as a biological information-processing system, one that has very little in common with the computational brain models of today’s cognitive science.

Information is immaterial. It is neither matter nor energy, although it needs matter for its (temporary) embodiment and energy for its communication - for example to other minds or for storage in the external environment.

In part II, we review the arguments for quantum mechanical indeterminism and show how quantum physics introduces indeterminism into the motions of the fundamental particles, making their motions stochastic and their future positions statistical, not certain.

Indeterminism breaks critically located links in the “causal chains” that have historically been used by philosophers of mind to argue for “bottom-up” causation. Breaking these deterministic links means that the properties of biological cells cannot be reduced to those of its component atoms and molecules, those of plants and animals cannot be reduced to those of its cells, and the mind cannot be reduced to neurons in the brain.

In Part III we give three examples of breaking causal chains - between atoms and molecules, between molecules and cells, and between neurons and the information structures of the mind.

Part IV then makes the case for specific “emergent” properties at those higher hierarchical levels that could not have been predicted from the laws of lower levels. We then defend an emergent capability for “downward causation,” in which biological systems have limited causal powers over their cells, and their cells have

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causal powers over component atoms and molecules. At the highest level, we show how the mind can exert a supervenient downward causation on the brain. Mental causation is needed for an agent to act willfully. The agent’s actions are adequately determined by the agent’s motives, reasons, feelings, intentions, and desires.

In part V we show that determinism itself is an emergent property. Determinism shows up only when we can average over a large enough number of atoms and molecules so that indeterministic events are statistically insignificant. Since this kind of determinism is only highly probable, and not perfectly certain, we call it “adequate” determinism. We review the process that creates emergent adequately determined macroscopic information structures in the universe, despite the second law of thermodynamics which demands an increase in disorder or entropy.

Part VI situates this quantum physical and informational model of mental causation in the spectrum of theories of mind, somewhere between the classical substance dualism of René Descartes and the mind-body identity theory of Ullin T. Place, Herbert Feigl, and J.J.C Smart.

Part I. An information-based model for non-reductive physicalism.

The leading defender of a non-reductive physicalism was Donald Davidson. Its leading critic is Jaegwon Kim. In his 1970 essay "Mental Events," Davidson described his "Anomalous Monism":

“Mental events such as perceivings, rememberings, decisions, and actions resist capture in the nomological net of physical theory. How can this fact be reconciled with the causal role of mental events in the physical world? Reconciling freedom with causal determinism is a special case of the problem if we suppose that causal determinism entails capture in, and freedom requires escape from, the nomological net. But the broader issue can remain alive even for someone who believes a correct analysis of free action reveals no conflict with determinism. Autonomy (freedom, self-rule) may or may not clash with determinism; anomaly (failure to fall under a law) is, it would seem, another matter.”

In order to allow mental events to cause physical events, yet not be reducible to them, Davidson developed the following set of arguments.

1. "at least some mental events interact causally with physical events"2. "where there is causality, there must be a law: events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws."3. "there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained." (mental events are "anomalous.")

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Davidson viewed his work as extending that of Immanuel Kant on reconciling (eliminating the anomalous contradiction between) freedom and necessity. Davidson gave the term supervenience a specific philosophical meaning within analytic philosophy. He saw supervenience as the last hope for a non-reductive physicalism, which does not reduce the mental to the physical, the psychological to the neurophysiological.

Davidson set two requirements for supervenience:

1. a domain can be supervenient on another without being reducible to it (non reduction)

2. if a domain supervenes, it must be dependent on and be determined by the subvenient domain (dependence)

In Jaegwon Kim's 1989 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, he said:

“The fact is that under Davidson's anomalous monism, mentality does no causal work. Remember: in anomalous monism, events are causes only as they instantiate physical laws, and this means that an event's mental properties make no causal difference.”

Kim claims that:

“The most fundamental tenet of physicalism concerns the ontology of the world. It claims that the content of the world is wholly exhausted by matter. Material things are all the things that there are; there is nothing inside the spacetime world that isn't material, and of course there is nothing outside it either. The spacetime world is the whole world, and material things, bits of matter and complex structures made up of bits of matter, are its only inhabitants.”

Kim says that Davidson's goal of "non-reductive physicalism" is simply not possible. The physical world is "causally closed," says Kim:

“what options are there if we set aside the physicalist picture? … This means that one would be embracing an ontology that posits entities other than material substances — that is, immaterial minds, or souls, outside physical space, with immaterial, nonphysical properties.”

An informational theory of mind posits the existence of something physical, yet immaterial. It is both a “non-reductive physicalism” and an “immaterial physicalism.”

The germ of the idea was apparent in a series of papers in the 1950’s and 1960’s by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, whose theory of functionalism pointed to characteristics of mind that are “multiply realizable” in different physical substrates. They were inspired by the then new digital computers, whose software could be

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moved between different computers and perform the same functions. Mind is the software in the brain hardware, they argued.

Our informational theory of mind shows how thoughts that are embodied in one mind can be converted from their material instantiation and transformed into the pure energy of sound waves or electromagnetic waves by which they are communicated to other minds, there to be embodied again. During communication, the information in human knowledge is not even embodied in material, though it is still a part of the physical world.

Part II. Quantum physics introduces the chance needed to break the chains of strict causal determinism

The problem of mental causation can be traced back to the first half of the seventeenth century and René Descartes, who divided the world into three distinct substances; God as the primary substance; matter, which has a spatial extension; and mind, a thinking substance which is the locus of intellect and a free will.

Descartes thought that animal and human bodies are machines subject to laws of matter alone. His famous “cogito, ergo sum” argument was used to distinguish his thinking substance from his material body.

“I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist. I saw on the contrary that from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have had no reason to believe that I existed. From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist.” (Discourse on Method, 6:32)

Whereas Descartes argued that the thinking substance had freedom of the will, his materialist contemporary Thomas Hobbes saw necessity and deterministic laws of nature that denied human freedom.

