Jason W. Brown
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted - and how exquisitely, too ...
The external World is fitted to the Mind
Wordsworth, Recluse: 63
I
This essay1 is not so much an argument for the positions taken on the topics of its theme as an exploration of what those positions would be given the theme that it takes. The approach differs from the usual pick and choose applications of neuropsychological data to philosophical issues which insert clinical symptoms into philosophical arguments simply to illustrate or reinforce their claims. A symptom or deficit is snatched from its context as a fragment of defective behavior and used to strengthen an argument in which it has no authentic share. This is a fraudulent use of the clinical material.
A thoroughly clinical approach directly explores the pathological in search of a richer and more naturalistic conception of mind than philosophical study or normal psychology can afford. The material itself is the ground of the theory. The symptom and its spatio-temporal context evoke an organic philosophy of the "abnormal", which is to say, they describe the infrastructure of the normal. In such a description, ideally, every symptom is coherent with the entire body of clinical observation. The coherence then becomes a philosophy of mind revealed by the pattern of its disruption.
I am aware of only two theories of the pathological that are consistent across their domains of observation, psychoanalytic theory, which is an account of disorders of the self and personality, and microgenetic theory, which is a new, largely untested account of the effects on cognition of brain pathology. As with psychoanalysis, which had its beginnings in aphasia study, microgenesis owes much to observations in the neurological clinic. Microgenesis is a theory of mind and brain based on a process approach to anatomy in relation to patterns of symptom formation in patients with disturbances of language, action and perception. A model of the organization of cognition in the normal brain is inferred from the symptoms of brain damage, their change over time and their relation to pathology in specific brain areas. The theory stems from a dynamic approach to symptom formation and the change in symptoms over time, and a process-based approach in relation to evolutionary growth trends. The mapping of symptoms to distributed brain systems and the ability to relate pathology to normal cognitive function provided the basis for a process theory of the mind/brain state.
The picture that emerged2 was of an intrinsic core that actualizes over phases from the past to the present and from depth to surface in mind and evolutionary brain structure. In this process, content fractionates from a unitary base into the different modalities. The content undergoes progressive articulation and terminates in the world of object perception. The mind/brain state is a process of becoming reiterated through life. Damage to the brain at successive points in becoming exposes phases or levels in the mental state. These phases are, in turn, mediated by brain systems that incorporate the responsible (lesioned) area. A symptom is a piece of preliminary mentation that stands for a phase in the mind of an observer-patient.
The philosophy of mind that derives from microgenetic theory departs from the strongly computational and linguistic approaches of current philosophy. There is a relation to the work of Henri Bergson, William James and, especially, Alfred North Whitehead, whose controversial metaphysics may, I believe, be one day vindicated by microgenetic studies, but the theory is not linked to a particular school of philosophical thought. The philosophy originates in the symptom as a subjective datum. The symptom, the subject, and the subjective point of view are primary. This, I believe, is a strength of the theory.
Like evolutionary or, for that matter, developmental or psychoanalytic theories, microgenesis is a retrospective model. It_describes how a present state or object came to be what it is. In_certain respects, however, microgenesis is more fundamental. Phylo-ontogeny describes individual or group patterns that seem to be_extended
in time. From a microgenetic standpoint, these patterns reflect the reiteration of a single instance of becoming over different (evolutionary, lifespan) durations. Put differently every organism is in a constant process of becoming that reinstantiates itself in some duration. Phylo-ontogeny is the pattern of reinstantiations over time. Microgenesis is the time-creating pattern of a single instantiation.
This distinction was obscured in the past by a comparison of the time frames of what was presumed to be a common process, i.e. eons in evolution, decades in maturation, milliseconds in microgenetic process. Gradually, it became clear that microgenesis does not collapse phylo-ontogeny into milliseconds. The duration of, say, 100 msec. over which mental events unfold, is not a duration into which becoming deposits. This is not the (subjective) time it takes for the process to occur. Events are seriated in the fractionation to objects and this seriation creates temporal facts. The time for becoming is the time the becoming creates. Becoming is succession without temporal incrementation. Every actualization is a whole unit of psychological time.
