Center for Naturalism February Newsletter

The Center for Naturalism (www.naturalism.org) has sent out its February newsletter, which includes updates on events, articles and presentations, online resources and much more.

We bring here a snip of Dennett’s TW Clark’s article “Mind, unspecified”

Mind, Unspecified

By Daniel Dennett TW Clark

The difficulty with dualism has always been how to specify the interaction between two putatively separate realms of existence, mind and body. Henry Stapp’s solution in “Quantum Interactive Dualism”, Journal of Consciousness Studies V12 #11, 2005, pp. 43-58 is to connect them via quantum theory, while keeping the mind quite distinct from the brain. The problem, however, is that on Stapp’s account the mind itself remains unspecified (like the intelligent designer, not coincidentally) except in terms of ordinary folk-psychological descriptions. Whatever it is, the mind isn’t the brain, but beyond that we’re not told much about it.

In particular, on Stapp’s account we need not ask what determines the mind in its choices: “Thus the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects of the data are rationally tied together by quantum rules that directly specify the causal effects of the subject’s choices upon the subject’s brain, without any need to specify the physical antecedents of these choices”; and: “in the quantum treatment the causal connection via the laws of physics is not from the cause of conscious choice to the effects of that choice, but rather directly from the conscious choice itself to its physical effects” (p. 57 JCS, p. 17 pdf ). Why, one wonders, do the causes of choice get such short shrift here? Whatever the reason, for Stapp the mind is causally privileged over the physical brain: the mind drives the brain, but is not itself driven by anything. This renders the mind supernatural; like god, it gets to cause without being caused in turn. Any naturalistic account of a phenomenon has to show its provenance in the natural world, and on Stapp’s account, the mind – variously described as consciousness, the observer, the subject’s choices, intention, mental effort, William James’ “spiritual force”, etc. – has no provenance, at least none that he discusses here. The reluctance to address the causes of mind might be related to Stapp’s desire to defend a contra-causal conception of free will.

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