“That which I say necessitates and determinates every action is the sum of all those things which, being now existent, conduce and concur to the production of the action hereafter, whereof if any one thing were wanting, the effect could not be produced. This concourse of causes, whereof every one is determined to be such as it is by a like concourse of former causes, may well be called the decree of God.” (Of Liberty and Necessity, § 11)

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In the second half of the eighteenth century, the great Isaac Newton discovered his three laws of physics that seemed for many to come down on the side of Hobbes and determinism. Explaining the heavenly motion, Newtonian laws surely could explain all the workings of terrestrial material machines.

The power to predict eclipses of moon and sun many years in advance was extrapolated in the eighteenth-century by Pierre-Simon Laplace to the idea of a super intelligence that can predict the future based on a knowledge of positions, velocities, and forces of all the particles of matter.

Thus arose the concept of “causal closure” and what might be called “the great chain of causation.” But in the late nineteenth century, some philosophers and scientists came to wonder whether our physical laws, derived as they are from fallible experiments and measurements with only finite accuracy, are as absolute and perfect and strict as most scientists and philosophers believed.

Charles Sanders Peirce was the leading philosopher who argued that the world contained absolute chance. Peirce was deeply impressed by chance as a way to bring diversity and "progress" (in the form of increasingly complex organisms) to the world, including the mind. Peirce was unequivocal that chance was a real property of the world. He named it Tyche ( ). He writes in his third Monist article, "The τύχηLaw of Mind,"

“In an article published in The Monist for January, 1891, I endeavored to show what ideas ought to form the warp of a system of philosophy, and particularly emphasized that of absolute chance. In the number of April, 1892, I argued further in favor of that way of thinking, which it will be convenient to christen tychism (from , chance)... I τύχηhave begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth.”

Physicist Ludwig Boltzmann was the leading scientist who argued against perfect deterministic laws. Boltzmann's first attempt to derive the second law of thermodynamics (that entropy or disorder in the universe always increases) assumed that gas particles followed strict deterministic dynamical laws, that is, Newton's classical mechanics. But Boltzmann was immediately criticized by his colleagues James Clerk Maxwell and Josef Loschmidt.

Boltzmann's mentor and colleague Loschmidt criticized Boltzmann's demonstration of entropy increase on the grounds that dynamical laws are time reversible. If all the particles could be turned around exactly (or if time could be reversed), in such a case the entropy should decrease, violating the second law.

As a result, Boltzmann developed a statistical version of his H-Theorem, which again showed that entropy would always increase, as long as the fundamental particles themselves had what he called “molecular disorder” or “molecular chaos.”

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Boltzmann explained the gas laws of thermodynamics as statistical laws resulting from averaging over an enormous number (billions of billions of billions) of chaotic atoms and molecules. Boltzmann maintained (as his student Franz Exner, and even Exner's student Erwin Schrödinger would briefly insist) that no amount of observational evidence can ever justify our assumptions of strict determinism.[]

Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, observational evidence led to the notion that fundamental physical quantities like energy and momentum need to be “quantized,” putting irreducible limits on our ability to observe atoms and molecules. This in turn led to quantum indeterminism, breaking the causal chain of determinism that was thought to put limits on the workings of the human mind.

Max Planck in 1900 introduced the quantum concept. He explained the spectral distribution of colors (wavelengths) in electromagnetic radiation by using Boltzmann’s principle that the entropy S of a gas is related to the probabilities W for random distribution of molecules in different places in its container (S = k logW, where k is Boltzmann’s constant). Boltzmann’s calculations of probabilities used the number of ways that particles can be distributed in various volumes of space. Planck used the same combinatorial analysis, but now for the number of ways that elements of energy could be distributed among a number of electromagnetic oscillators. To simplify the calculations, both Boltzmann and Planck assumed that energies could be multiples of a unit of energy, E = , 2 , 3 …. Plank regarded this ε ε εquantum hypothesis as a mathematically convenient device. He did not think it represented reality. Nevertheless, this was the beginning of quantum theory. And even more importantly it provided the first connection between the laws of matter and the laws of pure energy (radiation). Planck told his son he had discovered something as significant as Copernicus or Newton. [ref- Kuhn]

Five years later, Albert Einstein, in the same year that he published his theory of special relativity (also connecting energy and matter, but now with the famous equation E = mc2), his theory of Brownian motion, and his explanation of the photoelectric effect (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize), proposed that electromagnetic radiation really consists of discrete quantities of light (he called them lichtquant - today they are called photons). Radiant energy E = hν, where h is Planck’s constant - the “quantum of action,” Planck called it - and ν is the frequency of the radiation.

When in 1913 Neils Bohr published his work on the quantization of energy levels in atoms (the so-called "old" quantum theory), he did not imagine that the transitions between quantized energy levels involved quantized light particles. And this despite the use of Einstein's formula and Planck's constant to determine the frequency of the light energy emitted in a transition between energy levels: E2 - E1 = hν21.

As late as 1917, Einstein felt very much alone in believing the reality (his emphasis) of light quanta:

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“I do not doubt anymore the reality of radiation quanta, although I still stand quite alone in this conviction.”

(Letter to Besso, quoted by Abraham Pais," "Subtle is the Lord...", p.411)

But the introduction of Boltzmann's statistical mechanical thinking to electromagnetic theory has produced what Einstein called a "weakness in the theory." It introduces the reality of an irreducible objective chance!

If light quanta are particles with energy E = h travelling at the velocity of light c, νthen they should have a momentum p = E/c = h /c. When light is absorbed by νmaterial particles, this momentum will clearly be transferred to the particle. But when light is emitted by an atom or molecule, a problem appears.

Conservation of momentum requires that the momentum of the emitted particle will cause an atom to recoil with momentum h /c in the opposite direction. However, νthe standard theory of spontaneous emission of radiation is that it produces a spherical wave going out in all directions. A spherically symmetric wave has no preferred direction. In which direction does the atom recoil?

An outgoing light particle must impart momentum h /c to the atom or molecule, νbut the direction of the momentum cannot be predicted! Neither can the theory predict the time when the light quantum will be emitted.

