Potency and Process: a Naturalistic Defense of Mental Causation
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
The Mathematics of Causal Relations
In P.E. Shrout, K. Keyes, and K. Ornstein (Eds.), Causality and Psychopathology: Finding the TECHNICAL REPORT Determinants of Disorders and their Cures, Oxford University Press, 47-65, 2010. R-338 September 2010 The Mathematics of Causal Relations Judea Pearl Introduction Almost two decades have passed since Paul Holland published his highly cited review paper on the Neyman-Rubin approach to causal inference [Holland, 1986]. Our understanding of causal inference has since increased severalfold, due primarily to advances in three areas: 1. Nonparametric structural equations 2. Graphical models 3. Symbiosis between counterfactual and graphical methods These advances are central to the empirical sciences because the research questions that motivate most studies in the health, social, and behavioral sciences are not statistical but causal in nature. For example, what is the efficacy of a given drug in a given population? Can data prove an employer guilty of hiring discrimination? What fraction of past crimes could have been avoided by a given policy? What was the cause of death of a given individual in a specific incident? Remarkably, although much of the conceptual framework and many of the algorithmic tools needed for tackling such problems are now well established, they are hardly known to researchers in the field who could put them into practical use. Why? Solving causal problems mathematically requires certain extensions in the standard mathematical language of statistics, and these extensions are not generally emphasized in the mainstream literature and education. As a result, large segments of the statistical research community find it hard to appreciate and benefit from the many results that causal analysis has produced in the past two decades. -
Studies on Causal Explanation in Naturalistic Philosophy of Mind
tn tn+1 s s* r1 r2 r1* r2* Interactions and Exclusions: Studies on Causal Explanation in Naturalistic Philosophy of Mind Tuomas K. Pernu Department of Biosciences Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences & Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies Faculty of Arts ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be publicly discussed, by due permission of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki, in lecture room 5 of the University of Helsinki Main Building, on the 30th of November, 2013, at 12 o’clock noon. © 2013 Tuomas Pernu (cover figure and introductory essay) © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media (article I) © 2011 Walter de Gruyter (article II) © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media (article III) © 2013 Taylor & Francis (article IV) © 2013 Open Society Foundation (article V) Layout and technical assistance by Aleksi Salokannel | SI SIN Cover layout by Anita Tienhaara Author’s address: Department of Biosciences Division of Physiology and Neuroscience P.O. Box 65 FI-00014 UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI e-mail [email protected] ISBN 978-952-10-9439-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-952-10-9440-8 (PDF) ISSN 1799-7372 Nord Print Helsinki 2013 If it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying … , if none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the end of the world. Jerry Fodor “Making mind matter more” (1989) Supervised by Docent Markus -
Causal Closure of the Physical, Mental Causation, and Physics
Preprint – Accepted for publication in European Journal for Philosophy of Science Causal closure of the physical, mental causation, and physics Dejan R. Dimitrijević Department of Physics Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics University of Niš Abstract The argument from causal closure of the physical (CCP) is usually considered the most powerful argument in favor of the ontological doctrine of physicalism. Many authors, most notably Papineau, assume that CCP implies that physicalism is supported by physics. I demonstrate, however, that physical science has no bias in the ontological debate between proponents of physicalism and dualism. I show that the arguments offered for CCP are effective only against the accounts of mental causation based on the action of the mental forces of a Newtonian nature, i.e. those which manifest themselves by causing accelerations. However, it is conceivable and possible that mental causation is manifested through the redistribution of energy, momentum and other conserved quantities in the system, brought about by altering the state probability distribution within the living system and leading to anomalous correlations of neural processes. After arguing that a probabilistic, interactionist model of mental causation is conceivable, which renders the argument from causal closure of the physical ineffective, I point to some basic features that such a model must have in order to be intelligible. At the same time, I indicate the way that conclusive testing of CCP can be done within the theoretical framework of physics. Keywords: Causal closure of the physical; Mental causation; Second law of thermodynamics; Physics; Probability distribution 2 1 Introduction At the beginning of his influential paper „The Rise of Physicalism‟ (2001), David Papineau, one of the leading proponents of the ontological doctrine of physicalism in our time, made a bold statement that “physical science has come to claim a particular kind of hegemony over other subjects in the second half of [20th] century. -
