MCMP – Philosophy of Mind MCMP Team

Roland Poellinger (MCMP/LMU) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (14 May, 2014) titled "The Mind-Brain Entanglement". Abstract: Listing "The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation" (1993) Jaegwon Kim suggested that the only remaining alternatives are the eliminativist’s standpoint or plain denial of the mind’s causal powers if we want to uphold the closure of the physical and reject causal overdetermination at the same time. Nevertheless, explaining stock market trends by referring to investors’ fear of loss is a very familiar example of attributing reality to both domains and acknowledging the mind’s interaction with the world: "if you pick a physical event and trace its causal ancestry or posterity, you may run into mental events" (Kim 1993). In this talk I will use the formal framework of Bayes net causal models in an interventionist understanding (as devised, e.g., by Judea Pearl in "Causality", 2000) to make the concept of causal influence precise. Investigating structurally similar cases of conflicting causal intuitions will motivate a natural extension of the interventionist Bayes net framework, Causal Knowledge Patterns, in which our intuition that the mind makes a difference finds an expression.

Paul Schweizer (Edinburgh) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (11 July, 2012) titled "Multiple Realization and the Computational Mind". Abstract: The paper addresses a standard line of criticism of the Computational Theory of Mind, based on the claim that realizing a computational formalism is overly liberal to the point of vacuity. In agreement with the underlying view of computation used to support this criticism, I argue that computation is not an intrinsic property of physical systems, but rather requires an observer dependent act of interpretation. The extent to which a given configuration of matter and energy can be said to realize an abstract formalism is always a matter of approximation and degree, and interpreting a physical device as performing a computation is relative to our purposes and potential epistemic gains. And while this may fatally undermine a computational explanation of consciousness, I argue that, contra Putnam and Searle, it does not rule out the possibility of a scientifically defensible account of propositional attitude states in computational terms.