Mind And Causality

Author : Alberto Peruzzi
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2004-02-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789027295859

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Mind and Causality by Alberto Peruzzi Pdf

Which causal patterns are involved in mental processes?On what mechanisms does the self-organisation of cognitive structure rest? Can a naturalistic view account for the basic resources of intentionality, while avoiding the objections to reductive materialism? By considering the developmental, phenomenological and biological aspects linking mind and causality, this volume offers a state-of-the art theoretical proposal emphasising the fine-tuning of cognition with the complexity of bodily dynamics.In contrast to the de-coupling of mind from the physical environment in classical information-processing models, growth of brain’s architecture and stabilisation of perception­–action cycles are considered decisive, with no need for an eliminative approach to representations pursued by neural network models. The tools provided by physics and biology for the description of massive causal interactions, on top of which ‘qualitative’ changes occur, are exploited to suggest a model of the mind as a many-layered, co-evolving system. (Series A)

Author : Michael Leyton
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 644 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0262621312

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Symmetry, Causality, Mind by Michael Leyton Pdf

In this investigation of the psychological relationship between shape and time, Leyton argues compellingly that shape is used by the mind to recover the past and as such it forms a basis for memory. Michael Leyton's arguments about the nature of perception and cognition are fascinating, exciting, and sure to be controversial. In this investigation of the psychological relationship between shape and time, Leyton argues compellingly that shape is used by the mind to recover the past and as such it forms a basis for memory. He elaborates a system of rules by which the conversion to memory takes place and presents a number of detailed case studies--in perception, linguistics, art, and even political subjugation--that support these rules. Leyton observes that the mind assigns to any shape a causal history explaining how the shape was formed. We cannot help but perceive a deformed can as a dented can. Moreover, by reducing the study of shape to the study of symmetry, he shows that symmetry is crucial to our everyday cognitive processing. Symmetry is the means by which shape is converted into memory. Perception is usually regarded as the recovery of the spatial layout of the environment. Leyton, however, shows that perception is fundamentally the extraction of time from shape. In doing so, he is able to reduce the several areas of computational vision purely to symmetry principles. Examining grammar in linguistics, he argues that a sentence is psychologically represented as a piece of causal history, an archeological relic disinterred by the listener so that the sentence reveals the past. Again through a detailed analysis of art he shows that what the viewer takes to be the experience of a painting is in fact the extraction of time from the shapes of the painting. Finally he highlights crucial aspects of the mind's attempt to recover time in examples of political subjugation.

Author : Nicholas Jolley
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2013-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199669554

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Causality and Mind by Nicholas Jolley Pdf

This text presents 17 of Nicholas Jolley's essays on early modern philosophy. They focus on two main themes: the debate over the nature of causality; and the issues posed by Descartes' innovations in the philosophy of mind. Together, they show that philosophers in the period are systematic critics of their contemporaries and predecessors.

Author : Sven Walter,Heinz-Dieter Heckmann
Publisher : Andrews UK Limited
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-11-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781845405830

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Physicalism and Mental Causation by Sven Walter,Heinz-Dieter Heckmann Pdf

Physicalism—the thesis that everything there is in the world, including our minds, is constituted by basic physical entities—has dominated the philosophy of mind during the last few decades. But although the conceptual foundations of the physicalist agenda—including a proper explication of notions such as ‘causation’, ‘determination’, ‘realization’ or even ‘physicalism’ itself—must be settled before more specific problems (e.g. the problems of mental causation and human agency) can be satisfactorily addressed, a comprehensive philosophical reflection on the relationships between the various key concepts of the debate on physicalism is yet missing. This book presents a range of essays on the conceptual foundations of physicalism, mental causation and human agency, written by established and leading authors in the field.

Author : William Child
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780198236252

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Causality, Interpretation, and the Mind by William Child Pdf

Exploring the relation between interpretationism and causal theories in the philosophy of mind, this text defends interpretationism as an approach to the propositional attitudes. It also defends causal theories of action-explanation and vision.

Author : George Ellis
Publisher : Springer
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2016-05-31
Category : Science
ISBN : 9783662498095

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How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? by George Ellis Pdf

Physics underlies all complexity, including our own existence: how is this possible? How can our own lives emerge from interactions of electrons, protons, and neutrons? This book considers the interaction of physical and non-physical causation in complex systems such as living beings, and in particular in the human brain, relating this to the emergence of higher levels of complexity with real causal powers. In particular it explores the idea of top-down causation, which is the key effect allowing the emergence of true complexity and also enables the causal efficacy of non-physical entities, including the value of money, social conventions, and ethical choices.

Author : Jens Harbecke
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2013-05-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783110324846

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Mental Causation by Jens Harbecke Pdf

This work is a systematic investigation of a range of solutions offered today for the philosophical problem of mental causation. The premises constituting the problem are analyzed before a survey is developed of the most popular theories on mental causation. It is demonstrated in detail why most of these canonical solutions must be considered deficient. In a third part, the 'new compatibilist’s' approach to mental causation is explored, which is characterized by assertion of a non-identity-but-non-distinctness principle. The last part aims to offer an alternative solution to the problem. On the basis of a certain set of counterfactual conditionals, which are jointly taken to provide a definition of 'causal proportionality' that improves the existing definitions, it is shown that a specific, and hitherto widely neglected, version of causal overdeterminationism must be considered the most successful solution to the problem of mental causation.