Causal Knowledge and the Development of Inductive Reasoning ⇑ Aimée K
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Elsevier - Publisher Connector Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 122 (2014) 48–61 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp Causal knowledge and the development of inductive reasoning ⇑ Aimée K. Bright a, , Aidan Feeney b a Psychology Division, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK b School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK article info abstract Article history: We explored the development of sensitivity to causal relations in chil- Received 5 April 2013 dren’s inductive reasoning. Children (5-, 8-, and 12-year-olds) and Revised 27 November 2013 adults were given trials in which they decided whether a property Available online 8 February 2014 known to be possessed by members of one category was also possessed by members of (a) a taxonomically related category or (b) a causally Keywords: related category. The direction of the causal link was either predictive Category-based induction Causal knowledge (prey ? predator) or diagnostic (predator ? prey), and the property Causal asymmetry that participants reasoned about established either a taxonomic or cau- Taxonomic knowledge sal context. There was a causal asymmetry effect across all age groups, Inductive selectivity with more causal choices when the causal link was predictive than Knowledge over-generalization when it was diagnostic. Furthermore, context-sensitive causal reason- ing showed a curvilinear development, with causal choices being most frequent for 8-year-olds regardless of context. -
UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Causal Action: A
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Causal Action: A Framework to Connect Action Perception and Understanding A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology by Yujia Peng 2019 ©Copyright by Yujia Peng 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Causal Action: A Framework to Connect Action Perception and Understanding by Yujia Peng Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology University of California, Los Angeles, 2019 Professor Hongjing Lu, Chair Human actions are more than mere body movements. In contrast to dynamic events involving inanimate objects, human actions have a special status in that they control interactions with the world and afford privileged access to the experience of agency and to control interactions with the world. Several causal constraints on human actions support the generation and the understanding of actions. For example, human actions inherently involve a causal structure: limb movements generally cause changes in body position along a path through the environment to achieve intentional goals. However, it remains unclear how the system that supports action perception communicates with high-level reasoning system to recognize actions, and more importantly, to achieve a deeper understanding of observed actions. My dissertation aims to ii determine whether causality imposes critical motion constraints on action perception and understanding, and how causal relations involved in actions impact behavioral judgments. The project also investigates the developmental trajectory and neural substrate of action processing, and whether a feedforward deep learning model is able to learn causal relations solely from visual observations of human actions. Through behavioral experiments, an infant eye movement study, a neural study using magnetoencephalography, and model simulations, my dissertation yields a number of insights. -
Novel Pancreatic Endocrine Maturation Pathways Identified by Genomic Profiling and Causal Reasoning
Novel Pancreatic Endocrine Maturation Pathways Identified by Genomic Profiling and Causal Reasoning Alex Gutteridge2*, J. Michael Rukstalis1,4, Daniel Ziemek3, Mark Tie´ 1, Lin Ji1,4, Rebeca Ramos-Zayas1, Nancy A. Nardone4, Lisa D. Norquay4, Martin B. Brenner4, Kim Tang1, John D. McNeish1, Rebecca K. Rowntree1* 1 Pfizer Regenerative Medicine, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 2 Pfizer Regenerative Medicine, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 3 Pfizer Computational Sciences Center of Emphasis, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 4 Pfizer Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America Abstract We have used a previously unavailable model of pancreatic development, derived in vitro from human embryonic stem cells, to capture a time-course of gene, miRNA and histone modification levels in pancreatic endocrine cells. We investigated whether it is possible to better understand, and hence control, the biological pathways leading to pancreatic endocrine formation by analysing this information and combining it with the available scientific literature to generate models using a casual reasoning approach. We show that the embryonic stem cell differentiation protocol is highly reproducible in producing endocrine precursor cells and generates cells that recapitulate many aspects of human embryonic pancreas development, including maturation into functional endocrine cells when transplanted into recipient animals. The availability of whole genome gene and miRNA expression data from the early stages of human pancreatic development will be of great benefit to those in the fields of developmental biology and diabetes research. Our causal reasoning algorithm suggested the involvement of novel gene networks, such as NEUROG3/E2F1/KDM5B and SOCS3/STAT3/IL-6, in endocrine cell development We experimentally investigated the role of the top-ranked prediction by showing that addition of exogenous IL-6 could affect the expression of the endocrine progenitor genes NEUROG3 and NKX2.2. -
