Mental Causation

Classical mechanics is formulated without reference to conscious experience. Quantum mechanics, in contrast, is, both by design, and in actual practice, a theory of relationships between the actions we choose and the consequences we experience. The theory includes not only laws that define a continuous evolution described in purely physical terms, but also an elaborate theoretical machinery that relates that continuous evolution to our actions and observations. This machinery injects into the dynamics an “element of wholeness symbolized by the quantum of action and completely foreign to classical physical principles”. The resulting process disrupts the principle of the causal closure of the physical and provides a natural mechanism for mental causation. 1. The Mind-Brain Problem In 2002 Scientific American published a special issue entitled “The Hidden Mind”. It begins with a pronouncement by Antonio Damasio: At the start of the new millennium, it is apparent that one question towers above all others in the life sciences: How does the set of processes we call mind emerge from the activity of the organ we call brain? He notes that some thinkers “believe the question to be unanswerable in principle’’, and remarks that “The naysayers argue that exhaustive compilation of all these data (of neuroscience) adds up to correlates of mental states but to nothing resembling an actual