QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

causal theories of action, each individual’s mental states such as desire, purpose and beliefs
could be regarded as causes for their action, free will was lost. Attempts to ”rescue” the principle
of free will were often the motivation for the production of non-causal theories of action , which
in their turn found it difficult to explain how free will, released from causal links, could influence
events in a world of deterministic matter. 302
The basic ontological framework born out of Cartesian dualism has remained unchanged through
the centuries. Those who have not accepted Descartes’ dichotomy have however been bound to it
in their representation. Materialists have typically attempted to reduce mental phenomena to
matter while Idealists have wished to restore material to the spirit. 303 When stressing the
importance of the mind Idealists realized that it could not have any links with a factor so
completely alien as matter. Through idealism, the whole of the material world can be seen as
nothing more than a by-product of the spontaneously active and autonomous mind. Combining
the viewpoints of Materialism and Idealism is presumably impossible without significant
alterations in the concepts of material or knowledge. For Dualism, the problem is interaction or
lawful parallelism between two completely different substances.
In a similar way to the basic ontological setup, the starting point for epistemology, i.e. that
humans are subjective observers of an objective world, has also now remained almost unchanged
for several hundred years. Regardless of whether observers are considered to be immaterial or
material, it is believed that they are able to form a truthful description of the reality of the world
by using their reason or experience.
3.3.1. Materialism versus Idealism
In philosophy, the term substance has traditionally signified something that exists by itself.
Descartes tried to save the sense of human freedom and to the claims of universal mechanism by
his concepts of res cogitans and res extensa. If they are understood as substance, the relationship
301 Ketonen 1989, 87. Aspelin 1995, 192.
302 Niiniluoto 1983, 162-3. the doctrine of Compatibilism is located between these stances, asserting that it is
possible to give reasonable content to the concept of free will even when human actions are determined by
deterministic or probabilistic laws.
303 In materialism, attempts have been made to solve the psycho-physical problem through elimination, reduction or
emergence, which aim to either eliminate mind, reduce it to matter or somehow make it emerge from complex
material systems. In dualistic interactionalism, mind and matter are assumed to somehow interact, while in
parallelism, both obey their own laws which are synchronized in time.
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