Dear Jochen,
no problem, I myself am totally busy with many important, rather non-daily like demands that came upon me after having recovered from an influenza a couple of weeks ago.
"But the world is not such a setting (so very, very much not!);"
I totally agree. I must re-read your essay from last year, but need at least a couple of days to do so to recall what your framing of the mind-problem had contained in detail. I only know that I commented this essay a few times.
"I believe an organism can 'evolve' appropriate reactions to even completely novel stimuli;"
Yes, absolutely. Since I had influenza B, my organism has presumably now adapted to this new stimuli, since I work with children (150!) and many of them had severe flue. All kinds of viruses circulate in my place of work .
"I think the first puzzle they have to face is how two substances that are different in kind could exert causal influence on one another"
If you think of causality in the old way, namely as mechanical push-and-pull forces, so to speak, I would have to agree. I would have to agree, because this implies that some action that leads to a reaction must have been caused by another action of the same mechanical kind. If I now introduce a non-material cause into this chain (of thinking...?), I am tempted to understand this non-material cause as just the same rigid mechanical cause and effect that we ascribe to the material domain.
Yes, I agree that this kind of "if...then" relationship, a relationship that we interpret (and have strong reasons for that) as "because of X... Y or Z happens". But when I try to think this to its "end", I end up either with another particle picture that suggests that "cause" is "communicated" by some exchange particles (gluons) which need not "move" in the classical Newtonian sense to push and pull (otherwise we end up in an infinite regress once more!!!).
If I do not adopt myself to this rather naïve push-and-pull story, I am forced to conceptualize the very physical term "cause" in a rather different manner. The first thing that comes to my mind is that when we speak about physical "causes", we really don't know any classical mechanism that could elucidate how these "causes and forces" operate - at a fundamental level.
I think at this point we should confess that maybe the classical mode of imaginating "causes and forces" is just a model. The algorithmic approach to model cause-and-effect relationships is tempting because if elevates cause-and-effect relationships to the level of data processing. With that one has eliminated the problem of how physical causes and forces operate at a fundamental level, because now we can think of them as abstract relationships, relationships that have nontheless the needed property of being "necessary" in the classical, Newtonian sense - they are congruent to the classical push-and-pull forces, since they are now logically mandatory relationships "instead of physically mandatory" relationships, in which the former's dynamics can be understood as complex computations.
It is tempting to think that all this results in the insight that at a funamental level, nature is either a computational process or a kind of dynamic mathematical landscape in the sense of Max Tegmark's MUH.
In a certain sense, the informational approach must contain some truth I think. On the other hand, I would say that this truth does not exclude other, equally abstract "causes and forces". By taking the informational approach seriously, one must presuppose that such logico-mathematical systems which have the feature of being dynamic and adaptable (in contrast to a mere static platonical realm of mathematics) must be build up from certain axioms, since axioms are the very starting point for any logico-mathematical process to decide about the final output result. These axioms must be considered IMHO as somewhat be choosen amongst all possible logico-mathematical axioms to at all facilitate something like adaption - and life - and consciousness to think about it and grasp it. My lines of reasoning in my last post were to consider that 'mind' could be some additional fundamental axiom - in the sense that it can choose other axioms to start with for the sake of obtaining a certain final result. The mind feeds, so to speak, the computational processes with some initial data. In this sense the mind can be viewed as a self-programming computer program, a program that is able to deliberately freed some deterministic processes with changeable initial data to achieve certain goals.
Since in my last post I assumed the mind to be a dualistic 'thing', you are right that there is a conceptual problem with it when you write
"if it has causal influences on something physical, we could study those influences, come up with laws describing x's behavior; but then, that's all we're doing with things like quarks and electrons, too---study them by their causal influences and formulate laws on their behavior. So if something is physical, so is everything that causally interacts with it. Physicality is contagious!"
But the study the laws describing x's behaviour is fundamentally limited, I would say. Simply think about the different interpretations of QM. How can we figure out which of the different ontologies does indeed match the facts? I would suppose we can't, we can only ever detect strong correlations between certain phenomena and link them together into a cause-and-effect relationship. But as described above, such relationships cannot be simply considered as merely reflecting classical "push-and-pull" forces. The informational approach is tempting, because it suggests that we can (at some abstract level). And if we can, I think we also can include some axiom generating fundamental "axiom", namely a mind that is able to change "if.... Then" correlations into "cause-and-effect" relations. If we can't fully adopt the informational approach to reality, then once more the quest for the real nature of causes and forces and how they act and become effective must be searched for along some non-classical lines of reasoning. Either way, I conclude that such non-classical causes and forces must exist, since it seems obvious for me that the mind has some *effective* cause-and-force effect onto the physical realm.
I will re-read your last year's essay and will comment on it here when I think I have something additional to remark.
