Introduction
The problem of mental causation depends heavily on the idea of “causal closure” of the world under "laws of nature." If everything that is caused has a physical cause (whether deterministic or indeterministic), what room is there for mental causes? Must mental events be eliminated - reduced to physicalism at best and epiphenomenalism at worst?
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 an
immaterial 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 and an emergent dualism.
Information is physical, but
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.
Indeterminism in quantum physics breaks 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 and they are more than "adequate" to support the idea of self-determination.
Our informational theory of mind is a powerful alternative to the computational theories popular in cognitive science. Biological information processors are profoundly different from digital computers.
We argue against neurobiological reductionism and physical “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 by past events and the laws of nature) to cause willed actions. Actions are ultimately statistical but “adequately determined” by our motives, reasons, intentions, desires, and feelings, in short, by our character. Our actions are thus determined for practical purposes, but "self-determined," with at least some of the causes originating inside our minds.
We defend an emergent dualism of mind and matter, subject and object, idealism and materialism. Monists might like the idea that information is a neutral quantity that can ground a
triple-aspect monism of matter, life, and mind. Information itself is an emergent that did not exist in the early universe. We will show that information structures emerge in three ways and in a temporal sequence, corresponding respectively to
matter, life, and mind.
First is the emergence of "order out of chaos" This has given rise to complexity and chaos theories that try to explain life as a "complex adaptive system." Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel prize for far-from-equilibrium "dissipative" processes that produce information structures, like Bénard convection cells. He called it "order out of chaos." These "complex" systems have no internal information processing. They are "dumb" structures. They do, however, exert a
gross "downward causation" over their physical parts.
Second is the emergence of "order out of order." Erwin Schrödinger showed that all life feeds on a stream of negative entropy from the sun. He called this "order out of order." Biological processes rearrange the information in the negative entropy to create and maintain themselves. They are "information-processing systems." Their downward causation is extremely
fine, meaning they can exert causal control over component atoms and molecules individually.
