Mind

Human “free will” has been made problematic by several recent arguments against mental causation, the unity of the I or “self,” and the possibility that conscious decision-making could be temporally prior to action. This paper suggests a pathway through this thicket for free will or self-determination. Doing so requires an account of mind as an emergent process in the context of animal psychology and mental causation. Consciousness, a palpable but theoretically more obscure property of some minds, is likely to derive from complex animals’ real-time monitoring of internal state in relation to environment. Following Antonio Damasio, human mind appears to add to nonhuman “core consciousness” an additional narrative “self-consciousness.” The neurological argument against free will, most famously from Benjamin Libet, can be avoided as long as “free will” means, not an impossible event devoid of prior causation, but an occasional causal role played by narrative self-consciousness in behavioral determination. There is no necessary incompatibility between the scientific and evolutionary exploration of mind and consciousness and the uniquely self-determining capabilities of human mentality which are based on the former.

According to a widely held view in the philosophy of mind, property dualism is a respectable theory whereas substance dualism need not be taken seriously. This paper argues that property dualism, as it is usually understood, is incoherent. The commitments that are meant to lead to property dualism actually lead to substance dualism. The argument presented here adds weight to David Chalmers’ suggestion that the serious nonphysicalist options are in fact various kinds of panpsychism and substance dualism. Along the way, I offer an account of the substance/property distinction, argue against the existence of substrata as distinct from substances and properties, and describe a new position that I call ‘transcendent panpsychism’. I identify some reasons why philosophers of mind might have overlooked the incoherence of property dualism and finish with some thoughts on the significance of my conclusion for developmental psychology.

Contemporary theology is realizing the importance of integrating the knowledge of modern/contemporary physics into the metaphysical and ontological categories used to consider God and the God-world relationship. Time is a complex notion with different meanings, characterized by a plurality of uses. The concept of time opens up to broader conceptions than those of physics, mathematics, and philosophy and reveals that the human being, the earth, and the cosmos are not the center of space or time. The concepts of space, time, and matter, to which the concept of vacuum is connected, are of central importance in any modern physical theory, and particularly in the theories of unification. It is being discovered that spacetime is absent at the most fundamental level and only emerges at an appropriate limit. This emerging image of time leads to new conceptual challenges that must be faced in parallel with philosophy and theological researchto achieve its correct understanding. It is a comparison of the viewpoints of the three investigative domains concerned with understanding the nature of consciousness, namely science, philosophy, and metaphysics. This thought process is connected to the intuitions of the contemplative and mystical traditions and seems to be in line with current scientific thought, which can be mathematically expressed. Recent scientific research struggles to grasp the subjective aspect of consciousness; subjective experience is in conflict with the figure of the observer classically understood in the scientific sense. The evolution of life and the relationship with the transcendent could have their information basis in a hyper-complex multi-dimensional space; recent efforts try to explain how mental states exist in the higher dimensions of this hyperspace; some recent models of unification integrate matter and consciousness through the use of this primordial multi-dimensional dynamic space. Ontological interpretations of quantum theory have been given, leading to patterns of bidirectional flow of consciousness between an explicate and an implicate order, supporting both local and non-local phenomena in the cosmos. The paper aims to offer an overview of the indicated issues with a trans-disciplinary method and through interesting hints for thought.

I argue in the essay that the conceptualist understanding of the mind-world relation ultimately leads to the kind of view that Panayot Butchvarov calls conceptual or linguistic creationism. According to this view, “there is nothing we have not conceptualized”. In addition to being an antithesis of metaphysical realism, which maintains that there is a reality independent of us, the term refers to the kind of thinking that sees human cognitive experience (and reality itself) as thoroughly constituted according to our concepts. While it might be easy to attribute this kind of position to Kant as well, especially when read through a conceptualist lens, I argue that such a position is not in accord with Kant’s philosophical intentions. Using the Deduction and Schematism chapters of the Critique of Pure Reason as examples, I also argue that on the conceptualist understanding of the mind-world relation too much is read into Kant’s idea that sensibility and understanding must be cognitively compatible with one another.