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When Is a Brain Like the Planet?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
Time series of macroscopic quantities that are aggregates of microscopic quantities, with unknown one-many relations between macroscopic and microscopic states, are common in applied sciences, from economics to climate studies. When such time series of macroscopic quantities are claimed to be causal, the causal relations postulated are representable by a directed acyclic graph and associated probability distribution—sometimes called a dynamical Bayes net. Causal interpretations of such series imply claims that hypothetical manipulations of macroscopic variables have unambiguous effects on variables “downstream” in the graph, and such macroscopic variables may be predictably produced or altered even while particular microstates are not. This paper argues that such causal time series of macroscopic aggregates of microscopic processes are the appropriate model for mental causation.
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- Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association
Footnotes
I am grateful to Jim Woodward, Michael Strevens, Elliott Sober, and John Campbell for valuable comments and corrections to a previous draft of this essay and to the participants in a conference on fMRI issues sponsored by the Rutgers Department of Philosophy in 2006, and especially to Steve Hanson, for stimulating discussions that caused substantial revisions in this essay. The graph of Figure 5 was obtained by Joseph Ramsey by applying a Bayesian search procedure, the Greedy Equivalence Search algorithm, implemented in the TETRAD IV program (
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