Conscious Authorship: Empirical Models of Mental Causation

The relation between the mind, especially its conscious activity, and the brain is a mysterious one. In this chapter, two empirical models of mental causation put forward by two Nobel Laureates will be discussed. The first is John Eccles’ interactionist theory, according to which mind and brain interact by means of the influence that conscious choice has in the quantum chance that a certain probabilistic event such as exocytosis (the basic unit of neural activity) take place in the brain. The second empirical model presented is Eugene Wigner’s interpretation of what happens when one measures a quantum system, and the wave function of different less than-unity probabilities collapses into one single well-defined state. According to Wigner and others, consciousness is the cause of this collapse. By discussing these two theories, this chapter wishes to argue that the reductionist answer to the mind-brain problem should not be taken as its final solution. In fact, there are open problems in both science and philosophy and consciousness in one of the cases where the sets of open problems intersect.