The Religious Naturalism of William James: a New Interpretation Through the Lens of Liberal Naturalism
Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Bunzl, Jacob Herbert (2019) The Religious Naturalism of William James: A New Interpretation Through the Lens of Liberal Naturalism. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent,. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/81750/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html 1 The Religious Naturalism of William James A New Interpretation Through the Lens of ‘Liberal Naturalism’ Jacob Herbert Bunzl Abstract: This thesis argues that recent developments in philosophical naturalism mandate a new naturalistic reading of James. To that end, it presents the first comprehensive reading of James through the lens of liberal rather than scientific naturalism. Chapter 1 offers an extensive survey of the varieties of philosophical naturalism that provides the conceptual tools required for the rest the thesis, and allows us to provisionally locate James within the field. -
Explaining Causal Closure
Explaining Causal Closure by Justin Tiehen The physical realm is causally closed, according to physicalists like me. But why is it causally closed? That is, what explains causal closure? The question has not often been addressed. In what follows I argue that physicalists are committed to one explanation of causal closure to the exclusion of others, and that this has profound consequences for how physicalism is to be defended. In particular, I claim that we physicalists need to give up on using a causal argument to defend our view. Whatever the problem with dualism is, it’s not distinctively causal in any interesting sense. 1. Following Jaegwon Kim, we can formulate the causal closure thesis as follows. (Closure): If a physical event has a cause at a time t, it has a physical cause at t.1 What’s nice about this formulation is that it makes transparent the logical relation between causal closure and another physicalist thesis: (P*): All events are physical events. For my purposes in this paper, I will treat (P*) as a commitment of physicalism.2 If all events are physical, then it trivially follows that whenever some physical event has a cause, that cause is physical. That is, (P*) entails (Closure). This entailment corresponds to the first proposal for explaining causal closure. According to the proposal, the reason 1 Kim (2005: 15). 2 There are in fact some nonreductive physicalists who deny (P*) and hold that mental events are realized by physical events, not identical with them. We could account for such views by replacing (P*) with (P**): All events are or are realized by physical events. -
Demystifying Emergence
AN OPEN ACCESS Ergo JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Demystifying emergence David YateS Centro de Filosofia, Universidade de Lisboa Are the special sciences autonomous from physics? Those who say they are need to explain how dependent special science properties could feature in irreducible causal explanations, but that’s no easy task. The demands of a broadly physicalist world- view require that such properties are not only dependent on the physical, but also physically realized. Realized properties are derivative, so it’s natural to suppose that they have derivative causal powers. Correspondingly, philosophical orthodoxy has it that if we want special science properties to bestow genuinely new causal powers, we must reject physical realization and embrace a form of emergentism, in which such properties arise from the physical by mysterious brute determination. In this paper, I argue that contrary to this orthodoxy, there are physically realized prop- erties that bestow new causal powers in relation to their realizers. The key to my proposal is to reject causal- functional accounts of realization and embrace a broad- er account that allows for the realization of shapes and patterns. Unlike functional properties, such properties are defined by qualitative, non-causal specifications, so realizing them does not consist in bestowing causal powers. This, I argue, allows for causal novelty of the strongest kind. I argue that the molecular geometry of H2O— a qualitative, multiply realizable property— plays an irreducible role in explaining its dipole moment, and thereby bestows novel powers. On my proposal, special science properties can have the kind of causal novelty traditionally associated with strong emergence, without any of the mystery. -
Russellian Panpsychism: Do We Need It and Is It Enough?
