On the Concepts of Mental Causality and Informational Causality

Abstract

The article presents a critical response to A.A. Zhudina's work analyzing the author's conception of mental causality. The author examines the methodological foundations of criticism of his theory from the standpoint of analytical philosophy and substantiates the specificity of the information approach to solving the mind-brain problem. Particular attention is paid to critical analysis of the basic principles of analytical philosophy: reduction of the mental to the physical, the identity theory of mental and physical, causal closure of the physical, and the principle of supervenience. The author provides a detailed account of the development of the information approach dating back to the 1960s, demonstrating its priority over D. Chalmers’ conception. Considerable space is devoted to substantiating the differences between physical and information causality, as well as defining mental causality as a specific type of information causality. The article addresses the relationship between mental and physical, the problem of subjective reality, the category of the ideal, the principle of isofunctionalism of systems and its epistemological significance. The author critically analyzes the interpretation of the concept of mental in Zhudina's work and points to the need for deeper elaboration of subjective reality problematics. The article also highlights methodological issues of decoding brain neurodynamic codes of subjective reality phenomena and the significance of the information approach for contemporary neuroscience.​