Deciding the Mind–Body Problem Experimentally

Axiomathes 27 (4):333-354 (2017)
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Abstract

A Bell-type strategy of decision for the long-standing question of the nature of psychophysical correlations has been previously presented in a recent article published in Mind and Matter. This strategy of decision is here applied to experimental data on psychophysiological correlations, namely, correlations between cardiovascular and emotional variables that have been reported in several independent publications. This statistical analysis shows that a substantial majority of these correlations cannot be interpreted as an exchange of signals or a mere “interaction”, whatever its form, but that these correlations could a priori be explained classically, as the result of a common preparation during the evolution process. A discussion on the scope and the limitations of this result will then be provided. In particular, alternative explanations of the psychophysical correlations that do not appeal to a notion of signalling will be discussed.

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What is it like to be a bat?Thomas Nagel - 1974 - Philosophical Review 83 (October):435-50.
Physicalism, or Something Near Enough.Jaegwon Kim - 2005 - Princeton University Press.
Causation.David Lewis - 1973 - Journal of Philosophy 70 (17):556-567.

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