The 77 Bombings: What caused them

1
The 7/7 Bombings What caused them?

• Causation, embodiment and explanation.

2
What caused the explosions in London on 7/7/5?

• British foreign policy?
• Radical political Islam?
• Evil terrorist criminals?
• Beliefs desires of the bomber?
• An electrical current in the presence of peroxide
  etc?

3
Mill (1851)

• Nothing can better show the absence of any
  scientific ground for the distinction between the
  cause of a phenomenon and its conditions than the
  capricious manner in which we select from among
  the conditions that which we choose to denominate
  the cause.

4
Explanatory Choices

• Not really capricious, just dependent on our
  explanatory purposes.
• What to hold constant and what to vary is a
  decision we make relative to our interests.
• Quines counterfactual cases If Ceasar had been
  in command during the Korean war, he would have
  used nuclear bombs/catapults.

5
Hurley (2006)

• The causal-constitutive error error is the
  error of objecting that externalist explanations
  give a constitutive role to external factors that
  are merely causal while assuming without
  independent argument or criteria that the causal
  constitutive disjunction coincides with some
  external/internal boundary
• Why assume we stop at the skin? Is our
  consciousness embodied in the whole brain, or
  just a part of it while the rest is part of the
  causes? If its such a mystery how neurons can
  produce consciousness, why exclude the rest of
  the body and the world it interacts with?

6
Hurley

• Internalist intuitions rest on supervenience
  thought experiments that hold internal factors
  constant while varying external factors (brains
  in vats), concluding that mental contents would
  be the same and so supervene on internal facts
  alone.
• Explanatory separability is necessary for
  controlled experiments, but if internal and
  external factors are not unpluggable but vary
  together, no STEs.
• In complex non-linear dynamical systems,
  non-separability is common, undermining the sense
  in which certain factors causally explain the
  systems behaviour while others are merely
  background conditions.

7
Hurley

• Supervenience on internal factors is necessary
  but not sufficient for internalist
  what-explanation. Internal supervenience merely
  requires that mental content does not vary if the
  relevant internal factors are duplicated across
  different environments. Internalist
  what-explanation requires not merely the truth of
  internal supervenience, but that controlled STEs
  are possible. But it may not be possible for the
  internal factors to remain constant while
  external factors vary.
• 2 ways for internalism to fail
• because given unplugging and replugging, external
  factors are needed to explain intuition about
  content.
• because unplugging and replugging are not
  possible in the first place.

8
Hurley

• Take the perceptual state of an agent acting in
  the world, continually probing and sampling her
  environment through multiple informational
  channels, generating multiple feedback loops.
  Unplugging and replugging is less likely to be
  possible for such dynamic cases Temporal
  extension leads to spatial extension.
• Dennett made the intracranial version of this
  point in his argument against a Cartesian
  Theatre, but the point extends promiscuously
  across the boundaries of skull body.
• If the boundary is understood functionally, the
  bodily or environmental scaffolding needed to
  duplicate neural factors in different
  environments may themselves count as functionally
  internal factors, so that the supervenience
  boundary should include them.
• To make the states explanatory, we need to
  separate out non-explanatory factors but this
  will depend on our explanatory interests.

9
Rockwell (2007)

• Distinguishes pragmatic compleat cause
  (ugh).
• How do we select the pragmatic cause? When we
  say the spark caused the explosion, this is good
  for a physics course, no good for a political
  discussion.
• Neuroscience finds the pragmatic causes of mental
  phenomena in the brain, and assumes that the
  brain thus embodies the mind.
• Are they justified in drawing the supervenience
  boundary there?

10
Rockwell

• Nagel (1961) Both theoretical and experimental
  science proceed on the assumption that everything
  is not relevant to everything else, and
  occurrences in one part of the world are not
  dependent upon what happens everywhere else.
• (Butterflys wing-flaps?)

11
Rockwell

• Causal properties are relations, but we ascribe
  causal power to a kind of object intrinsically
  when it is useful to do so because it has that
  property in many situations (knives cut many
  kinds of things).
• But exactly how many such situations do there
  have to be before we should ascribe the causal
  power to the object rather than the situation?
• Even if sciences most frequently refer to objects
  with causal powers, this requires us to assume
  only that any given scientific speciality must
  refer to intrinsic causal powers.

12
Rockwell

• not only intentional thoughts, but also feelings
  and sensations, must be seen as supervening on
  the entire brain-body-world nexus. We feel what
  we feel because of impingements on our bodies and
  personal histories, and these have as much right
  to be called embodiment as brain cells do.
• Brain activity is necessary but not sufficient
  for every mental state.
• The borders of the supervenience base are a
  function of the goals and purposes of the various
  sciences.
• The distinction between intrinsic and relational
  is context dependent and will thus vary from
  science to science

13
Kim (1993)

• Kim (1993) Mental states supervene only on the
  internal states of the organism that has them,
  where internal is understood as neither rooted
  outside times at which it is had, nor outside the
  objects that have it an internal process would
  be a causally connected or continuous series of
  internal events or states involving the same
  object or system of objects.
• So, if natural kinds are individuated by entering
  into causal generalizations, and are thus
  dependent on our explanatory interests, there
  will be cognitive kinds referred to in embodied
  or enactive cognitive science whose supervenience
  base is extended over time and space, rather than
  supervening on local physical properties, as
  required by Kims supervenience argument for
  reduction.