Such a random time was not unknown to physics. When Ernest Rutherford derived the law for radioactive decay of unstable atomic nuclei in 1900, he could only give the probability of decay time. Einstein saw the connection with radiation emission:

“It speaks in favor of the theory that the statistical law assumed for [spontaneous] emission is nothing but the Rutherford law of radioactive decay.”

(Pais," "Subtle is the Lord...", p.411)

But the inability to predict both the time and direction of light particle emissions, said Einstein in 1917, is "a weakness in the theory... that it leaves time and direction of elementary processes to chance (Zufall, ibid.)." And, of course for Einstein, God does not play dice.

In 1925 Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Pascual Jordan, formulated their matrix mechanics version of quantum mechanics as a superior formulation of Neils Bohr's old quantum theory. The matrix mechanics confirmed discrete states and "quantum jumps" of electrons between the energy levels, with emission or absorption of Einstein’s light quanta.

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In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger developed wave mechanics as an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger disliked Heisenberg’s abrupt jumps. His wave mechanics was a continuous theory, but it predicted the same energy levels and was otherwise identical in its predictions to the discrete theory.

Within months of the new wave mechanics, Max Born showed that while Schrödinger's probability amplitude wave function evolved over time deterministically, it only predicts the positions and velocities of atomic particles probabilistically.

It is critically important to understand that probability is nothing but abstract information. It is neither matter nor energy, despite the fact that it often needs energy to be transmitted and it needs matter to be embodied in the receiver.

Heisenberg used Schrödinger's wave functions to calculate the "transition probabilities" for electrons to jump from one energy level to another. Schrödinger's wave mechanics was easier to visualize and much easier to calculate than Heisenberg's own matrix mechanics, although wave mechanics and matrix mechanics are isomorphisms, two ways of looking at the one theory of quantum mechanics.

Despite this identity, Schrödinger always stressed that the time evolution of his wave function, which gives the probability of observing a particle, is a deterministic process. While Heisenberg emphasized that in any measurement that locates a particle, there is an irreducible indeterminism.

In early 1927, Heisenberg announced his uncertainty principle limiting our ability to measure the simultaneous position and velocity of atomic particles. The product of the position error and the momentum error is greater than or equal to Planck's constant h/2 .π

p x ≥ hΔ Δ /2 π

Heisenberg declared that the new quantum theory undermines the classical idea of causality. Confirming Einstein’s insights from many years earlier (but without mentioning him), Heisenberg said:

"We cannot - and here is where the causal law breaks down - explain why a particular atom will decay at one moment and not the next, or what causes it to emit an electron in this direction rather than that." []

Heisenberg was convinced that quantum mechanics had put an end to classical ideas of causality and strict determinism. Although Planck, Einstein, Schrödinger, and others had their doubts about Heisenberg’s attack on causality, quantum physics has proved to be the most accurate theory of the physical world.

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When radiation interacts with matter, first being absorbed from a specific direction, then being emitted in an arbitrary direction (as Einstein first showed in 1917), the motion of the atom changes stochastically. As a result, any deterministic path information is destroyed. Even a Laplace demon could not know where the atom goes next. If it were to form part of a molecule, for example, there is no way that that molecule’s existence was determined by immediate past events.

Consequently, we can say that there is no “bottom-up” causation that links the positions and velocities of atoms with the positions and velocities of molecules that they might form.

Note that after they are combined into molecules, there is now a “downward causation,” because the motions of the molecules constrain the motions of their component atoms. This “downward causation” is an emergent property, a we shall see in Part IV.

We shall now see that quantum physics can break upward causal deterministic chains between the physics of the atomic and molecular level and the biophysics of the organic world. It also breaks any deterministic chains between the neurobiological brain and the mind, replacing them with a statistical causality that provides us with what William James called “some looseness in the joints.” []

Part III. Breaking causal chains in cells and neurons

Inside a cell, the high-speed random motions of the molecules is critically important to the rapid creation of proteins. As a ribosome travels down the messenger RNA reading each three-nucleotide codon, it expects there to be an available transfer RNA complex nearby with the three appropriate amino acids attached close to their binding site on the growing polypeptide chain.

The average time between bindings of the amino acid triplets is one microsecond. [] The only reason that the correct one is available when necessary is that on the average, every other triplet was also available in the same microsecond, thanks to those high-speed random motions. There could be no pre-arranged sequences of the correct transfer RNA of the kind needed to have the lower-level molecules controlling which proteins are being built in a “bottom-up” causal way.

Once again, the lower level is random and stochastic. The information that is causing or determining the process is only present at the next higher level, from which it is exerting downward causal control over the molecules, albeit statistically.

Note that the three amino acids attached themselves to the transfer RNA in a similar stochastic fashion. There is no deterministic control coming from below. The transfer RNA grabs the amino acids it needs as they collide with it at random. This layer of random chaos erases any past path information of the molecules, insulating

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the upper level from deterministic “bottom up” causation, even as the upper level exerts its downward causal control.

Neurons, while microscopically small compared to the body, are huge compared to even the largest biological macromolecules. They are large enough to be “adequately determined” systems, not normally susceptible to atomic or molecular indeterminacy. When neurons fire, billions of atoms (mostly charged ions) are involved. At 98 degrees centigrade, individual ions are moving randomly, at very high speeds. They move in concert (by “downward causation”) when the relatively high-voltage action potential moves down the neuron. There is no possibility for atomic level motions to cause (“bottom-up”) the

But the situation is a bit different at the synapses and at all of the tiny ion channels along the neuron. When neurotransmitters travel across the synaptic cleft, they are carried in another kind of “quanta,” the vesicles of neurotransmitter, each containing only a few thousand molecules (of dopamine, acetylcholine, etc.)

Part IV. The emergence of downward mental causation.

Although the concept of emergence has become very popular in the last few decades in connection with the development of chaos and complexity theories, it is actually a very old idea, dating at least to the nineteenth century, with some hints of it in ancient and medieval philosophy.

The idea of emergence was implicit in the work of John Stuart Mill and explicit in "emergentists" like George Henry Lewes, Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad.

