Mental Coordinative Structures: Naturalizing Causation in Embodied Biological Agents

In the cognitive sciences, the distinction between mind and brain gives rise to the problem of mental causation: If talk of mental states such as beliefs, desires, or intentions is supposed to be more than just metaphorical, how exactly do these states of mind bring about changes in the neural structures and processes that realize them? This book suggests a broadening of scope as the solution to this problem, by conceptualizing mental states as coordinated patterns of neural, bodily, and behavioral activity. This new metaphysics of the mind describes mental states and processes on the basis of dynamical systems theory and coordination dynamics, situating them within a hierarchy of nested, self-organizing subsystems that realize a given cognitive agent. Mental causation may then be understood as constraints placed on the phase spaces of these nested subsystems by the mental coordinative structure they jointly realize. The first half of this book lays the metaphysical groundwork for this conceptualization, while the latter provides both theoretical and empirical arguments for the top-down causal efficacy of mental coordinative structures, before detailing their relevance for empirical study designs in the cognitive sciences.