What Life has Mind in a Physical Universe

Abstract

Descartes assumed a substance dualism of both res cogitans (thinking things) and res extensa (physical things extended in space). While holding to mechanism regarding the latter, he suggested that the will is contra-causally free, for given a particular set of conditions, one can either do X or ~X. The question of how to square such freedom with natural determinism animated the immediate discussion after Descartes and is still assumed in much contemporary work in the philosophy of mind where compatibilist strategies are deployed to allow talk of mental causation while acknowledging that such causation is realized within a deterministic physical system. Kant famously argued that since physical determinism is tied to time as a pure a priori form of sensibility, there is no warrant to claim determinism true of an inaccessible supersensible order. Accordingly, while the empirical world and ego operate deterministically, the noumenal world, the realm of things existing independently of our experience, can nonetheless allow for freedom. The transcendental unity of apperception, the Kantian “I,” is thus not a denizen of the phenomenal empirical order, and applying the category of causality to it eventuates in illegitimate claims about that which properly lies beyond the realm of possible experience. Kant’s response to the mind/body problem is indexed to standpoint: We are at the same time determined from the standpoint of the empirical and yet free from the standpoint of the transcendental. After examining a suggestion by Sybille Rolfe that one might think the unity of the agent in non-reductive physicalism by properly applying the communicatio idiomatum of classical Christology, I argue for its application in a more Kantian way. Thus, instead of an identity ranging over the different contents of mental and physical descriptions, I suggest that the identity properly applies to different standpoints. Accordingly, just as Christ really is human and divine, so too are humans really determined and free. Because they have an irreducible and real non-empirical nature, their lives suggest a significance that is underappreciated by current trends within the philosophy of mind.