Mental Causation In a Physical Brain?
نویسنده
چکیده
Mental causation is a philosophical concept attempting to describe the causal effect of the immaterial mind on subjectś behavior. Various types of causality have different interpretations in the literature. I propose and explain this concept within the framework of the reciprocal causality operating in the brain bidirectionally between local and global brain levels. While committing myself to the physical closure assumption, I leave room for the suggested role of mental properties. Mental level is viewed as an irreducible perspective of description supervening on the global brain level. Hence, mental causation is argued to be interpreted as a convenient metaphor because mental properties are asserted to be causally redundant. Nevertheless, they will eventually help us identify and understand the neural and computational correlates of consciousness. Within cognitive science, the proposed view is consistent with the connectionist and dynamic systems paradigms, and within the philosophy of mind, I see it as a form of non-reductive physicalism.
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