Pitts J Brian
Faculty of Philosophy and Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
School of History and Heritage, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK.
Erkenntnis. 2022;87(4):1931-1973. doi: 10.1007/s10670-020-00284-7. Epub 2020 Aug 4.
The conservation of energy and momentum have been viewed as undermining Cartesian mental causation since the 1690s. Modern discussions of the topic tend to use mid-nineteenth century physics, neglecting both locality and Noether's theorem and its converse. The relevance of General Relativity (GR) has rarely been considered. But a few authors have proposed that the non-localizability of gravitational energy and consequent lack of physically meaningful local conservation laws answers the conservation objection to mental causation: conservation already fails in GR, so there is nothing for minds to violate. This paper is motivated by two ideas. First, one might take seriously the fact that GR formally has an infinity of rigid symmetries of the action and hence, by Noether's first theorem, an infinity of conserved energies-momenta (thus answering Schrödinger's 1918 false-negative objection). Second, Sean Carroll has asked (rhetorically) how one should modify the Dirac-Maxwell-Einstein equations to describe mental causation. This paper uses the generalized Bianchi identities to show that General Relativity tends to exclude, not facilitate, such Cartesian mental causation. In the simplest case, Cartesian mental influence must be spatio-temporally constant, and hence 0. The difficulty may diminish for more complicated models. Its persuasiveness is also affected by larger world-view considerations. The new general relativistic objection provides some support for realism about gravitational energy-momentum in GR (taking pseudotensor laws seriously). Such realism also might help to answer an objection to theories of causation involving conserved quantities, because energies-momenta would be conserved even in GR.
自17世纪90年代以来，能量守恒和动量守恒就被视为对笛卡尔式心理因果关系的破坏。关于这个话题的现代讨论往往使用19世纪中叶的物理学，既忽略了局域性，也忽略了诺特定理及其逆定理。广义相对论（GR）的相关性很少被考虑。但一些作者提出，引力能量的不可定域性以及随之而来的缺乏具有物理意义的局域守恒定律，回答了对心理因果关系的守恒性异议：守恒在广义相对论中已经失效，所以心灵没有什么可违反的。本文受两个观点的启发。第一，人们可能会认真对待这样一个事实，即广义相对论在形式上具有无穷多个作用量的严格对称性，因此，根据诺特定理的第一定理，有无限多个守恒的能量 - 动量（从而回答了薛定谔1918年的假阴性异议）。第二，肖恩·卡罗尔（Sean Carroll）曾（以反问的方式）问过，应该如何修改狄拉克 - 麦克斯韦 - 爱因斯坦方程来描述心理因果关系。本文利用广义比安基恒等式表明，广义相对论倾向于排除而不是促进这种笛卡尔式的心理因果关系。在最简单的情况下，笛卡尔式的心理影响在时空上必须是恒定的，因此为零。对于更复杂的模型，困难可能会减小。其说服力也受到更大的世界观考虑因素的影响。新的广义相对论异议为广义相对论中引力能量 - 动量的实在论提供了一些支持（认真对待赝张量定律）。这种实在论也可能有助于回答对涉及守恒量的因果关系理论的一个异议，因为即使在广义相对论中能量 - 动量也会守恒。