II
Unlike other genetic theories, microgenesis does not lend itself to teleological interpretation. It is firmly set in the present. Past, present and future have their origins in the present state. The goals and motivations of psychoanalytic theory, the purposes and ends that have been imputed to developmental or even evolutionary theories, are not beacons in the future toward which current states are directed but patterns of recurrence that observation extracts from constraints on emergent form. The "goal" of becoming is an actual (occurrent or present) object. The present does not move toward the future. The future is the next actuality. This next actuality is the ensuing present already developing over the residue of the occurrent state. Indeed, if mental states overlap, as is likely, the onset of the next state, i.e. the immediate past of that state, is part of the structure of the occurrent state. Every present is re-created in a traversal from the distant to the more recent experiential past. Conversely, the personal past is the ground in which every new present is conceived.
For microgenesis, an explanation for an occurrent event lies in the personal past of the event. This personal past is buried in the present state. The personal past is not a causal sequence of events leading to the present but an experiential past revived in the depth or core of the present as the foundational segment of an irreducible, i.e. non-temporal, span of becoming. The aim of microgenetic analysis is to describe those phases in the revival from past to present that constitute the sum of mind for that moment.
This mode of explanation would seem to have the disadvantage of any historically-based theory. We value prediction more than retrodiction. We value the future more than the past. Retrospective theories tend to be labeled as descriptive or hermeneutic and are distinguished from so-called scientific theories which are causal and predictive. The concept of time is deeply entwined with the aims of science. To take an example, prediction in microgenetic theory is an estimation of the effects of constraints on the next actualization, not the outcome of change an occurrent object undergoes. On this view, the immediate prehistory of objects is the source of change in the world, not as in causal science, the simultaneous effects of a present object on another object or its effects in the immediate future. To hold that a direction to the immediate future is scientific and an orientation to the immediate past is non-scientific is to decide on the most basic question of change in the world before its foundations are elucidated.
In causation, there is a fixed sequence leading to the present. This sequence continues toward the future. The causal relation is future-directed. A present cause leads to a future effect. What is assumed for physical causation is assumed for psychological causation. The imputation of a causal relation between psychological events, e.g. desires causing actions, beliefs causing desires, or the assumption that cognitive "solids" interact, are essential postulates of cognitive "science". Indeed, this is the basis for its claim to be scientific.
In causal theory, the present is an outcome of a chain of events in the past. The chain continues from the present moment toward the future. In principle, physical causation and causal change in relation to time are isotropic or reversible. In microgenetic theory, change is unidirectional and occurs in the process of object recurrence, i.e. in the becoming of an actual (occurrent) object, not in the transition from one (present) object to another (future) object. An account of objects entails an account of their becoming from past to present, the future being imaginary. Objects do not lead to future objects. Objects do not change, they perish3 and are replaced by near replications. Authentic change is not in the replication, i.e. the replacement, but in the process through which the replication occurs. An iterated replication of worlds does not account for the change between replicates. In microgenesis change is in the becoming of each world.
The topic of change is at the heart of a theory of causation and determinism and is ingredient in the debate on free will. A theory of time is fundamental to this debate, since time and change are inseparable. A
theory of change in the world is a theory on the creation of time. Time
and change have the same directional properties. From the observer’s perspective, time is anisotropic. An action goes from the present to the future, so an account of how change creates the direction from past to present to future - "time’s arrow" - is a necessary component of any theory of will and action.4
Free will is a voracious problem that touches every aspect of_philosophy. The definition of will, agency and the self, the nature and efficacy of mental contents (e.g. beliefs, desires and intentions), morals and responsibility, and the brain basis of it all, are a few of the topics that need to be covered. The relation of mind to brain determines whether the mental can be reduced to the physical. The concept of change establishes whether a reduction is possible5 (SP: l7l-173) and if so, whether it is satisfied by a causal explanation. The nature of beliefs, desires or intentions are problems for any theory regardless of whether these folk psychological concepts disappear in a reduction of mind to brain. Common sense may not provide the categories for a theory of cognition, but the categories it does provide need to be accounted for.
Ultimately, the question is, what is process in the world? If process is causal, is there room for freedom in a mind-brain reduction? If process is emergent or probabilistic, is this sufficient to account for acts of freedom? Probability is potentially reversible but novelty is not. Were a prior state to be exactly reproduced, the reproduction would violate a "law" of universal novelty. How do novelty and probability relate to causation? Probability, but not novelty, is consistent with causal theory. Is the relation between novelty and probability comparable to that between freedom and determinism?
