A Model for Mental Causality without Emergentism: Abhinavagupta’s Svātantryavāda

Loriliai Biernacki

A Model for Mental Causality without Emergentism: Abhinavagupta’s Svātantryavāda How do we get a concept of mind that can effectively cause events within a materialism which reduces causal relations to the interplay of physical objects, i.e., neurons and molecules? To a great extent, contemporary philosophical conceptions of mental causality rely on a concept of emergentism as a way of guaranteeing the causal efficacy of mental processes. This paper offers a different model, one which does not rely on emergentism. Instead Abhinavagupta’s model proposes a modal argument based on a foundational subjectivity as a means of positing mental causation. Abhinavagupta proposes a nondualist, cosmopsychist cosmology that sketches a version of mental causation arguing for the reality of our everyday world, unlike alternative Indian models (Advaita Vedānta and Yogācāra, for instance) appealing to an idealism that discards the ordinary physical world. In this paper I draw specifically from mathematical models developed by Nicolas Gisin and L.E.J. Brouwer formulated as Intuitionist Mathematics to frame a notion of freedom and mental causality not tied to emergentism, and to support and comparatively assess Abhinavagupta’s cosmology in his doctrine of freedom, Svātantryavāda.