Joe Dewhurst, “Information, Causation and Emergence in Cognitive Neuroscience”

The aim of this paper is to present and analyse three different information-theoretic measures of causation that have recently been proposed from within cognitive neuroscience, and to argue that they are best understood as offering a deflationary or instrumentalist account of causation. The formal measures of causal strength or influence that these accounts provide are useful tools for the analysis of complex systems (like brains), but such tools cannot necessarily do the philosophical work that more traditional, metaphysically robust accounts of causation are expected to. It would therefore be a mistake to draw any strong conclusions about topics such as causal emergence or mental causation from these novel measures alone. Nonetheless, once this limitation has been recognised, the tools developed by these accounts can provide a valuable foundation for a formal philosophy of the special sciences, guiding our analysis of existing philosophical issues such as explanatory autonomy, levels of explanation, and reduction and emergence. I will conclude by considering whether this approach should simply be understood as a pragmatic gloss on the concept of causation, or alternatively (and more boldly) as the foundation for a novel, scientifically informed scale-relative ontology.

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