Schwarz and Begley on the Mind and the Brain

Can neuroscience criticize the causal closure of the physical? Schwarz seems to think he can.

More clarification of causal closure

The causal closure principle is a doctrine designed largely to explain what a materialistic world-view must be committed to at minimum. In my analysis of what a philosophical materialist, and, I would say also, a philosophical naturalist must believe, there are three doctrines which comprise is:

1) A purpose-free physical level.
2) The causal closure of the physical level.
and
3) The supervenience of everything that cannot be captured in the language of physics upon that which can be captured in the language of basic physics.

(It gets a little more complicated when you want to bring in timeless entities like numbers, for example, or even sets. However, such entities, if they exist, are irrelevant to how events are produced in the world).

Now causal closure is consistent with epiphenomenalist forms of dualism, according to which there are mental substances that do not cause any effects in the physical world.

Yes, the AFR is an attack on the causal closure principle, in fact one of the classic defenses of it, chapter 3 of William Hasker's The Emergent Self, is entitled "Why the Physical Isn't Closed."

Why should we believe the causal closure principle? Well, for the reasons that are offered for being a philosophical naturalist of some kind. If the physical world is all there is, then nothing else exists.

So yes, my argument from reason is an attack on the causal closure principle. But I was simply trying to explicate what a contemporary naturalist believes.

There are some people who call themselves philosophical naturalists who deny the causal closure principle, though I think that position leads to incoherence.

Beversluis, Lewis, and Jaegwon Kim on causal closure

Here is an interesting passage in Beversluis chapter on the argument from reason:

JB: Naturalists believe that everything that happens within the total system is caused by something internal to it, so that nothing is independent in a way that enables it to escape this vast interlocking causal web. In short, nature is a self-contained and closed system. By "closed" Lewis means causally closed. So defined, naturalism is a form of determinism--the philosophical theory that everything that happens, happens necessarily as a result of antecedent causes given which nothing could else could have happened. So by naturalism, Lewis means deterministic naturalism. thus, he declares, "no thoroughgoing naturalist believes in freee will (M1, 17). It is important to notice that his argument depends on the assumption that there are ony two alternatives: deterministic naturalism and supernaturalism. If other choices exist, the refutation of the former would not entail the truth of hte latter, as Lewis claims it does.

VR: So in this passage Beversluis commits Lewis to understanding naturalism as deterministic, with the implication that forms of naturalism that deny determinism are not naturalistic. Intereesing Lewis does discuss the denial of determinism through quantum-mechanical indeterminism and says that this would be a rejection of strict natruralism but not an affirmation of supernaturalism, since it would admit a Subnatural realm rather than a supernatural realm. I have discussed this in a couple of posts, but what I had not seen before was the fact that Beversluis seems to think that causal closure entails determinsm.

As defined by contemporary philosophers such as Jaegwon Kim, closure does not entail determinism. Kim writes:


JK: The first of these is the principle that the physical world constitutes a causally closed domain. For our purposes we may state it as follows:The causal closure of the physical domain. If a physical event has a cause at t, then it has a physical cause at t.
There is also an explanatory analogue of this principle (but we will make no explicit use of it here): If a physical event has a causal explanation (in terms of an event occurring at t), it has a physical causal explanation (in terms of a physical event at t).8 According to this principle, physics is causally and explanatorily self-sufficient: there is no need to go outside the physical domain to find a cause, or a causal explanation, of a physical event. It is plain that physical causal closure is entirely consistent with mind-body dualism and does not beg the question against dualism as such; it does not say that physical events and entities are all that there are in this world, or that physical causation is all the causation that there is. As far as physical causal closure goes, there may well be entities and events outside the physical domain, and causal relations might hold between these nonphysical items. There could even be sciences that investigate these nonphysical things and events. Physical causal closure, therefore, does not rule out mind-body dualism--in fact, not even substance dualism; for all it cares, there might be immaterial souls outside the spacetime physical world. If there were such things, the only constraint that the closure principle lays down is that they not causally meddle with physical events--that is, there can be no causal influences injected into the physical domain from outside. Descartes's interactionist dualism, therefore, is precluded by physical causal closure; however, Leibniz's doctrine of preestablished harmony and mind-body parallelism, like Spinoza's double-aspect theory,9 are perfectly consistent with it. Notice that neither the mental nor the biological domain is causally closed; there are mental and biological events whose causes are not themselves mental or biological events. A trauma to the head can cause the loss of consciousness and exposure to intense radiation can cause cells to mutate.

VR: In short, the causal closure principle doesn't imply that there are determining physical causes for every event, only that there are no non-physical causes for any event. The argument from reason, on the other hand, if successful, intends to show that there are non-physical causes for the mental states involved in rational inference. The causal closure principle that Kim presents is sufficient to generate argument from reason. If Lewis had had Kim's definition of causal closure to work with, he would not have saddled the naturalist with determinism, but the argument from reason would not have been effected, since if the AFR works, it requires not merely the denial of physical determinism but also of the causal closure principle as defined by Kim.

My question for Paul Draper

My question for Paul Draper on the Internet Infidels God or Blind Nature debate

In your reply to Plantinga, you maintain that a “sensible naturalism” can provide an adequate response to Plantinga’s EAAN. I would like to take a closer look at that “sensible naturalism.”

Surely you must know who invented the term “sensible naturalism.” It comes from William Hasker’s generally friendly response to my presentation of the Argument from Reason, entitled “What About a Sensible Naturalism: A Response to Victor Reppert," Philosophia Christi 5 (2003), at 53-62.

In your essay you define a set of beliefs that Hasker would accept as part of what a sensible naturalist must accept:

S: Beliefs exist, they affect behavior by virtue of their contents, and a belief's having a particular content is not the same as its displaying a certain set of third-person properties.

I quite agree. But I wonder if you are willing to accept the next step in Hasker’s argument, the claim that a sensible naturalist ought to deny the causal closure of the physical. Do you accept that, or not?

The problem here is that orthodox physics does not import first-person properties to its descriptions. It must be admitted that before living things ever came to exist, there was nothing that had a first-person perspective. Yet, if naturalism is true, all the causes were in place within the physical world to produce everything that has been produced since. So how does third-person physical stuff give rise to first-person entities?

If the physical is closed, the every particle’s being where it is can be fully accounted for in terms of physics. If you were physically omniscient, then nothing from the world of the mental could possibly give you any information about where a particle was going to be. You are familiar, surely with the difficulties Jaegwon Kim has raised for mental causation in a physicalistic world, or the argument from mental causation found in Hasker’s The Emergent Self (Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 3, or in my book, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Inter-Varsity Press, 2003).

If you say that the universe started out as a physicalistic system with no mental causes in place, how did it create a distinct, irreducible mental realm that interacts with it?

Hasker, of course, argues that sensible naturalist should set the causal closure of the physical aside, even though many of you fellow naturalists will wonder whether you’re still a naturalist. But it seems to me that one must do more than that, one must admit that there are basic, irreducible causes in the universe that are mental in nature. Now you can do that without accepting theism per se: pantheism and absolute idealism are OK also. Admitted this is not supernaturalism, in the sense these world-views do not posit a separate, supernatural realm. But it does so at the cost of maintaining that the physical world is quite different from what orthodox physics says that it is.