Some of these issues have been discussed in my last book, Self and Process, especially that of the self-concept in relation to the hierarchy of the mental life and the continuity of intra- and extra-personal entities. Primarily, the book was a study of the nature of duration and the phenomenal present and an effort to extend the theory of time awareness to the problem of voluntary action. The psychology of time was a central part of its argument and remains the cornerstone of this essay which continues the same line of thought more deeply into change, process, and will.
III
What sort of world is imagined when we think of a world as process?
The world of such a thought - really, the thought of such a world - is first of all a mental picture that fills a certain duration. The picture is made possible by the duration. A duration is the beginning of a category or concept and a concept is the nucleus of an object. The innate capacity for duration and category formation is so fundamental to mind, it is part of the definition of what mind is.
Durations, categories and concepts span moments in the passage of nature. A mental picture of a stabilized world is a world of thought in which the images of everyday objects sequester in a world object that creates itself through the mind of an observer. This world is carved by sensation into entities in an observer’s mind. Conversely, the mind of an observer is pruned by the environment to model the constraints out there in the physical world. The observer is one of the many objects in the world that he creates. But an observer is more than an object, an observer is an object that is penetrated by subjectivity. However, before there is a subject, there is an object. An object is a basic entity. What, then, is an object?
From the standpoint of process, an object is a local density that recurs the next moment more or less precisely. It is a configuration that persists across change as a combination of many such recurrences. This combination - the "summation" across moments in the life of the object - is the key to its persistence. The observer has an essential role to play if objects are to endure. This is because the series of near replications that constitute an object, in order to endure, requires the mind of an observer.
It is reasonable to assume that objects would continue to exist if all possible observers were eliminated. This does not mean we have nothing to learn from mental objects. Mind is an expression of nature. The "laws" of mental process are, I believe, a species of the "laws" of physical nature. If the actualization of an object is an instance of actualization in the world, the becoming of mental objects provides an account of the becoming of material objects. The theory of microgenesis is driven by this belief. Whatever the fate of the theory, however, we have no choice but to examine the contents of our own mind to know the objects of the world. Objects endure through observers. What, then, is more basic, an object or a subject?
The world is made up of objects and events. Objects are moments of change where some stability is achieved. Events are the vehicles of change in stable objects. I would say an event is a spatiotemporal discontinuity in object replication. If a replication is more or less exact, the chair remains a chair. If the chair burns to ashes or is shattered or flung across the room, this is an event in the history of the chair. If objects are reinstantiations of more or less identical spatiotemporal configurations and if events are discontinuities in such reinstantiations, is the difference between an object and an event the degree to which a configuration is approximated in each replication, i.e. is it a function of the distribution of spatiotemporal change?
The distinction of objects and events depends on a theory of change, specifically how objects endure, since events are created when objects cease to exist or when they change to other objects or effect them. The distinction between objects and events is mind-dependent since the endurance (duration) of an object, thus its stability or change, requires a segment of changeless persistence that is thought up in the imagination. It was Henri Bergson's genius to recognize the significance of this fact. A block present in the world may be a God's eye present that is everywhere, but without an observer it is still a durationless edge of passage.
For process theory, the concept of change is fundamental. There is change from moment to moment in brain activity and in the expression of this activity in normal and pathological states, as well as the interior flux of images and feelings. To know change, moreover, is to know its opposite, stability. For a theory based on change, i.e. process theory, the problem is stability. For a theory of stable objects the problem is how they change. A theory that is founded on stability requires change as an addition to objects. The addition of change is needed to explain the nature of an event. A theory that is founded on change requires duration as a psychic addition for object stability.
We are accustomed to think of events as interactions or concatenations of objects. Similarly, we think of objects as the conscious or nonconscious "agents" of events, or in cognitive theory, of objects as contents or representations in the mind, and events as the effects of operations that are applied to them. We think that change is extrinsic to an object. The idea of a world as process is mind-boggling. Everything is in constant transformation. The world seems, to borrow Dante’s phrase from another context, like "a ship without a pilot on a stormy sea".
