Conservation Laws and the Philosophy of Mind: Opening the Black Box, Finding a Mirror

Abstract

Since Leibniz's time, Cartesian mental causation has been criticized for violating the conservation of energy and momentum. (Non-epiphenomenalist property dualism is analogous.) Many dualist responses clearly fail. But conservation laws have important neglected features generally undermining the objection. Conservation is local, holding first not for the universe, but for everywhere separately. The energy (or momentum, etc.) in any volume changes only due to what flows through the boundaries (no teleportation). Constant total energy holds if the global summing-up of local conservation laws converges; it probably doesn't in reality. Energy (momentum) conservation holds if there is symmetry, the sameness of the laws over time (space). Thus, if there are time-places where symmetries fail due to nonphysical influence, conservation laws fail there and then, while holding elsewhere, such as refrigerators and stars. Noether's converse first theorem shows that conservation laws imply symmetries. Thus conservation trivially nearly entails the causal closure of the physical. But expecting conservation to hold in the brain (without looking) simply assumes the falsehood of Cartesianism. Hence Leibniz's objection begs the question. Empirical neuroscience is another matter. So is Einstein's General Relativity: far from providing a loophole, General Relativity makes mental causation harder.

The Causal Efficacy of Consciousness

“…Additionally, as the foregoing considerations suggests, the justification for it is wanting. (For further challenges to the causal closure principle and its applicability to mental causation, see [ 55 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 ].)…”

General Relativity, Mental Causation, and Energy Conservation

“…The energy conservation objection to nonphysical mental causation has been made starting from Leibniz in the 1600s (Leibniz 1997, Book I, chapter 1, section 73, 1985Schmaltz 2008, p. 172) until today and has engaged Wolff, Knutzen, Crusius, the young Kant, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Broad (not all on the same side) and many more modern authors. This objection is made with great frequency and often considerable confidence in the contemporary philosophy of mind literature [see citations in Montero (2006), Collins (2008), Gibb (2010), Pitts (2019)] as well as some striking instances (Bunge 1980, p. 17;Dennett 1991, p. 35;Churchland 2011). Even E. J. Lowe thought that conservation laws might be problematic for interactionist dualism, though he proposed several ways out, one of which (though not his favorite) has merit (Lowe 1992(Lowe , 1996(Lowe , pp.…”

“…Thus one needn't be attracted to substance dualism to encounter this worry: if the deliciousness of pizza is a quale that helps to bring about your eating seconds over and above what your body would have done anyway, then you face the conservation objection. Unfortunately quite a few dualists, not grasping the relevance of the converse of Noether's first theorem or of the locality of conservation laws in modern physics (Pitts 2019), have tried to argue that mind-to-body causation is compatible with the conservation laws. The converse Noether theorem says that conservation laws imply symmetries, so by contraposition non-symmetries imply non-conservation.…”

“…Recently (Pitts 2019;Cucu and Pitts 2019) this 300+-year-old objection was assessed in light of modern physics, including aspects that rarely come up and some that seem not to have entered the debate at all. It was found that, construed as an argument, the objection begs the question.…”

“…Thus interactionist mental causation removes the theoretical expectation of conservation by falsifying the symmetry that would otherwise hold. The preceding paper novelly applied the converse Noether theorem, which says that conservation laws imply symmetries, to show that one can go further (Pitts 2019). Not only is there no reason to expect conservation to hold, but there is reason to expect it not to hold, given interactionism.…”