Anomalous Monism in a Digital Universe

Bermúdez (Philosophy of psychology: a contemporary introduction, Routledge, London, 2005) identifies the “Interface Problem” as the central problem in the philosophy of psychology: how commonsensical psychological explanations can be integrated with lower-level (cognitive, biological, etc.) explanations? In particular, since folk psychology is meant to provide causal explanations on a par with, say, neurobiological explanations, the question of how to understand the relation between the two layers arises naturally. Donald Davidson claimed that the interface problem is actually ill-posed and put forward his version of the “Autonomy Picture”, the view known as anomalous monism. This work reviews Davidson’s proposal in the light of digital universes: we model the key claims of the theory using cellular automata and show that Davidson’s original version of the Autonomy Picture (which differs, in some respects, from what is discussed by Bermúdez) is immune to two arguments against autonomy.