John Stuart Mill discusses the Laws of Nature in his System of Logic, Book III, chapter IV and describes the Law of Universal Causation in chapter V ("The truth that every fact which has a beginning has a cause"). Then, in chapter VI, Mill explores the "Composition of Causes" in mechanics where the parallelogram of two vector forces explains the resultant force. However, this simple principle from dynamics, says Mill, does not apply to materialist chemistry nor to more complex biological life.

Although Mill did not use the term "emergent," he makes the concept clear enough:

“This principle [of simple composition], however, by no means prevails in all departments of the field of nature. The chemical combination of two substances produces, as is well known, a third substance with properties different from those of either of the two substances separately, or of both of them taken together. Not a trace of the properties of hydrogen or of oxygen is observable in those of their compound, water. The taste of sugar of lead is not the sum of the tastes of its component elements,

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acetic acid and lead or its oxide; nor is the colour blue vitriol a mixture of the colours of sulphuric acid and copper. This explains why mechanics is a deductive or demonstrative science, and chemistry not. In the one, we can compute the effects of m combinations of causes, whether real or hypothetical, from the laws which we know to govern those causes when acting separately; because they continue to observe the same laws when in combination which they observed when separate: whatever could have happened in consequence of each cause taken by itself, happens when they are together, and we have only to "cast up" the results. Not so in the phenomena which are the peculiar subject of the science of chemistry. There, most of the uniformities to which the causes conformed when separate cease altogether when they are conjoined; and we are not, at least in the present state of our knowledge, able to foresee what result will follow from any new combination, until we have tried the specific experiment.

“If this be true of chemical combinations, it is still more true of those far more complex combinations of elements which constitute organized bodies; and in which those extraordinary new uniformities arise, which are called the laws of life. All organized bodies are composed of parts similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an organic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents.”

(A System of Logic, Book III, chapter VI)

George Henry Lewes also used Mill's example of the properties of water not being reducible to those of oxygen and hydrogen. If all effects are only the consequences of their components, everything would be completely determined by mathematical laws, he said, and then coined the term "emergent":

“Although each effect is the resultant of its components, the product of its factors, we cannot always trace the steps of the process, so as to see in the product the mode of operation of each factor. In the latter case, I propose to call the effect an emergent. It arises out of the combined agencies, but in a form which does not display the agents in action.”

(Problems of Life and Mind (1875), vol. 2, p. 412)

In his 1912 book Instinct and Experience, C. Lloyd Morgan revived the term "emergent".

In his 1920 book Space, Time, and Deity Samuel Alexander initially cited Lloyd Morgan as the source of emergentism, but Lloyd Morgan reminded Alexander about Lewes' 1875 work. Alexander wrote:

“much of what I have to say has been already said by Mr. Lloyd Morgan in the concluding chapter of his work on Instinct and Experience. The argument is that mind has certain specific characters to which there is or even can be no neural counterpart. It is not enough to say that there is no mechanical counterpart, for the neural structure is

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not mechanical but physiological and has life. Mind is, according to our interpretation of the facts, an 'emergent' from life, and life an emergent from a lower physico-chemical level of existence. It may well be that, as some think, life itself implies some independent entity and is indeed only mind in a lower form. But this is a different question, which does not concern us yet.If life is mind, and is a non-physical entity, arguments derived from the conscious features of mind are at best only corroborative, and it is an inconvenience in these discussions that the two sets of arguments are sometimes combined. Accordingly. I may neglect such considerations as the selectiveness of mind which it shares with all vital structures.” (Space, Time, and Deity (1920), vol. 2, p. 14)

Later, in his 1922 Gifford Lectures and 1923 book Emergent Evolution, Lloyd Morgan defined emergent evolution and introduced the related "top-down" concept of hierarchical supervenience:

“in the physical world emergence is no less exemplified in the advent of each new kind of atom, and of each new kind of molecule. It is beyond the wit of man to number the instances of emergence. But if nothing new emerge - if there be only regrouping of pre-existing events and nothing more - then there is no emergent evolution.

“Such emergence of the new is now widely accepted where life and mind are concerned. It is a doctrine untiringly advocated by Professor Bergson.

“One could not foretell the emergent character of vital events from the fullest possible knowledge of physico-chemical events only...Such is the hypothesis of emergent evolution.

“Under emergent evolution there is progressive development of stuff which becomes new stuff in virtue of the higher status to which it has become raised under some supervenient kind of substantial gotogetherness.”

(Emergent Evolution (1923), pp. 1-6)

But Lloyd Morgan's idea of emergent novelty may have been an epistemic rather than an ontological claim. The laws of nature may still pre-determine all the higher-level properties, though our understanding of the laws may not be enough to allow us to predict the higher levels:

“May we bring emergence itself under the rubric of causation?...Is emergent evolution itself the expression of an orderly and progressive development? If so (and such is my contention), then emergence itself takes rank, as Mill and Lewes also contended, among the "laws of nature." We may be unable to predict the probable nature of a character that is emergently new. We could not have foretold on the basis of physico-chemical events only what the nature of life would be. But that is due to our ignorance before the event of the law of its emergence. May we then, say:

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“...That such novelty is for us unpredictable owing to our partial knowledge of the plan of emergence up to date, and our necessary ignorance of what the further development of that plan will be.“

(Emergent Evolution (1923), p. 281-2)

Vitalists like Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch may not have used the term emergence, but they strongly supported the idea of teleological (purposeful), likely non-physical causes, without which they thought that life and mind could not have emerged from physical matter.

Emergence supports the idea of mental causation in particular and the more general idea of downward causation, for example the downward control of the motions of a cell's atoms and molecules by supervening biological macromolecules.

Reductionism is the view that material particles and the physical forces between them, which are supposed to be mathematically analytical, can explain all that happens in the world. Chemistry is thought reducible to physics, biology reducible to chemistry, psychology (via neuroscience) reducible to biology, and mind/brain (or cognitive science) reducible to psychology. The causal relations are "bottom-up."

The finest details of brain events are thought to be a consequence of motions of the material particles that comprise the brain. Reductionism implies that mind is an epiphenomenon, or worse, just an illusion. The reductionist idea that everything is the consequence of "bottom up" physical causes is often called eliminative materialism.

