Psychophysical Interaction

Abstract

The normal consequence of defending the reality of consciousness, sentience, cognition is to confirm the causal role of mental states. And the admission of conscious, sentient, intelligent entities normally entails that the observable molar movements of such entities are, in some essential way, psychologically informed, that is, informed by particular mental states — and thereby construed as behavior. Such states are, at the very least, introduced to explain the apparently purposive congruence of sets of otherwise random or purposeless movements in accord with the functional requirements of minimal rationality, or, assuming the particular needs, wants, interests, perceptual capacities of particular kinds of creatures, with the coherence requirements of that particular network (Rundle [ 1972] ). In short, the assumption that a system is purposive is simply the assumption that the functional properties of the system are informed by (Woodfield [1976] ), and that it is causally affected by, its mental states — where, the ascription of mental states (to languageless creatures) presupposes a (heuristically formed) model of the species-typical rationality of such a creature.If ‘good’ is construed in such a way that the functioning of the parts of the system are said to be good only insofar as they contribute to the determinate goals assigned by our model of rationality or by analogous models applied to nonsentient systems, then we are not bound (contra Woodfield), in admitting purposiveness or “natural function”, to defend the view “that a biological end of an organism is essentially a state or activity that is intrinsically good for the organism” (cf. Margolis [1975a], [1977h] ).