The mind, causality and evolution

Hello everybody wanted to run some ideas across you guys that I have been thinking about for some time. This is a long post but I believe it is a good one and would love your feedback.

Firstly, this is going to be aimed at people who believe in the causal relevance of the mind in relation to the matter in the brain. So this post would not really apply to someone who say, subscribed to epiphenomenalism, but they still might find it interesting. More specifically, I am going to be assuming the position known as interactionism. A definition for interactionism is given by Stanford Phil. Dictionary: Interactionism is the view that mind and body—or mental events and physical events—causally influence each other.

The rest of this is going to be mostly from an article on my blog but I will be responding to questions and comments here.

Before we examine the evolution of consciousness, I want to establish four important ideas that I am going to be referencing, and they are basically things that follow from our assumed position of Property Dualist Interactionism (see above post).



1. The first is the acknowledgement of the existence of what are called the Neural Correlates of Consciousness.

The Neural Correlates of Consciousness are defined to be: “the minimum neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious experience”

Science has made progress in linking some brain processes to certain states of consciousness; however I will only focus here on the fact there are brain processes that are neural correlates of consciousness and there are possible brain processes that are not neural correlates of consciousness. Notice that this definition is only talking about the brain processes that correlate with the existence of certain states of consciousness – it does not talk about the effect of the mind on the material brain.

2. Behavior of matter in the brain is changed from what it would have been if governed completely by the understood rules of physics and chemistry. This is essentially the basis of interactionism.

3. It is a multitude of physical objects in the brain which give rise to and change behavior due to consciousness and not simply one or two. I believe this is an incredibly important part of the mind/body problem that does not get enough attention. It's important that you understand what is being said here, and what would be true if the contrary were true and all of our mind was created and reacted to by one or two electrons (or what ever other objects are involved in creating the mind).

4. The fourth is the theory of evolution by natural selection. Only a basic understanding of the fact organisms reproduce (replicate their genetic codes), and there are mutations that occur within the offspring. Mutations' effects can be beneficial, negative or have very little effect at all. Organisms who their mutations cause benefit will survive better and reproduce in greater numbers thus spreading their genetic code with that mutation included. I recommend if you are not familiar with evolution to get an introductory view before continuing.

Let us look back to our nearest common ancestor with chimpanzees for an example. This organism had some form of subjective experience. It experienced pain and pleasure, and most likely had some primitive reasoning abilities, probably more so nearer to a chimps than a human. One might ask how we arrived at the consciousness humans have today from that of said ancestor?

There were mutations that happened when these organisms reproduced. One place these mutations happened was in the brain. Some of these mutations would have changed the Neural Correlates of Consciousness for that creature in some way. Some of these changes would have been harmful - perhaps rendering the creature mentally unstable. Others of these changes, though, would have been beneficial – possibly making the creature more creative somehow. These organisms who gained evolutionary benefit would have outcompeted their rivals and passed these genes onto the next generation.

This process happened repeatedly; a mutation leading to a change in the Neural Correlates for that creature (when compared to its parent), a change in behavior of matter in the brain, and the changes that lead to evolutionary benefit being carried over, until we arrive at humans today. This follows if we accept both an interactionist perspective as well as accept the evolutionary model of the development of life.


This process is very similar to the evolutionary process for the development of any feature of an organism, so what is the difference? Again I will have to remind my reader that I assuming an interactionist point of view, and we will see the difference between evolution of the consciousness and evolution of other features of an organism depend on the acceptance of this premise.

In the interactionist perspective, there are two key differences between evolution of the mind and evolution of purely physical attributes. Note when we talk of evolution of the mind we do not necessarily mean evolution of the brain. There could certainly be evolution regarding structures in the brain that do not involve the mind; but changes in the mind are results of changes within the brain.

The first major differences is the mind makes a change in behavior of matter from that which would be assumed if its behavior were governed purely by the rules of chemistry and physics as understood. When creatures evolve most features such as horns, teeth, muscles, bones; the behavior of the matter involved behaves according to the rules of physics and chemistry.

The second major difference between evolution of the mind and evolution of purely physical features of an organism is the mind itself. Not only is there a change in the structure of the matter in the body – as would happen in the evolution of any new feature – there is another aspect of reality that is altered along with the structure of the matter in the organism. In the Property-Dualist Interactionist model which I subscribe to we call this other aspect of reality a non-physical property.

But notice in both, evolutionary benefit as a product of the mutation is important for it to be passed down to future generations.


Following an interactionist perspective, we can see in the evolution of consciousness of creatures on earth there is a process where the behavior of matter is being continually altered within the brain from generation to generation. Life has not always existed so this has to have been a finite process with a beginning. A first change in behavior of matter from what would be expected purely from the predictions of physics and chemistry. For convenience I will refer to this moment in evolution as the initial alteration.

I believe the initial alteration is an extremely important possibility regarding the mind-body problem for various reasons. If people here seem interested I will go into it more deeply including the possibility that the initial alteration was due to some other unknown property other than consciousness.

What I would like to know from you guys: if my assumptions of interactionism and evolution is true, do you believe my conclusion of the 'initial alteration' is also true? And what do you think about the 'four important ideas' surrounding the interactionist view that I laid out. Thanks for your input.