December 28, 2005
The Mind-Body Problem - Who Cares?:
Guy Claxton said this a few years ago in the Journal of Consciousness Studies:
Any discussion of the causal status of conscious experience has to start, therefore, with the recognition that what appears to be a dispassionate enquiry is actually a question of life and death importance to which there is only one permissible answer.
The preceeding context is given below the fold...
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(quoting Claxton)
Just so with myself. There is abundant evidence that I impute causal relationships between bits of my experience — my imagining a calm meadow and a physical feeling of relaxation; the thought ‘I’d better get up now’ and the act of getting out of bed — on the basis of a sufficient tightness of coupling between the events, and whether their conjunction makes sense in terms of the causal narratives through which I habitually interpret my experience. I ask myself, preconsciously for the most part, a number of questions, and on the basis of the answers, I either do or do not make that causal attribution. Is A reliably followed by B? Dothe delays between A and B fall within a range that I can interpret causally, given the kinds of folk psychological stories with which my culture has equipped me?
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And especially: what key aspects of those stories might be jeopardised if I were to withdraw the imputation that A is the cause of B?
The answer to the last question, for many people much of the time, is: ‘my sense of self’. The existence of a causal relationship between conscious states, especially thoughts and intentions, and physical states or actions — taking the cello out of its case and beginning to practise; refraining from taking the last piece of cake—is one of the axioms of the garden-variety self. If I acknowledge that this causal relationship does not obtain, or not enough, then I have to conclude that I am ‘broken’: mad, out of control, or the plaything of impersonal forces. While the axiom remains unchallenged, the mind–body causal relationship is not neutrally discovered; it is mandatorily imposed. I am obliged to find it whether it is there or not. I will rig the evidence if I have to, and shamelessly deny that I have done so. Any discussion of the causal status of conscious experience has to start, therefore, with the recognition that what appears to be a dispassionate enquiry is actually a question of life and death importance to which there is only one permissible answer.
Source: Claxton, G. (2003). The mind-body problem: who cares? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 35-8. PDF here