By contrast, downward causation is a kind of holism that denies reductionism. "Wholes" can enforce constraints on their "parts" that make them move in ways that are unpredictable, even given the complete information about the parts along with the complete information about the state of the universe outside those parts.

Downward causation is closely related to the concepts of emergence, self-organization, and supervenience. The problem of mental causation is a specific case of downward causal control that is central to the philosophy of mind.

The idea that minds have powers "over and above" the known physical, chemical, and biological laws is sometimes called "mentalism." It is related to the idea of "vitalism," that biology might involve new laws that cannot be reduced to "nothing but" the laws of physics.

Although Donald Campbell in 1974 coined the phrase "downward causation," the concept was actually described a few years earlier by Roger Sperry who claimed that it supports a form of “mentalism.” Sperry cited a wheel rolling downhill as an example of what he called "downward causal control." The atoms and molecules are caught up and overpowered by the higher properties of the whole. Sperry compared

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the rolling wheel to an ongoing brain process or a progressing train of thought in which the overall properties of the brain process, as a coherent organizational entity, determine the timing and spacing of the firing patterns within its neural infrastructure.

In 1977, Karl Popper announced that he changed his mind on the importance of indeterminism. He developed a two-stage model of free will and said that it was an example of downward causation. Popper cited both Sperry and Campbell as the source of the idea of downward causation.

In a lecture called Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind, Popper said he had changed his mind (a rare admission by a philosopher) about two things. First he now thought that Darwinian evolution and natural selection was not a "tautology" that made it an unfalsifiable theory. Second, he had come to accept the random variation and selection of ideas as a model of free will.

“The selection of a kind of behavior out of a randomly offered repertoire may be an act of choice, even an act of free will. I am an indeterminist; and in discussing indeterminism I have often regretfully pointed out that quantum indeterminacy does not seem to help us; for the amplification of something like, say, radioactive disintegration processes would not lead to human action or even animal action, but only to random movements.

“I have changed my mind on this issue. A choice process may be a selection process, and the selection may be from some repertoire of random events, without being random in its turn. This seems to me to offer a promising solution to one of our most vexing problems, and one by downward causation.” []

Since Popper’s two-stage model of free will and the analogy with biological evolution, several other thinkers have developed two-stage free will models, including Daniel Dennett, Henry Margenau, Robert Kane, David Sedley and Anthony Long, Roger Penrose, David Layzer, Julia Annas, Alfred Mele, John Martin Fischer, Stephen Kosslyn, John Searle, Bob Doyle, and Martin Heisenberg. []

In 2007, Christoph Koch chaired a conference on free will sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. The proceedings were published in the 2009 book Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will. One of the principal contributors, Nancey Murphy, and her colleague Warren Brown, had argued in their 2007 book, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?, for the existence of downward causation on the basis of complexity and chaos theories. Murphy and Brown’s goal was to defend a non-reductive version of physicalism whereby humans are (at least sometimes) the authors of their own thoughts and actions.

“If humans are purely physical, and if it is the brain that does the work formerly assigned to the mind or soul, then how can it fail to be the case that all of our thoughts and actions are determined by the laws of neurobiology? If this is the case, then free will, moral responsibility, and, indeed, reason itself would appear

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to be in jeopardy.” []

The problem, say Murphy and Brown, is not neurobiological determinism, it is neurobiological reductionism that they want to avoid. This is odd, because it is precisely the elimination of strict determinism that prevents the causal closure and reduction of the mind to the neural level below, as well as the emergence of freedom for the mind to exert downward causation on all the levels below.

Murphy and her colleagues propose to get the kind of non-reductive physicalism that Donald Davidson wanted based on the emergence of complex systems in far-from-equilibrium conditions in deterministic chaos that exhibit spontaneous self-organization.

Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on thermodynamic irreversibility. He is best known for his studies of “dissipative” structures and self-organizing complex systems. These are far-from-equilibrium systems into which flow matter and energy with very low entropy. These systems maintain their self-organization and low entropy in apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics, a fact that had been cited by many other thinkers before Prigogine, including the general systems theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy and physicist Erwin Schrödinger. In his landmark 1945 essay What Is Life?, Schrödinger famously described life as “feeding on negative entropy.”

“What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something', moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to 'keep going' under similar circumstances…

“It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of `equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic; so much so, that from the earliest times of human thought some special non-physical or supernatural force (vis viva, entelechy) was claimed to be operative in the organism, and in some quarters is still claimed.

“What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening – call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy – or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy – which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive. “ []

As we shall see below, the low entropy of all information structures is only possible because excess positive entropy is carried away, ultimately to the cosmic background of the expanding universe.

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Some of the standard examples given for such self-organizing complex physical systems include whirlpools, Bénard convection cells, basalt columns, and soil polygons, all of which apparently violate the normal tendency toward disorder according to the second law of thermodynamics. These temporary ordered structures depend for their existence on a steady flow of matter and energy through them. The order visible is a minimal amount of information.

The complexity theorists like to compare their complex physical system examples to living systems, which also are self-organizing and require a steady flow of matter and energy for their continued existence.

But this comparison is very weak. The information in complex physical systems is thin and fragile. By comparison, the information in biological systems has a lifetime of the same order as astronomical information structures, despite constantly changing the matter and energy that embody and communicate biological information from generation to generation.

From the moment the earliest “self-replicating” and “self-organizing” systems appeared at the origin of life, the universe has contained purposeful beings. We can say that a primitive version of the concept of a “self” emerges at this time.

Before this there was no pre-existing telos, no teleology, as many philosophers and theologians imagined, but there is teleonomy, as Jacques Monod called it. François Jacob, who shared the Nobel Prize with Monod, said that the purpose of every cell is to become two cells.[]

To summarize the emergence of systems exhibiting downward causation, we can divide them into Prigogine’s complex dissipative physical systems and Schrödinger’s living biological systems.

