Newton's Influence

Most philosophers, like most educated people today, have a conception of causation which is a mixture of common sense and Newtonian mechanics. Philosophers tend to suppose that causal relations are always instances of strict deterministic causal laws, and that cause and effect relations stand to each other in simple mechanical relations like gear wheels moving gear wheels, and other such Newtonian phenomena. We know at some abstract level that this picture is not right, but we still have not replaced our common sense conception with a more sophisticated scientific conception...I think that in the course of this project we are going to have to revise certain crucial notions, such as the notion of causation; and this revision is going to have very important effects on other questions, such as the questions concerning determinism and free will.

I think the essential problem is this: Twentieth century science has radically challenged a set of very pervasive, powerful philosophical and common sense assumptions about nature, and we simply have not digested the results of these scientific advances. I am thinking especially of quantum mechanics...quantum mechanics really does provide a basic challenge to our world view, and we simply have not yet digested it. I regard it as a scandal that philosophers of science, including physicists with an interest in the philosophy of science, have not so far given us a coherent account of how quantum mechanics fits into our overall conception of the universe, not only as regards causation and determinacy but also as regards the ontology of the physical world.
---- John Searle, "Philosophy in a New Century"

The study of human mind is so difficult, so caught in the dilemma of being both the object and the agent of its own study, that it cannot limit its inquiries to ways of thinking that grew out of yesterday's physics.
---- Jerome Bruner, "Acts of Meaning"