How change is overcome as moments are chunked into entities that appear to interact is a complex topic. It is so complex that it is easier to assume that solid objects interact in the first place. This is one reason that objects are assumed to exist ab origo. Yet there is another, deeper reason for the belief in stable objects. Mind has evolved to stabilize change. The world is perceived through a distorting prism. The distortion is necessary to perceive the world. Objects are the observer-error in the brain's instrument of observation. This observer-error is built into the brain by evolution. The duration that leads to object categories becomes a belief in the existence of external objects. This belief requires a mind in opposition to a world. After a mind fills the world with objects, the next step is to populate that mind with object-like contents.
An object-centered approach turns everything into an object. A thought is an object. A noun is an object. Once a thing is named or thought of, the thought or name of the thing endorses its separateness. Language and perception taxonomize the inner and the outer world. Process theory has to deal with this state of affairs, i.e. things and names as anchors for the objects of thought and perception. The fixation of change in solid entities undermines our ability to understand the entities themselves. The understanding is not to be found in the object but in the process of becoming through which the object appears. Objects are inert actualities. They are perceived at the expense of an awareness of the recurrence that is the basis of their existence. We live in an actual world, the sources and vitality of which are hidden from us. Objects are distractions from the underlying connectedness of all things, in the mind and, presumably, in the world as well.
IV
The concept of time and change dictates the concept of objects and events and thus the implicit role of causal theory as an account of object relations. Object causation, say between two billiard balls, is not, as it seems, an event in the material world but an event between mental objects since all known objects are mental. Physical causation is an inference about a material world that is the presumed basis for mental objects. The belief in object causation may be derived from the feeling of mental causation which concerns the interaction between concepts or, at the earliest stage in development, between an agent and an action. Indeed, the concept of causation in the world of physics is an extension to science of the discourse of human agency.5 If object and mental causation
explain occurrences in mind and perceptible nature, their difference is the role of agency and freedom in a causal world.
In contrast, a subjectivist account of agency entails an inner story about agents, actions, beliefs, desires, choices, reasons, ends and so on. The story would detail the nature of these contents, where they begin, where they leave off, their derivations and boundaries and their relations to other mental contents. Take the example of an intention. It is not enough to say that an intention is a state in which there is a direction
toward an object. The direction might be an epiphenomenon that accompanies the object as it becomes clearer. That is, the direction becomes apparent when a content reaches a certain phase in its actualization. We speak of acts and actions but what exactly is an action? Are the plans that precede voluntary actions part of the action, are they thoughts, actions proper or perceptual contents? One cannot decide what is an action without an account of the temporal features that constitute an act in its entirety. The nature of acts, agents and intentions will determine whether there is interaction between them and, if so, whether it is causal.
There is a difference between a philosophical approach to these problems and that of microgenesis. A philosophical question concerning, say, belief might deal with its penetration by language or the nature and truth value of statements or propositions, while a microgenetic approach asks what is its momentary history, its before and after and the correlates of belief mentation with brain process. Philosophy slices mind for its static architecture. Microgenesis takes the continuum of mental process as the fundamental reality.
This approach can lead to new insights on the nature of freedom, but this depends on what sort of freedom one is talking about. Generally, since Hobbes, freedom has been defined by the effects of constraints on action, i.e. in limiting one’s options. This definition of freedom is centered in an object theory of the agent. It has nothing to do with interior events in the generation of a volition. The interior story can claim that an action is not necessary to decide if the will is free. The willing in a freely willed act is similar to the willing in a freely willed thought or image. Even if an action is compelled, there may be freedom in its timing. Suppose I am instructed to kill someone against my will but am told I can decide when and where the killing will occur. It seems fruitless to debate what elements of an act are free and what elements are not, or the degree of freedom in a given act. Extrinsic constraints are mere impediments. We want to know whether any act is free. The freedom in free will is not in the exercise of freedom - not in the action that follows a decision - but the ability to decide independent of whether the chosen act or any act occurs.
Freedom is also defined by certain properties. When such properties are found in a behavior, the behavior is said to be free. This property approach, however, does not get at the interior events. A somnambulist might act in a manner consistent with a volition except for the lack of later recall. If the descriptive properties of a freely willed act include its later recall, say, as a feature of conscious as opposed to automatic or trance state cognition, and if lacking such recall the act is judged to be unfree, what about the same behavior in a person with forgetfulness who has full consciousness of an action, and acts in a way that would be termed free, but later does not recall it? To an observer, a freely willed act and its simulacrum may be difficult if not impossible to distinguish. Moreover, the attribution of freedom to an agent on the basis of an outward description of his act is highly circular. This definition of freedom follows from everyday experience. We have an experience that we label as free, we use the properties of that experience to define freedom and then term a behavior free when it exhibits those properties.
