Consciousness and Action

2020 ◽  
pp. 537-559
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kozuch
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Motor Action ◽  
Classical Form ◽  
Visual Consciousness ◽  
Physical Effects ◽  
Intuitive View ◽  
Visually Based ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Conscious Will

In its classical form, epiphenomenalism is the view that conscious mental events have no physical effects: while physical events cause mental events, the opposite is never true. Unlike classical epiphenomenalism, contemporary forms do not hold that conscious mental states always lack causal efficacy, only that they are epiphenomenal relative to certain kinds of action, ones we pre-theoretically would have thought consciousness to causally contribute to. Two of these contemporary, empirically based challenges to the efficacy of the mental are the focus of this chapter. The first, originating in research by Libet, has been interpreted as showing that the neural events initiating voluntary actions precede our conscious willing of them, meaning the conscious will cannot be what causes them. The second challenge, originating in studies by Milner and Goodale, consist of instances in which the content of visual consciousness and motor action dissociate, casting doubt on the intuitive view that visual consciousness guides visually based motor action.

The Process of Inference

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Mole
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Belief Revision ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Belief States ◽  
Mental Events

The set of entities that serves as the domain for our discourse about the mind is metaphysically heterogenous. It includes processes, events, properties, modes, and states. In the latter part of the twentieth century, philosophers started to suppose that a philosophical theory of the mind should be primarily concerned with the explanation of mental states. Those states could be mentioned in the explanations that would need to be given for mental entities of other sorts. If, for example, we had a prior explanation of belief states, then those states could figure in our subsequent explanation of inferences: inferences, on this approach, are to be identified with certain processes of belief revision. This states-first approach was not favoured by earlier theorists of the mind, who tended to suppose that mental events and processes are explanatorily more basic than mental states. The current states-first approach faces insuperable difficulties, which the earlier approach avoids.

Inference and Rationality

2020 ◽  
pp. 321-356
Author(s):  
Scott Sturgeon
Keyword(s):  
State Transition ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Epistemic Reason ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Rational Inference

A theory of rational state transition must answer four questions: are shifts within its domain brought about by agents or do they simply happen to them? Is the approach part a theory’s dynamics or kinematics? Does the approach make use of everyday or ideal rationality? Are the mental states involved coarse- or fine-grained? The questions are used to generate a sixteen-fold classification of rational shift-in-view. It is then argued that rational inference leads to the idea of a coordinated epistemic reason: roughly, a reason where causal-efficacy and evidential-relevance fuse together. This idea is illustrated with everyday examples and it is then argued that the theory of rational inference turns crucially on the non-ideal rationality of agential dynamics. The chapter closes by developing a theory of rational inference and a take on the human mind to go with it.

The Debate on Mental Causation: Davidson and His Critics

Dialogue ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ausonio Marras
Keyword(s):  
Mental Causation ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Present Collection ◽  
Contemporary Perspective ◽  
Mental Events

The flurry of debates on mental causation in recent years has largely been occasioned by Donald Davidson's original and controversial views on the role of mind in the causation and explanation of behaviour. In his classic 1963 paper, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” Davidson argued, against the prevailing opinion of the Ryleans and later-Wittgensteineans, that in order to be genuinely explanatory of human behaviour, reasons must be causes; and in his equally influential and far more controversial 1970 paper, “Mental Events,” he undertook to show how reasons can be causes—how it is possible for our beliefs, desire, intentions, and the like, in terms of which we “rationalize” our behaviour, to be at the same time causes of our behaviour. While the basic thesis of the 1963 paper was widely accepted, setting a trend for much of the work on action theory for the following three decades, the account of the causal efficacy of mind in “Mental Events” generated a great deal of controversy. The debates continue, involving scores of participants but seldom Davidson himself. What makes the present collection of previously unpublished papers particularly interesting is that it contains Davidson's own reply to some of his most notable critics, together with their rejoinders; so we now have a contemporary perspective on the mental causation debate that Davidson initiated, unwittingly, a quarter of a century ago.