Author : Anthony Dardis
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2008-09-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780231513517

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Mental Causation by Anthony Dardis Pdf

Two thousand years ago, Lucretius said that everything is atoms in the void; it's physics all the way down. Contemporary physicalism agrees. But if that's so how can we—how can our thoughts, emotions, our values—make anything happen in the physical world? This conceptual knot, the mental causation problem, is the core of the mind-body problem, closely connected to the problems of free will, consciousness, and intentionality. Anthony Dardis shows how to unravel the knot. He traces its early appearance in the history of philosophical inquiry, specifically in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and T. H. Huxley. He then develops a metaphysical framework for a theory of causation, laws of nature, and the causal relevance of properties. Using this framework, Dardis explains how macro, or higher level, properties can be causally relevant in the same way that microphysical properties are causally relevant: by their relationship with the laws of nature. Smelling an orange, choosing the orange rather than the cheesecake, reaching for the one on the left instead of the one on the right-mental properties such as these take their place alongside the physical "motor of the world" in making things happen.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2019-10-21
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789004409965

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Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience by Anonim Pdf

Neuroscientists often consider free will to be an illusion. Contrary to this hypothesis, the contributions to this volume show that recent developments in neuroscience can also support the existence of free will. Firstly, the possibility of intentional consciousness is studied. Secondly, Libet’s experiments are discussed from this new perspective. Thirdly, the relationship between free will, causality and language is analyzed. This approach suggests that language grants the human brain a possibility to articulate a meaningful personal life. Therefore, human beings can escape strict biological determinism. Contributing author Sofia Bonicalzi has received funding from the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 754388 (LMUResearchFellows) and from LMUexcellent, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Free State of Bavaria under the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal Government and the Länder.

Author : S. C. Gibb,E. J. Lowe,R. D. Ingthorsson
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2013-03-21
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780191652554

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Mental Causation and Ontology by S. C. Gibb,E. J. Lowe,R. D. Ingthorsson Pdf

An international team of contributors presents new work on the importance of ontology for a central debate in philosophy of mind. Mental causation has been a hotly disputed topic in recent years, with reductive and non-reductive physicalists vying with each other and with dualists over how to accommodate, or else to challenge, two widely accepted metaphysical principles—the principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and the principle of causal non-overdetermination—which together appear to support reductive physicalism, despite the latter's lack of intuitive appeal. Current debate about these matters appears to have reached something of an impasse, prompting the question of why this should be so. One possibility is that, while this debate makes extensive use of ontological vocabulary—by talking, for instance, of substances, events, states, properties, powers, and relations—relatively little attempt has been made within the debate itself to achieve either clarity or agreement about what, precisely, such terms should be taken to mean. The debate has become somewhat detached from broader developments in metaphysics and ontology, which have lately been proceeding apace, providing us with an increasingly rich and refined set of ontological categories upon which to draw, as well as a much deeper understanding of how they are related to one another. In this volume, leading metaphysicians and philosophers of mind reflect afresh upon the problem of mental causation in the light of some of these recent developments, with a view to making new headway with one of the most challenging and seemingly intractable issues in contemporary philosophy.

Author : Wim de Muijnck
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2003-07-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1402013914

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Dependencies, Connections, and Other Relations by Wim de Muijnck Pdf

This work covers, in its subsequent parts, ontology, the metaphysics of causation, and the philosophy of mind. It provides a firm theoretical basis for believing that in our all-physical world mental causation is perfectly real, and that it can be understood.

Author : David Malet Armstrong
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : Causation
ISBN : OCLC:1319193923

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Consciousness and Causality by David Malet Armstrong Pdf

Author : Neil Campbell
Publisher : Broadview Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2003-01-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1551115093

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Mental Causation and the Metaphysics of Mind by Neil Campbell Pdf

Since Descartes’s division of the human subject into mental and physical components in the seventeenth century, there has been a great deal of discussion about how—indeed, whether or not—our mental states bring about our physical behavior. Through historical and contemporary readings, this collection explores this lively and important issue. In four parts, this anthology introduces the problem of mental causation, explores the debate sparked by Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism, examines Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument for the view that qualia are epiphenomenal, and investigates attempts to employ the controversial concept of supervenience to explain mental causation.

Author : Thomas Kroedel
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2019-12-19
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781108487146

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Mental Causation by Thomas Kroedel Pdf

Presents a comprehensive account of how the mind causes things to happen in the physical world. This book is also available as Open Access.

Author : Jaegwon Kim
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 0262611538

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Mind in a Physical World by Jaegwon Kim Pdf

This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind--in particular, the mind-body problem, mental causation, and reductionism. This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind--in particular, the mind-body problem, mental causation, and reductionism. Kim construes the mind-body problem as that of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical. Among other points, he redefines the roles of supervenience and emergence in the discussion of the mind-body problem. Arguing that various contemporary accounts of mental causation are inadequate, he offers his own partially reductionist solution on the basis of a novel model of reduction. Retaining the informal tone of the lecture format, the book is clear yet sophisticated.