A theory of time, change and the mental state determines what concept of freedom, if any, can be tolerated within the confines of the theory. The theory establishes the limits of agency, thus the limits and meanings of free will. From the standpoint of microgenetic theory, the freedom in free will is the ability of an agent, i.e. the self in a state of agentive awareness, to choose among options or to decide to act or not to act. This definition holds even if the conscious self as an agent is not fully autonomous or free standing , but is a chosen self, emerging out of the deep self as one of many potential selves that might have developed. If the conscious self is a product, and if concepts generated by the self prefigure its actions, an action is biased by the dispositions of the chosen self to generate the options that it does. The options are almost irrelevant. The self and its choices are delivered into a decisional state.
The problem of free will is as much a part of a planned or deliberative6 action of the finger as the choice of a summer vacation. Complexity augments the feeling of agency through incremental discharge but is not essential for it. More important is autonomy. If the conscious self is a product of an unconscious core self, does the conscious self function independent of its preliminary phases? Can the self initiate, guide or veto an action? If so, is dualism necessary for control? From the standpoint of the agent, these questions are independent of extrinsic constraints or coercions. The self, as Kant argued, is not driven by external conditions but by its own internal state.
Moreover, even internal constraints such as drug addiction, habits and hypnosis are inessential. For the libertarian, extrinsic constraints block or inhibit the freedom of action, while intrinsic constraints are not determining. For microgenetic theory, extrinsic constraints merely amplify or disinhibit intrinsic ones. The effect of the intrinsic is always primary. Every constraint limits one’s options,7 a gun to one’s head or one’s skill in karate no less than one’s height, weight, mortality and the absence of wings, but the number of options is irrelevant to whether any option, in this construal of freedom, is freely chosen. Otherwise, we are fated to incessantly quibble over the degrees of restrictions, coercions, lack of opportunity, genetic predisposition, failed upbringing, and so on. We want to know if free will exists, its criteria and parameters, not the quantity of freedom in a given circumstance.
Change evokes stability which in turn is a brake on change. Freedom demands responsibility which in turn is a constraint on action. The topic of responsibility is central to any discussion of free will. There is a political, if not theoretical, mandate to presume that an individual is responsible for his or her acts. All human intercourse depends on this assumption. Indeed, the effort to assume responsibility for one’s volitions regardless of their freedom, e.g. arguments for individual responsibility in compatabilist accounts of free will, pervades much of the literature on this topic. What, then, is responsibility?
One can ask, is there a primitive moral sense8 that generates a feeling of responsibility? Certainly, it seems likely we have evolved with some social instincts or patterns of behavior derived from biological dispositions. For example, such a pattern might correspond with a type of loyalty in which self-interest is sacrificed - or realized through - the group benefit. This could originate in herd instincts or the hierarchic relations among members. The sense of responsibility to oneself for acts that are in conflict with the group or independent of its values could originate in the evolution of instincts of social cohesion to cultural valuations, which gradually internalize to accompany the growth of the self concept. In the shift from core disposition to social cohesion, i.e. from wantonness to responsibility or from selfishness to compassion etc., the developing self-concept appropriates cultural attitudes. These attitudes infiltrate the drives and create a personal valuation that is deemed constitutive or defining by the individual.
The fact that evolution gives us moral dispositions, however, cannot anchor the truth or certainty of a given set of values. Evolutionary dispositions influence behavior because they have survival value, not because they are values. Microgenesis is consistent with value relativism in that values are learned adaptations of inherited dispositions,
but the range of what can be learned within the confines of the dispositions is so wide that one cannot justify what is learned by what can be learned or, to put it differently, by the way that learning parcellates the drives.
Thus, the core self is carved up by social values through learning. Certain values are central (constitutive) to a definition of the individual, others are peripheral to the self or define the society. But all values regardless of their positive or negative valence have their locus in the self-concept. When responsibility to one’s self, whether to altruism or self-gratification, supersedes that to another person or to a group, one set of values, those perceived as constitutive, is privileged over others and the privileged set biases the options and choices of the free agent regardless of how the sets are conceived, i.e. in terms of strengths, hierarchies etc.
