Pluralism and the Mind
Matthew Colborn
Language: English
Pages: 300
ISBN: 1845402219
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Given that consciousness is poorly understood and vaguely defined, Paul Feyerabend's advice to "keep our options open" seems sound, but is frequently ignored in favour of an insistence that a scientific theory of consciousness must be reducible to current monist physics and biology. This book argues that such an insistence is historically unsupportable, theoretically incoherent and unnecessary. The author instead makes the case for emergent property pluralism. New concepts of emergent mental properties are needed because of the failure of mainstream approaches satisfactorily to address issues like subjective volition, autonomy and creativity. Personal consciousness is active and classifiable as a subset of the wider problem of biological causation. The book is split into three sections. Part one builds an historical case for pluralism. Part two deconstructs insistent monism and mainstream models before addressing biological causation. Part three explores the consequences of such an alternative approach by examining specific phenomena like free will, the self and evolutionary emergence.
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The Rationality of Science (International Library of Philosophy)
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Robotics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Reproduct Sys (Your Body) (Your Body: How It Works)
functioning took on a new urgency because of the rise of evolutionary theory. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was foreshadowed in a number of places, including by his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, in a poem of 1803. Erasmus had written how ‘organic life beneath the shoreless waves/Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves’, and how ‘as successive generations bloom/New powers and larger limbs assume’.[30] The idea that life changes over time, first proposed by the Ancient Greeks, had
thought we needed to get there (even a physicalist might accept this as metaphorically true). So a committed idealist would probably be able to come up with arguments that were plausible to them and logically consistent within their framework of thought. We should also note that Searle is already committed to his perspective, and the numerous facts of science and technology just reinforce a view already firmly held. Searle also ignores the idealistic bent of a number of theoretical physicists,
idea of ‘conjectural explanations’ that postulate entities as part of scientific hypotheses but do not regard them as ultimate truths.[21] Real and Anti-Real Currents in Science The next question is, given that we cannot as easily eliminate hidden entities as the positivists hoped, whether said entities can be considered real or accurate descriptions of unseen or unobservable portions of the cosmos. There are two conflicting schools here. Realism assumes that science tells us the true and
2002, p. 143. 17 Heeger & Ress, 2002, p. 143. 18 Bor, 2010. 19 Bor, 2010. 20 Bor, 2010, p. 57. 21 Kriegeskorte et al., 2010. 22 Vul et al., 2009, p. 274. 23 Nichols & Newsome, 1999, p. 36. 24 Kosslyn, 1999. 25 Logothetis, 2008. 26 Logothetis, 2008, p. 869. 27 Logothetis, 2008, p. 870. 28 Logothetis, 2008, p. 873. 29 Uttal, 2005. 30 Uttal, 2005, p. 3. 31 Donaldson, 2004, p. 442. 32 Donaldson, 2004, p. 442. 33 Donaldson, 2004, p. 442. 34 Uttal, 2001; 2005. 35 Editorial in
assumption that introspection (or any other kind of observation) must ‘reveal things as they really are in their innermost nature’. This implies that the things we observe, whether inside or outside our minds, have an ‘innermost nature’ that they ‘really are’. As we have seen, physics long ago abandoned this position.[23] Similarly, the claim that the sound of a flute ‘is’ a sinusoidal pressure wave, or the warmth of a summer breeze ‘is’ the ‘mean kinetic energy of millions of tiny molecules’