🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3awngqj.kmc@netcom.com> kmc@netcom.com (Kevin McCarty) writes:

>It seems to me that the question of whether the mental aspect of
>reality is a causally invisible epiphenomenon has not been settled.
>Am I wrong?  This may explain the startled reaction to the claim that
>the physical world is causally closed.  We may have no evidence to
>doubt that it is, but that's not justification for saying there
>couldn't be.

Well, many aspects of mentality are almost certainly causally
efficacious: things like learning, memory, belief, desire, and
so on.  That sort of thing seems to logically supervene on the
physical facts -- e.g. if I'm learning, it's logically necessary
that my physical replica (if embedded in an identical physical
environment) is learning, and so on.  That's because mental
concepts like learning, belief, and so on, seem to be characterized
by their causal role in the production of behaviour.

The problem of epiphenomenalism only really arises in a strong
form for the phenomenal aspects of mind, i.e. conscious experiences,
or "qualia" as philosophers call them.  These aren't characterized
functionally, and don't seem to logically supervene on the physical.
But these have to be kept quite separate from the "psychological"
aspects of mind, like learning and belief, which seem to be
causally efficacious in a relatively straightforward way.  Hence,
it's not really a problem for physicalism if economics invokes the
beliefs and intentions of cognitive agents.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."