Responsibility, therefore, is the feeling of allegiance to values that are apprehended as personal, i.e. constitutive, or cultural, i.e. assimilated to the self-concept, thus constitutive, or in conflict with it, thus enforced in learning, censure and punishment. Values internalize as the feeling of responsibility to one’s self and others independent of reasons which are in my view not causes but justifications. Core values parent beliefs and desires and shape individual and group action. The importance of responsibility to freedom reduces to the nature of values, their relation to action and to the self-concept. Ultimately, the self’s feeling of responsibility or the judgment of one’s behavior as responsible by others, is the resolution of the inevitable conflict that inheres in the self’s own valuations.
V
This, then, is an outline and preview, perhaps for some a warning, of the perspective that is brought to bear by this essay, viz: the relation of time and change to the mind/brain state, the relation of duration and category formation to objects and acts, specifically to the structure of voluntary and automatic action, and agency, the role of value, belief and desire in action generation, intentionality, and mental process. My goal has been to search out a meaning of agency that conforms with a theory of mental process, i.e. microgenesis, that is coherent with the clinical data and its implications for a concept of subjective time.
At rock bottom, the problem of free will depends on the boundedness of mind to brain process, and whether mind and/or brain events are causal or emergent. If mental events are tightly bound (identical or epiphenomenal) to physical brain states, i.e. if mental events are irrelevant to a physical description or eliminated altogether, and if the physical brain states are instances of causal change in the world, there is no intrinsic freedom. If the "laws" of mental activity are a species of natural "law", free will requires either a loose construal of causation, which is probably something other than causation, or a different account
of change, i.e. as non- causal.9 I am inclined to the non- causal option. On this view, free will obtains as a variant of the universal change exhibited by complex systems in the actualization of wholes to parts. The alignment of change in the mental state with change in the material world, and the implications of this alignment for free will entail a self or agent that exists to serve, sustain and voice, perhaps even in some sense exploit, but never veer from the silent will of nature.
Surely, there will be readers who would have wished for more neuroscience from a neurologist or, perhaps, less or better philosophy from a poacher in a neighbor’s field. They may also interpret these failings as a lack of explicitness on topics of personal concern. On my part, there is a preference for intuition over exegesis and for the creativity in potential, in context and allusion, over the dry bones of the actual. But there is more to it than this.
If change is realized in the becoming of whole to part, there is a surround of indefiniteness that is ingredient in the description of every part. The part is a part of some field and the ground-like quality of the field, i.e. its potential to give rise to the part, is the warrant for its indefiniteness. Every object has this "complementary" character. Indeed, there are times when ambiguity seems to be the model of clarity. This feeling is not unknown to those working in purely physical science.10 It is not, therefore, in the spirit of mysticism but of scientific inquiry to suppose that every elucidation conceals a deeper layer of uncertainty. To seize or at the least glimpse the mystery of that is for me and, I hope, the reader, a goal worth pursuing.
1. This chapter is a modified version of the Introduction to a forthcoming book.
2. Brown, J. (1988) Life of the Mind, Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum (LM); Brown, J. (1991) Self and Process, New York: Springer- Verlag)
3. After: Whitehead, A.N. (1929) Process and reality Macmillan, New York.
4. The connection between time and agency was most forcefullargued in Bergson, H. (1923) Time and free will (F.L. Pogson, transl). Swan, Sonnenschein and Co., London. Original publ. 1889
5. van Fraasen, B. (1993) discussion in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LIII (2) p. 442
6. Frankfurt, H. (1988). The importance of what we care about. Cambridge University Press.
7. Kane, R. (1985). Free Will and Values. Albany: SUNY Press
8. Wilson, J. (1993). The Moral Sense, Free Press
9. The position is that free will exists but is incompatible with universal causation. See e.g. Van Inwagen, P. (1983). An essay on free will. Oxford University Press
10. For example, David Bohm notes that an essential contribution of Niels Bohr to quantum theory was to bring the "ambiguity of meaning (which we ordinarily associate only with the mind) into a crucial role in the understanding of the behavior of matter." [In: Soma-significance: a new notion of the relationship between the physical and the mental. Psychoscience 1: 6-27,1994].
From a somewhat different perspective, Kane (op cit) has written that, paradoxically, compatibilist and deterministic accounts of behavior have grown in influence during the same period that support for determinism has eroded in the physical sciences.