1. Dr Magda Osman Room 2.25 Office hours Mondays
Mental Causation
Dr Magda Osman
Room 2.25
Office hours Mondays

2. Is it possible for the mind to cause changes in the material body?
Yes No
Unsure

3. Are our actions ultimately controlled by brain processes independent of our mind?
Yes No
Unsure

4. Learning outcomes
Have knowledge of the different types of relationships the mind has to the brain (connection to the mind/body problem)
Understand the issues regarding intentionality and its connection to mental causation
Have a good understanding of the empirical methods used to examine causation (Libet study, and current replications)

5. Relationship between Mental & Physical
How are minds and bodies related?
Interactive substance
Mental and Physical substances interact directly with each other
Psychophysical parallelism
Mental and Physical substances exist in parallel, and do not interact with each other

6. Are interactive substance and Psychophysical parallelism
Monist positions
Dualist positions

7. Three kinds of Mental Causation
1. PHYSICAL-TO-MENTAL:
Events in the physical realm—e.g., dropping a bowling ball on one’s toe—cause events in the mental realm—e.g., a severe pain.
2. MENTAL-TO-MENTAL:
Events (or states) in the mental realm—e.g., one’s belief that the earth is round—cause other events (or other states) in the mental realm—e.g., one’s belief that no ship will fall off the edge of the earth.
3. MENTAL-TO-PHYSICAL:
Events in the mental realm—e.g., one’s desire for a glass of milk—cause events in the physical realm—e.g., getting out of bed and walking downstairs to the kitchen.

8. Problem 1 –Mental to physical
If the mental has causal influence over the physical—then there must be causal laws connecting mental phenomena with physical phenomena
(i.e., causal laws that govern the mental’s interaction with the physical).
But has psychology/philosophy found any such laws? NO
Donald Davidson’s (1963) anomalous monism
Unless we treat the mental state as a physical event for it to have any kind of causal power – in which we still need laws to explain psychophysical behavior

9. Problem 2 – Mental to physical
Causal Closure Principle –
“[N]o causal chain involving a physical event will ever cross the boundary of the physical into the nonphysical”
Mental to physical – violates the causal closure principle unless mental events and properties are somehow brought into the physical domain.
But if they are part of the physical domain, doesn’t that mean that they are physical properties and events?
Epiphenomenalism
Reductionist – only care about neural states (which correspond with what is a mental event – e.g. pain) – which are the physical events in the brain that have causal power.

10. Problem 3 – Mental to physical
Why complicate things – the observable is all that should count?
Tea making can be viewed as a simple Stimulus-Response set up, without having to posit complex ideas such as agency.
Dennett’s (1971, 2006) Intentional stance systems theory makes this very point.
He distinguishes the physical level (e.g., laws of physics)
from the design (e.g., biological, chemical)
and intentional (e.g., attribution of beliefs, desires) level of description of any system (human, animal, artefact).

11. Intentionality
Intentionality is an essential concept for agency because the assignment of actions is intimately linked to intentions.
The intention is the basis for the action, and the action can cause bodily movements such as using my finger to flick the switch of the kettle causing the water to boil.
(intentions are actions plans)
Difference between intentions/desires
Intentions are a way of initiating actions, even if the actions are delayed (intending to write the essay this evening, but putting it off till the end of the week), intentions persist until the end goal is achieved in some way,
Desires can persist without the need to initiate an action.
(Mele, 1992; Pacherie, 2008)

12. Problem with Intentionality I
What happens when we are performing actions that are automatic – i.e.
when we become practiced in a sport – our intention to act might be slower than performing the action?
Some (Hornsby, 1980; Mele, 2009) propose that if we may want to assign some special status to bodily movements as actions; for instance, by saying that they are closest to (i.e. proximal) the intention than other actions.
However… there is a problem….

13. Problem with Intentionality II
An expert swinging a squash racket
swinging the racket may be causally basic and also intentionally basic because the muscle movements are initiated as a function of the intention-embedded plan of hitting the ball.
But,
1. causal basicness is a relative concept, - a rehearsed body movement may be basic for an expert (e.g., swinging a racket) that is highly practiced in it, but not for a novice.
2., intentional basicness can be dissociated from casual basicness,
We tend to have little or no awareness of how we get to move our arm through the contraction of X muscle, or of other details of how we can get to move our arm, apart from the basic intention to move our arm.

14. So what?
For psychology and neuroscience, Agency (intentionality) and consciousness are bounded
Why is this an issue?
Some psychologists claim (e.g., Libet, 1985; Soon et al, 2008; Verbaarschot et al, 2015) that the representational content of an intention should include lower level components such as motor schemata and neuromuscular activity

15. Libet (early studies in the 80’s)
Benjamin Libet conducted a series of EEG experiments
to determine if there is electrical activity in the brain before
a bodily action.
He was able to show that there was an electrical
signal build-up in the brain approx 500 msc before
a physical movement was carried out.
So half a second before I move my finger,
there is an electrical build up in some
neurons of the brain.
This electrical build up was given
the name "readiness potential" by Libet.