The purely physical systems exhibit many interesting features described by complexity theory, fractals, attractors, non-linearity, etc. They include information that is maintained over time despite the entropic tendency of second law of thermodynamics. But they show no apparent purpose. Terrence Deacon calls them morphodynamic - shape changing.[] As they move, these systems carry their component particles with them, as Roger Sperry described the atoms in a rolling wheel. But this is an anemic sort of downward causation.

Biological systems, by comparison, use their information for more than just maintenance. They self-replicate and exhibit teleonomic purpose. . Terrence Deacon calls these teleodynamic. They evolve to more and more complex species, ultimately reaching the one that can externalize pure information to be shared with other members of the species, knowledge used (for better or worse) to control their environment. They do this by taking advantage of the freedom made possible by indeterminism and the causal power to act with downward causal control that

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results from an emergent adequate determinism. This is the most robust kind of downward causation. It is the mental causation of the human mind.

Part V. Determinism itself emerges as the universe evolves. [from the initial chaos and minimal information that exists at the origin to higher and information states, despite the second law of thermodynamics.]

When small numbers of atoms and molecules interact, their motions and behaviors are indeterministic, governed by the rules of quantum mechanics.

However, when large numbers of microscopic particle get together in aggregates, the indeterminacy of the individual particles gets averaged over and macroscopic adequately deterministic laws "emerge."

This determinism is an emergent property. It did not exist in the early universe of pure radiation and sub-atomic particles when all interactions of particles and matter were quantum mechanical and indeterministic.

The "laws of nature," such as Newton's laws of motion, are all statistical in nature. They "emerge" when large numbers of atoms or molecules get together. For large enough numbers, the probabilistic laws of nature approach practical certainty. But the fundamental indeterminism of component atoms never completely disappears. Indeed, quantum events sometimes show up in the macroscopic world, when an alpha-particle decay fires a Geiger counter, a cosmic ray mutates a gene, when a single photon is detected by an eye, or a single molecule is smelled by a nose.

The emergence of large and “adequately determined” information structures in the universe raises a question that is cosmological and ultimately metaphysical.

What is the process that creates the information structures in the universe?

Given the second law of thermodynamics, which says that any system will over time approach a thermodynamic equilibrium of maximum disorder or entropy, in which all information is lost, and given the best current model for the origin of the universe, which says everything began in a state of equilibrium some 13.75 billion years ago, how can it be that living beings are creating and communicating new information every day? Why are we not still in that state of equilibrium?

The question may be cosmological and metaphysical, but the answer is eminently practical and physical. It is found in the interaction between quantum physics and thermodynamics.

The discovery of a two-part cosmic creation process casts light on some classical problems in philosophy and physics, because it is the same process that creates new biological species and it explains the freedom and creativity of the human mind.

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When information is stored in any structure, two physical processes must occur.

The first is the mysterious collapse of a quantum-mechanical wave function, which happens in any measurement process, as Heisenberg found. Such quantum events involve irreducible indeterminacy and chance, but less often noted is the fact that quantum physics is directly responsible for the extraordinary temporal stability of most information structures, such as our DNA.

The second is a local decrease in the entropy (which appears to violate the second law) corresponding to the increase in information. As Schrödinger knew, entropy greater than the information increase must be transferred away from the location of new information, ultimately to the cosmic background, to satisfy the second law.

This two-step cosmic creation process generates the conditions without which there could be nothing of value in the universe, nothing to be known, and nothing to do the knowing.

The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy (or disorder) of a closed physical system increases until it reaches a maximum, the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. It requires that the total entropy of the universe is now and has always been increasing.

This established fact of increasing entropy has led many scientists and philosophers to assume that the universe we have is running down. They think that means the universe began in a very high state of information, since the second law requires that any organization or order is susceptible to decay. The information that remains today, in their view, has always been here. There is nothing new under the sun.

But the universe is not a closed system. It is in a dynamic state of expansion that is moving away from thermodynamic equilibrium faster than entropy-generating processes can keep up. The maximum possible entropy is increasing much faster than the actual increase in entropy. The difference between the maximum possible entropy and the actual entropy is potential information, as shown by David Layzer.[]

Creation of information structures means that in parts of the universe the local entropy is actually going down. Creation of a low entropy system is always accompanied by radiation of entropy away from the local structures to distant parts of the universe, into the night sky for example, and then on to the cosmic background.

Creation of information structures means that today there is always more information in the universe now than at any earlier time. This fact of increasing information fits well with an open and undetermined universe that is still creating itself. In this universe, stars are still forming, biological systems are creating new species, and intelligent human beings are co-creators of the world we live in.

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Because information increases, we can be co-creators of the universe

All this creation is the result of the two-step core creative process. I like to think that understanding this process is as close as we are likely to come to understanding the traditional idea of a creator of the universe, a still-present divine providence, the cosmic source of everything good and evil.

The two-step cosmic creation process also underlies the most plausible and practical model for free will. Because each free decision to act also creates information in the world, it too must be a two-stage process, first involving some quantum indeterminism to freely generate alternative possibilities, then an adequately determined decision and action statistically caused by reasons, motives, intentions, feelings and desires. Nearly two-dozen philosophers and scientists have proposed such a model. []

Darwinian evolution is another two-step creative process. Darwin proposed that chance variations (mutations) in the gene pool would be followed by natural selection to identify the variations with the greatest reproductive success.

Darwin inspired the first philosopher to propose a two-stage model of free will, William James, who compared his “mental evolution” explicitly to Darwinian evolution.

The genius of James’ picture of free will is that indeterminism is the source for what James called "alternative possibilities" and "ambiguous futures." The chance generation of such alternative possibilities for action does not in any way limit his choice to one of them. For James, chance is not the direct cause of actions. He makes it clear that it is his choice that “grants consent” to one of them.

James was the first thinker to enunciate clearly a two-stage decision process, with chance in a present time of random alternatives, leading to a choice which grants consent to one possibility and transforms an equivocal ambiguous future into an unalterable and simple past. There is a temporal sequence of undetermined alternative possibilities followed by an adequately determined choice where chance is no longer a factor.