Content: wide and narrow

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent Bach
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Mental States ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Central Problem ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Turn On ◽  
External Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrow Content

A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of affairs in the world. Consider, for example, that wanting water and thinking there is some in the tap can lead one to turn on the tap. The contents of these mental states pertain to things in the world (water and the tap), and yet it would seem that their causal efficacy should depend solely on their internal characteristics, not on their external relations. That is, a person could be in just those states and those states could play just the same psychological roles, even if there were no water or tap for them to refer to. However, certain arguments, based on some imaginative thought experiments, have persuaded many philosophers that thought contents do depend on external factors, both physical and social. A tempting solution to this dilemma has been to suppose that there are two kinds of content, wide and narrow. Wide content comprises the referential relations that mental states bear to things and their properties. Narrow content comprises the determinants of psychological role. Philosophers have debated whether both notions of content are viable and, if so, how they are connected.

Dualism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Property Dualism ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events

Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respect, nonphysical. The best-known version is due to Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance. Descartes argued that, because minds have no spatial properties and physical reality is essentially extended in space, minds are wholly nonphysical. Every human being is accordingly a composite of two objects: a physical body, and a nonphysical object that is that human being’s mind. On a weaker version of dualism, which contemporary thinkers find more acceptable, human beings are physical substances but have mental properties, and those properties are not physical. This view is known as property dualism, or the dual-aspect theory. Several considerations appear to support dualism. Mental phenomena are strikingly different from all others, and the idea that they are nonphysical may explain just how they are distinctive. Moreover, physical reality conforms to laws formulated in strictly mathematical terms. But, because mental phenomena such as thinking, desiring and sensing seem intractable to being described in mathematical terms, it is tempting to conclude that these phenomena are not physical. In addition, many mental states are conscious states – states that we are aware of in a way that seems to be wholly unmediated. And many would argue that, whatever the nature of mental phenomena that are not conscious, consciousness cannot be physical. There are also, however, reasons to resist dualism. People, and other creatures with mental endowments, presumably exist wholly within the natural order, and it is generally held that all natural phenomena are built up from basic physical constituents. Dualism, however, represents the mind as uniquely standing outside this unified physical picture. There is also a difficulty about causal relations between mind and body. Mental events often cause bodily events, as when a desire causes an action, and bodily events often cause mental events, for example in perceiving. But the causal interactions into which physical events enter are governed by laws that connect physical events. So if the mental is not physical, it would be hard to understand how mental events can interact causally with bodily events. For these reasons and others, dualism is, despite various reasons advanced in its support, a theoretically uncomfortable position.

Who’s Afraid of Supervenient Laws?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Mcintyre
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Anomalous Monism ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Epistemological Break ◽  
The Many ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Shed Light

OVER THE LAST FEW decades there has been much debate in the philosophy of science over the attractiveness–and potential costs–of supervenience. As philosophers well know, supervenience burst onto the scene as the “Davidson debate” in the philosophy of mind began to raise some provocative questions over whether it was desirable to think of mental events as in some way irreducible to physical events, while still being firmly rooted in material dependence. After some initial misunderstanding over the question of whether supervenience was committing us to a sort of ontological break between the mental and the physical, it was finally settled that the autonomy one was after need not be metaphysical; an epistemological break would do just fine. After this the merits of supervenience could be clearly considered, for it allowed one to have it “both ways” in the dispute over mental states: mental explanations could be epistemically autonomous from physical ones (and thus probably not reducible to them), even while one preserved the notion of the ontological dependence of the mental on the physical (thus avoiding any embarrassing entanglements in supernatural or other spiritually based accounts of causal influence). Davidson himself, of course, never really bought into the non-reductive materialist craze that he started, preferring to champion his own idiosyncratic view of anomalous monism, which allowed the mental to continue to exist as irreducible, even while he gave it no causal or explanatory work to do. Since then Jaegwon Kim—the person who has done most to shed light on Davidson’s view and demonstrate how the concept of supervenience could recast it as a more legitimate contender among the many proposals on the merits of non-reductive materialism—has appeared to repudiate his own earlier views about explanation and now wholeheartedly endorses a type of physicalist-based account that is even more conservative than Davidson’s. In his recent work, Kim has argued not only for the elimination of any mentally based causal descriptions (or laws) of human behavior, but also seems to call into question the very idea that in pursuing scientific explanation we need to pay much attention to secondary-level descriptions.

scholarly journals The possibility of physicalism

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 242-250
Author(s):  
Eduardo Giannetti
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Modern science has undermined belief in countless imaginary causalities. What is the nature of the relation between mind and brain? Philosophers have debated the issue for millennia, but it is only in the last twenty years that empirical evidence has begun to uncover some of the secrets of this ancient riddle. This lecture explores the possiblity that advances in neuroscience will undermine and subvert our intuitive, mentalist understanding of the mind-body relationship. Recent findings in neuroscience seem to support the notions that (i) mental events are a subclass of neurophysiological events, and (ii) they are devoid of causal efficacy upon the workings of the brain. If physicalism is true then the belief in the causal potency of conscious thoughts and free will are bound to join company with countless other imaginary causalities exploded by the progress of science.

