A relação mente-corpo: investigando a causação e a participação

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether there is a mind-body relationship and, if so, how we can characterize it. In the first chapter we investigate in what sense there is a mind-body problem, for if we understand that mental concepts are confusing and can be eliminated, or that they are significant, but can be reduced to the explanations of physical processes in the body, it does not make sense to say that there is a mind-body problem. However, qualia are mental aspects that resist elimination or reduction. Furthermore, if we understand that the idea of causation is an epistemic principle and does not actually refer to things in the world, investigating a possible interference of mind, especially of qualia, into body would also make no sense. In the second chapter, we investigate possible explanations for the psychophysical connection that makes mind in general, and qualia in particular, seem to influence our behaviors. Substantial dualistic perspective would be unsatisfactory, among other problems, insofar as the explanation of how the psychophysical connection takes place depends on accepting the existence of God, which is something questionable. We then investigate some monistic proposals that advocate a non-reductionist perspective on mental events. The perspectives of Davidson and Chalmers are fragile in explaining the causal power of mental events; and although Kim is able to avoid the problem of epiphenomenalism, he assumes an eliminativist position on qualia, which would not solve the problem. In the third chapter, we tried to evaluate in what sense David Bohm’s non-reductionist perspective on the mind-body relationship could answer to the problem of epiphenomenalism. For him, the mental and material aspects exist in participation with each other in reality, and therein lies the basis of the understanding of the ‘causal power of the mental’, which, as a potential activity of information, has the power to allow active information update itself by changing its material aspect. From this perspective, we can comprehend the phenomenal consciousness as a very subtle and complex sort of implicate order, that may emerge from less subtle implicate orders which have a mind-like aspect. In the fourth chapter, we argue that mind-body participation can be considered a causal connection, understanding it as a category of causation that establishes a particular link between two things, which would be compatible with the qualitative novelty that exists in human action. In this chapter we further argue that Bohm’s perspective on mind-matter participation in active information can be understood as an interaction between the four causes: formal, final, efficient, and material. They function as a single causation, modifying itself as being another. And this would explain the ability of humans to self-cause and, consequently, the causal power of qualia to interfere with human behavior. Finally, in the fifth chapter, we argue that the human being can be understood as a complex system that organizes itself through its relations with the world. We establish the relation between self-causation in the human system as a kind of secondary self-organization (according to Debrun), which presupposes the re-creation of its own form. We maintain that the relationship between the various hierarchical levels of organization in the human being occur by circular causation in which the parts interfere in the whole, and this, in turn, retroacts on the parts, allowing the emergence of new properties. In addition, we clarify that we can only understand the mind-body participation in the human being as a self-organization of a complex system in a world. We also consider that there is circular causation, among other types of determination, between the human being and the world (understood as a natural and cultural environment that includes several systems, besides other human beings). So the answer presented to the mind-body problem is that the mind, including qualia, cannot be reduced to the physical processes of the body. The phenomenal consciousness, as the mental aspect par excellence, refers to the subjectivity of the experience of human beings in the world; only one can know what and how they feel with their experiences. This phenomenal level would emerge from a protophenomenal level, in which there is already a mental (mind-like) aspect understood as a potential activity of information, considered as an efficient, formal and final interaction of causes, that when interacting with material cause, material aspect (actual active information), produces a change in oneself qua another. This understanding of the mental aspect as a potential activity of information enables us to understand the causal power of the mental aspect and as the phenomenal level emerges from the protophenomenal levels of reality, the qualia, mental aspect of complex systems like human beings, can be understood as exhibiting a causal power over the body.