Information philosophy offers a theory of mind that transcends flawed "brain as computer" models. The brain is not a digital electronic computer, though it has information circuits. It is not a Turing machine of deterministic states. The brain is not a mechanism in the seventeenth-century sense of a time-reversible system obeying Newtonian laws of physics. Time is of the essence in the mind. The arrow of time traces the irreversible development of unique biological individuals with increasing increasing information in minds that includes consciousness of self and others, and a nurturing environment.

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Information philosophy sees the brain as a magnificent information processing and decision system. It is orders of magnitude more capable than the whole of today's internetworked system of computers and multimedia communications channels at accumulating actionable knowledge, which is the brain's natural purpose, or telos.

Note there are three distinct kinds of information emergence:

1. the order out of chaos when the matter in the universe forms information structures like galaxies, stars, and planets, or dissipative complex systems. 2. the order out of order when the material information structures form self-replicating biological information structures with teleonomic purpose. [] 3. the pure information out of order when organisms with minds externalize information, communicating it to other minds and storing it in the environment.

Information philosophy claims that everything created since the origin of the universe over thirteen billion years ago has involved just two fundamental physical processes that combine to form the core of all creative processes. The two physical processes in the core creative process are quantum physics (the collapse of the wave function probability whenever a new bit of information appears) and thermodynamics (the inflow of negative entropy, energy, and matter, and the outflow of positive entropy, energy, and matter) .

This two-step core creative process underlies the formation of microscopic objects like atoms and molecules, as well as macroscopic objects like galaxies, stars, and planets. We showed in part III that the formation of self-organizing physical systems in conditions far from equilibrium that are the subjects of chaos and complexity theories are this basic, non-teleonomic form of emergence.

With the emergence of teleonomic (purposive) information in self-replicating systems, the same core process underlies all biological creation. But now some random changes in information structures are rejected by natural selection, while others reproduce successfully. The successful strategies are encoded in biological macromolecules which transmit the information from generation to generation.

Finally, with the emergence of self-aware organisms and the creation of extra-biological information stored in the environment, the same information-generating core process underlies communication, consciousness, free will, and creativity.

Part VI. Is our information theory of mind a kind of dualism?Information is neither matter nor energy, but it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication.

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A living being is a form through which passes a flow of matter and energy (with low entropy). Genetic information is used to build the information-rich matter into an overall information structure that contains a very large number of hierarchically organized information structures. Emergent higher levels exert downward causation on the contents of the lower levels.

The total information in multi-cellular living beings can develop to be many orders of magnitude more than the information present in the original cell. The creation of this new information would be impossible for a deterministic universe, in which information is constant.

Immaterial information is perhaps as close as a physical or biological scientist can get to the idea of a soul or spirit that departs the body at death. When a living being dies, it is the maintenance of biological information that ceases. The matter remains.

Biological systems are different from purely physical systems primarily because they create, store, and communicate information. Living things store information in a memory of the past that they use to shape their future. Fundamental physical objects like subatomic particles and atoms have no history, beyond the fact of their emergence from radiation in the early universe..

And when human beings export some of their personal information to make it a part of human culture, that information moves closer to becoming immortal.

Human beings differ from other animals in their extraordinary ability to communicate information and store it in external artifacts. In the last decade the amount of external information per person may have grown to exceed an individual's purely biological information.

Since the 1950's, the science of human behavior has changed dramatically from a "black box" model of a mind that starts out as a "blank slate" conditioned by environmental stimuli. Today's mind model contains many "functions" implemented with stored programs, all of them information structures in the brain. The new "computational model" of cognitive science likens the brain to a computer, with some programs and data inherited and others developed as appropriate reactions to experience.

But the brain should be regarded less as an algorithmic computer with one or more central processing units than as a multi-channel and multi-track experience recorder and reproducer with an extremely high data rate. Information about an experience - the sights, sounds, smells, touch, and taste - is recorded along with the emotions - feelings of pleasure, pain, hopes, and fears - that accompany the experience. When confronted with similar experiences later, the brain can reproduce information about the original experience (an instant replay) that helps to guide current actions.

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Our informational theory of mind is a kind of dualism because of the nature of information. Information in the mind, as software is to hardware, appears to exist “over and above” its realization in the material brain.

When sensory neurons fire, they can record information in memory. When considering alternative possibilities for action later, reproduced experiences played back from memory are again pure information, but if acted upon, they can fire motor neurons that move the body.

Information is neither matter nor energy. It is sometimes embodied in matter and sometimes is communicated as pure energy. It is the scientific basis for an immaterial mind that can nevertheless affect the physical world. Information is the modern spirit.

Where does our informational model of mental causation fit in the spectrum of theories of mind, from the classical substance dualism of René Descartes to the mind-body identity theory of Ullin T. Place, Herbert Feigl, and J.J.C Smart?

It is likely closest to what philosophers of mind call property dualism, because the world contains just physical substance, and information, while fundamentally neither matter nor energy, is instantiated physically. It is a non-reductive physicalism, similar to Davidson’s anomalous monism, resolving the anomaly, or antinomy as Kant called it, between freedom and necessity.

The informational theory of mind is part of an emergent physicalism, because information itself is emergent, first from the inchoate universe in the form of radiation and matter, then in astronomical structures like galaxies, stars, and planets, then in biological organisms, until we reach the information-creating minds of intelligent beings. Human knowledge is growing exponentially today at a rate faster than the expansion of the universe.

What the informational theory of mind tells us is that mind is not “outside space and time” like the Kantian noumena, it is not an illusion, or an epiphenomenalism, or a metaphysical panpsychism. It is non-reductively physical.

The dualism of the informational theory of mind maps well onto and sheds light on the ancient metaphysical dualisms of idealism and materialism and perhaps even on subject and object.

Conclusion

As we noted above, the locus classicus of twentieth-century discussions of mental causation is Donald Davidson's 1970 essay "Mental Events," which was revisited in his 1993 essay, "Thinking Causes," published together with 15 critical essays on Davidson's work in the 1993 book Mental Causation, edited by John Heil and Alfred Mele.