Mental Substances

2003 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 229-250
Author(s):  
Tim Crane
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Semantic Externalism ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Independent Entity ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events

Philosophers of mind typically conduct their discussions in terms of mental events, mental processes, mental properties, mental states—but rarely in terms of minds themselves. Sometimes this neglect is explicity acknowledged. Donald Davidson, for example, writes that ‘there are no such things as minds, but people have mental properties, which is to say that certain psychological predicates are true of them. These properties are constantly changing, and such changes are mental events’. Hilary Putnam agrees, though for somewhat different reasons:The view I have long defended is that the mind is not a thing, talk of our minds is talk of World-involving capabilities that we have and activities that we engage in. As Dewey succinctly put it, ‘Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situation in which we find ourseleves. Unfortunately, an influential manner of thinking has changed modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the activities in question. It has treated mind as an independent entity which attends, purposes, cares and remembers’. But the traditional view, by treating mental states as states of the ‘underlying substance’, makes them properties of something ‘inside’, and, if one is a materialist philosopher, that means properties of our brains. So the next problem naturally seems to be: ‘Which neurological properties of our brains do these mental properties “reduce” to?’ For how could our brains have properties that aren't neurological? And this is how materialist philosphers saw the problem until the advent of such new alternatives in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language as Functionalism and Semantic Externalism.

Mesoscopic brain dynamics and mental disorders

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S2) ◽  
pp. 2225-2225
Author(s):  
H. Liljenström
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Network Connectivity ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Dynamics ◽  
Clinical Interest ◽  
Simulation Results ◽  
Dynamics And Function ◽  
And Function ◽  
Mental Events

Mesoscopic brain dynamics, typically studied with electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG and MEG), display a rich complexity of oscillatory and chaotic-like states, including many different frequencies, amplitudes and phases. Presumably, these different dynamical states correspond to different mental states and functions, and studying transitions between such states could provide valuable insights into brain-mind relations that should also be of clinical interest. We use computational methods to investigate these transitions, with the objective of finding relations between structure, dynamics, and function. In particular, we have developed models of paleo- and neocortical structures, in order to study their mesoscopic neurodynamics, as a link between the microscopic neuronal and macroscopic mental events and processes. I will describe several types of models that emphasize network connectivity and structure, but which also include molecular and cellular properties at varying detail, depending on the particular problem and experimental data available. We use these models to study how phase transitions can be induced in the mesoscopic neurodynamics of cortical networks by internal (natural) and external (artificial) factors. I will discuss the models, and relate the simulation results to macroscopic phenomena, such as arousal, attention, anaesthesia, learning, and certain mental disorders.

scholarly journals When the Action to Be Performed at the Stage of Retrieval Enacts Memory of Action Verbs

2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-31
Author(s):  
Thibaut Brouillet ◽  
Arthur-Henri Michalland ◽  
Sophie Martin ◽  
Denis Brouillet
Keyword(s):  
Memory Performance ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Cued Recall ◽  
Motor Action ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
Verb Processing ◽  
Action Verbs ◽  
The Brain

Abstract. According to the embodied approach of language, concepts are grounded in sensorimotor mental states, and when we process language, the brain simulates some of the perceptions and actions that are involved when interacting with real objects. Moreover, several studies have highlighted that cognitive performances are dependent on the overlap between the motor action simulated and the motor action required by the task. On the other hand, in the field of memory, the role of action is under debate. The aim of this work was to show that performing an action at the stage of retrieval influences memory performance in a recognition task (experiment 1) and a cued recall task (experiment 2), even if the participants were never instructed to consider the implied action. The results highlighted an action-based memory effect at the retrieval stage. These findings contribute to the debate about the implication of motor system in action verb processing and its role for memory.

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