Physical vs. Computational Causation Explained #shorts

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]We mustn't forget that there's physical causation in that sense, which is crucial, but there's also mental or I would prefer to say computational causation. And the second thing I'd say is that when we talk about causation here, it's very important to realize that there are two sorts of causation that we need. One which we need to get the meaning in is the plugging into the world, the causal commerce with the world in in the way that we just talked about. What you might call pure physical causation, that light comes into my eyes, makes things happen on my retina, and that this body in the world touches that and it moves in physical space. Okay, but in between that there is psychological causation, what you call mental causation. Now, I would want to say that that psychological causation is best understood as a series of computations. Computations which ultimately are anchored in processes with a genuine causal semantics, if you like, of the sort that I've been mentioning. But when Marr, for example, talks about vision, he doesn't just talk about the way in which the light affects the cells in the retina, he then goes on, as you know, to talk about a number of different levels of representation in the visual system which are needed even just to work out something so simple as what is the three-dimensional shape of that glass.

[00:01:21]And each of those levels of representation is defined by him very carefully in terms of a set of symbols which might conceivably have been different, and each of which is defined in terms of the more primitive symbol at the level below. And ultimately, of course, you've got the level at which the eye is actually functioning as a physical transducer, namely, you've got a a plugging in of your semantics causally into the world. But we mustn't forget that there's physical causation in that sense, which is crucial, but there's also mental or I would prefer to say computational causation.