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What can we then make of Jaegwon Kim’s assertion that "non-reductive physicalism" is simply not possible, that the physical world is "causally closed?" Recall Kim’s view:

“what options are there if we set aside the physicalist picture? Leaving physicalism behind is to abandon ontological physicalism, the view that bits of matter and their aggregates in space-time exhaust the contents of the world. This means that one would be embracing an ontology that posits entities other than material substances — that is, immaterial minds, or souls, outside physical space, with immaterial, nonphysical properties.”

(Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, p. 71)

We find the idea of causal closure is a mistake. Quantum physics and the second law of thermodynamics show us that the physical world is not causally closed. The expansion of the universe shows it to be physically and informationally open, otherwise the total amount of information in the universe would be conserved, a constant of nature, which some mathematically inclined philosophers and scientists appear to believe (Roger Penrose and Michael Lockwood. for example).

Jaegwon Kim may be wrong about causal closure, but he is correct that the ontology we embrace does picture the mind as immaterial. Although thoughts in the mind - Descartes’ “thinking substance” - are immaterial, that does not mean that they are “outside physical space.” Rather they are physically present in our brains in the same sense as mathematics is there, as all concepts and ideas are there. They are information, the software in the hardware.

As we saw above, Davidson made three causal claims for mental causation. They can now be adapted to the statistical causality allowed by quantum physics:

1. Mental events are statistically caused by physical events. 2. Causal relations are normally backed by statistical laws. 3. There are no strict deterministic laws for mental events acting on physical events. But statistical causality and adequate determinism are good enough.

Davidson's man goal was to deny the reducibility of mental events to physical events in the lower levels, to deny the claim that the motions of the atoms and molecules at the base level are causally determinative of everything that happens at higher levels. This we can grant, but nevertheless maintain a statistical causality that is very often “adequately determined.”

We can also accept the goal of Nancey Murphy and her colleagues, that there is no neurobiological reductionism. Moreover, despite Murphy’s acceptance of causal determinism, there is no strict neurobiological determinism either.

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Finally, we can validate the optimistic view of most emergentists, that there is something “over and above” the physical. The mind is not “nothing but” the brain, as eliminative materialists (for example, Daniel Dennett and the Churchlands) believe.

The mind is information.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Alexander, Samuel, Space, Time, and DeityBaars, Bernard. In the Theater of ConsciousnessBoltzmann, Ludwig Campbell, Donald, Downward CausationChalmers, David 1996 The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, New York.Davidson, Donald, "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'", in Concepts, Theories, and the Mind-Body Problem, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol.2, p. 414Davidson, Donald. 1970, “Mental Events,” in Experience and Theory, University of Massachusetts Press (reprinted in Davidson (1980), pp. 207-227).Davidson, Donald (1980). Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Deacon, Terrence, Incomplete Nature.Dennett, Daniel, Brainstorms.Descartes, René (1642/1986). Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by John Cottingham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Descartes, René Discourse on Method, 6:32Doyle, Bob Free Will: The Scandal in PhilosophyDoyle, Robert O. Quantum Erasure of Classical Path Information by Photon Interactions and Rearrangement CollisionsEinstein, Albert (1905) A Heuristic Viewpoint on the Production and Transformation of Light," Annalen der Physik, vol.17, p.133, English translation - American Journal of Physics, 33, 5, p.368Feigl, Herbert (1958). "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'" in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. II, pp. 370-497.Fodor, Jerry (1974). "Special Sciences, or the Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis," Synthese 28; 97-115.Fodor, Jerry (1980).Heil, John; and Alfred Mele (eds.) (1993). Mental Causation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Heisenberg, Martin. “Is Free Will an Illusion?, Nature, Hobbes, Thomas 1654 Of Liberty and NecessityJammer, Max Conceptual Development of Quantum MechanicsKim, Jaegwon. 1989 "The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism", in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, Princeton University Press, p.150)

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Kim, Jaegwon (1998). Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Kim, Jaegwon (2005). Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Princeton, Princeton University Press.Kuhn, Thomas (1978). Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912, Oxford University Press, New YorkLayzer, David Cosmogenesis.Lewes, George Henry, Problems of Life and MindLloyd Morgan, Conwiy, Emergent EvolutionMill, John Stuart, A System of LogicMurphy, Nancey and Warren Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?Murphy, Nancey, George E.R. Ellis, and Timothy O’Connor, Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free WillNagel, Thomas. Mind and CosmosPais, Abraham “Subtle Is The Lord…” Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1892 "The Law of Mind," The Monist, vol. 2, pp. 533-559, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol VI, p.86Planck, MaxPutnam, Hilary (1967). "The Nature of Mental States" in Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. II (Cambridge University Press (1975).(Functionalism)Putnam, Hilary (1975). "The Meaning of 'Meaning'", in Putnam's Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers 2, 1975, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-71.Putnam, Hilary (1967). "The Nature of Mental States" in Representation and Reality (Cambridge. MIT Press (1988). (Abandons Functionalism)Robb, David (2003). "Mental Causation," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward Zalta (ed.). (link)Searle, John. Smart, J.J.C.Sperry, Roger.Yoo, Julie (2006). "Mental Causation," The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, James Fieser and Bradley Dowden (eds.). (link)

Outtakes:

Information is constant in a deterministic universe. There is "nothing new under the sun." The creation of new information is not possible without the random chance and uncertainty of quantum mechanics, plus the extraordinary temporal stability of quantum mechanical structures, only possible of course, if entropy is carried away from the new information structures to satisfy the second law.

It is of the deepest philosophical significance that information is based on the mathematics of probability. If all outcomes were certain, there would be no "surprises" in the universe. Information would be conserved and a universal

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constant, as some mathematicians mistakenly believe. Information philosophy requires the ontological uncertainty and probabilistic outcomes of modern quantum physics to produce new information.

But at the same time, without the extraordinary stability of quantized information structures over cosmological time scales, life and the universe we know would not be possible. Quantum physics reveals the architecture of the universe to be discrete rather than continuous, to be digital rather than analog.

Moreover, the "correspondence principle" of quantum mechanics and the "law of large numbers" of statistics ensures that macroscopic objects can normally average out microscopic uncertainties and probabilities to provide the "adequate determinism" that shows up in all our "laws of nature."

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