Russellian Panpsychism: Do We Need It and Is It Enough? By Damian Aleksiev Submitted to Central European University Department of Philosophy In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy Supervisor: Philip Goff CEU eTD Collection May 2016 Abstract The main aim of this thesis is to clarify the ontological status of phenomenal experience. In order to do this, I first examine how pure physicalism explains phenomenality. Pure physicalism relies on the structural and causal vocabulary of physics, and is compatible with the causal closure of the physical. Nonetheless, I argue that pure physicalism is false since it cannot account for our intuitive understating of phenomenal experience as something beyond-structural. I supplement these intuitions, first with the knowledge and conceivability arguments, and second with my own argument for the transparency of phenomenal concepts called the argument from solipsism. Then, I investigate Russellian panpsychism as a promising alternative to pure physicalism that attempts to solve its problems without any drawbacks. Russellian panpsychism places phenomenal experience at the fundamental ontological level, and at the same time remains compatible with the causal closure of the physical. Finally, I argue against Russellian panpsychism based on the combination problem, as well as my own: reverse conceivability argument, and combination problem for value. The conclusion of this enquiry is that neither pure physicalism nor Russellian panpsychism can provide a satisfactory account of phenomenal experience. CEU eTD Collection I Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor Philip Goff for his continual support and willingness to discuss my ideas during the entire academic year. -
The Causal Efficacy of Consciousness
entropy Article The Causal Efficacy of Consciousness Matthew Owen 1,2 1 Yakima Valley College, Yakima, WA 98902, USA; [email protected] 2 Center for Consciousness Science, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA Received: 10 June 2020; Accepted: 17 July 2020; Published: 28 July 2020 Abstract: Mental causation is vitally important to the integrated information theory (IIT), which says consciousness exists since it is causally efficacious. While it might not be directly apparent, metaphysical commitments have consequential entailments concerning the causal efficacy of consciousness. Commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and the nature of causation determine which problem(s) a view of consciousness faces with respect to mental causation. Analysis of mental causation in contemporary philosophy of mind has brought several problems to the fore: the alleged lack of psychophysical laws, the causal exclusion problem, and the causal pairing problem. This article surveys the threat each problem poses to IIT based on the different metaphysical commitments IIT theorists might make. Distinctions are made between what I call reductive IIT, non-reductive IIT, and non-physicalist IIT, each of which make differing metaphysical commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and nature of causation. Subsequently, each problem pertaining to mental causation is presented and its threat, or lack thereof, to each version of IIT is considered. While the lack of psychophysical laws appears unthreatening for all versions, reductive IIT and non-reductive IIT are seriously threatened by the exclusion problem, and it is difficult to see how they could overcome it while maintaining a commitment to the causal closure principle. -
Development of Causal Reasoning
The Development of Causal Reasoning Oxford Handbooks Online The Development of Causal Reasoning Paul Muentener and Elizabeth Bonawitz The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning Edited by Michael R. Waldmann Print Publication Date: Jun 2017 Subject: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology Online Publication Date: May 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199399550.013.40 Abstract and Keywords Research on the development of causal reasoning has broadly focused on accomplishing two goals: understanding the origins of causal reasoning, and examining how causal reasoning changes with development. This chapter reviews evidence and theory that aim to fulfill both of these objectives. In the first section, it focuses on the research that explores the possible precedents for recognizing causal events in the world, reviewing evidence for three distinct mechanisms in early causal reasoning: physical launching events, agents and their actions, and covariation information. The second portion of the chapter examines the question of how older children learn about specific causal relationships. It focuses on the role of patterns of statistical evidence in guiding learning about causal structure, suggesting that even very young children leverage strong inductive biases with patterns of data to inform their inferences about causal events, and discussing ways in which children’s spontaneous play supports causal learning. Keywords: development, causal reasoning, learning, induction, bias Causality plays a fundamental role in human cognition, and has long been a topic of interest for many developmental researchers—causal reasoning has been proposed to be a central aspect of early learning in the physical (Baillargeon, 2004; Carey, 2009; Cohen, Amsel, Redford, & Casasola, 1998; Leslie, 1995; Spelke, 1990), psychological (Csibra & Gergely, 1998; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992; Meltzoff, 2007; White, 2014; Woodward, 2009), and biological world (Carey, 2009; Wellman & Gelman, 1992).