Natural science foundations of the problem of interaction of consciousness and body

Abstract

The article examines the natural-scientific foundations of the problem of the interaction of consciousness and body in non-reductive theories suggesting the impossibility of re­ducing mental properties to the properties of physical systems. There are three determin­istic ways to solve this problem-interactionism, materialistic and idealistic epiphenome­nalism, and two indeterministic ways-parallelism and correlativism. All these methods are subjected to constructive criticism: interactionism, materialistic and idealistic epiphe­nomenalism contradict the principles of causal isolation of physical events and the episte­mological completeness of physics, on which the building of modern natural science is based, parallelism is a heuristically empty concept, and correlativism needs a special class of psychophysical laws that have not been discovered by natural science until now. It is shown that the truth of one theory explaining the interaction of consciousness and body, and the falsity of others should not be determined solely on conceptual grounds in the space of philosophical discourse, but can be established empirically in the process of the development of natural science knowledge. Accordingly, the natural-scientific cri­terion that allows us to make a choice between interactionism or epiphenomenalism, on the one hand, and parallelism or correlativism, on the other, is the principle of causal clo­sure of the physical world, based on the law of conservation of physical energy. If the law of conservation of physical energy is violated in both directions – from the mental to the physical and from the physical to the mental, then interactionism is true. If the law of conservation of physical energy is violated only in one direction – from the mental to the physical or from the physical to the mental, then materialistic or idealistic epiphe­nomenalism is true, respectively. If the principle of causal isolation of the physical world is not violated in the behavior of material systems in any direction, then the choice be­tween parallelism and correlativism depends on the existence of laws of the psychophysi­cal order that determine the relationship of mental and physical events. If such laws are not found as a result of natural science research, then parallelism is true, and if they are found, then correlativism is true.