16. E.g. Libet’s study (1979) I
More or less simultaneously the experimenter
1) stimulated a brain region such that the subject felt a tickle in her left hand.
2) stimulated the right hand directly. The subject had to decide where they felt the stimulation first, in the right hand or in the left hand or at the same time. It was possible for the experimenter to shift the onsets  of the stimulations

17. E.g. Libet’s study (1979) I
Libet predicted that – it should take approx 500 msc to prompt a conscious experience (since it needs always approximately a half second before an external stimulus can enter into consciousness).
However, the outcome was completely unexpected:
The stimulation of the brain
and the stimulation of the
skin were experienced
simultaneously if the
stimulation of the hand
started a half second earlier

18. Implications
In case of the external stimulation of the skin our 'conscious mind' subtracts 500msc and predates the subject's conscious experience.  (alternates the time line of conscious experience
In this way, we experience the outer world in the correct way – i.e. as it happens in real time.
It takes a while until we experience  a event in the outer world. However, our 'conscious mind' dates it back and we think we experience the world in the temporally right moment.

19. Libet (studies in the 90’s) I
In the more advanced experiment Libet put electrodes on the heads of his subjects and asked them to observe a very fast moving clock. he then asked them to move their wrists whenever they wanted to but note the time at which the "desire to move the wrist" came into their minds.
So there were three time measurements for each subject:
1) The time of the build up of the electrical signals in the brain ( this is the readiness potential) [electromyogram of the muscles]
2) The time when the conscious wish to act occurs in the brain ( this is now called Libet's W time) [the clock time]
3) The actual time of the physical movement or action. [EEG]

20. E.g. Libet’s study II

21. Libet (studies in the 90’s) II
Libet had found that the readiness potential is generated upto -500 ms before the button press.
Conscious will to act occurred about -200 ms before the action
300 ms before you know about it consciously, your conscious desire to move has been caused by electrical signals building up
This has been taken to imply that – at least in the case for simple motor tasks there seems to be that mental states don’t have causal efficacy.

22. Conclusions drawn from Libet’s studies
Our brain initiates a 'voluntionary act' unconsciously.  This is not a conscious decision but unconscious processes are influencing our decision making.
This conclusions directly contradicts our (conscious) common sense: Consciousness is unfaithful.
From the voluntionary act to the action itself (lifting a finger) it takes about 200 ms (myogram of the muscles).
Is this enough time for a consciousness to veto actions?

23. I am entirely convinced I am somewhat convinced Unsure
Does the evidence from Libet’s study convince you that our conscious experiences are tricking us into thinking we have control over our actions?
I am entirely convinced
I am somewhat convinced
Unsure
I am somewhat unconvinced
I am entirely unconvinced

24. Haggard, Clark and Kalogeras (2002)
Libet investigated the relation between the time people “felt” decisions for conscious actions/events.
Another related issues is the perception of events in time compared with the actual real time course of events
for example the timing judgment of pressing a key and the (delayed) occurrence of an event

25. Haggard, Clark and Kalogeras (2002)
Libet’s work (a)
Haggard et al’s
Work (b)

26. Haggard, Clark and Kalogeras (2002) E1
Does our perception of when an event occurs depend on whether we caused it?
E1. – Condition A - S’s judged the onset of a tone by reporting the corresponding position of a rapidly moving clock hand. (observation)
E1. – Condition B – S’s judged the onset of a tone, but in this case when they pressed a key it caused a tone to follow 250 ms later. (action)
They found that when the tone was causally linked to the subjects’ keypress, subjects judged the tone to occur 46 ms earlier than if these events had occurred independently of their actions.

27. Haggard, Clark and Kalogeras (2002)

28. Explanation
Hume identified Temporal and Spatial continguity as factors that facilitating the judgment of causality. So, the closer together in space and time events are (particularly when the cause is our intervention on the world) as compared to spatio-temporally distant events, then they will be perceived as causally related.
With certain assumptions about the prior probabilities, it follows from Bayes’
equation that events known to be causally related are more likely to be close in
time and space than unrelated events. P(Cause (e1, e2) | CloseTime(e1, e2)) >
P(Cause (e1, e2) | DistantTime(e1, e2)) ==>  (with certain assumptions about the prior probabilities) P(CloseTime(e1, e2) | Cause (e1, e2)) >
P(DistantTime(e1, e2) | Cause (e1, e2))

29. Different explanations for re-ordering
We re-organize the events so that it looks like effects happens shortly after our actions because:
Haggard et al (2002) we compress the time between actions and subsequent sensory events, such that all sensations following actions appear to draw closer to the actions (intentional binding).
Stetson et al (2006) suggest that the perceived timing of sensory events shifts with respect to the perceived timing of actions

30. Mental causation summary
In general, our system is designed to make our experiences of the world coherent:
Moreover, the basic framework it operates under is to give the impression that our
1. our intentions cause actions
2. our action have effects on the world
3. there is a correspondence between intentions, actions and effects
Even when there are temporal lags between actions and events our system recalibrates the temporal order – which implies that that temporal order judgments between motor acts and sensory events are constantly changing in order to maintain causality assessments.

31. Essay
Describe and evaluate empirical findings that challenge the view that our mind can cause a physical change in the external world?