Re-Emergence: Locating Conscious Properties in a Material World

259 Pages·2011·3.788 MB·English

by  Gerald Vision

Re-Emergence

Re-Emergence
Locating Conscious Properties in a Material World
Gerald Vision
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United
States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vision, Gerald.
Re-emergence : locating concious properties in a material world / Gerald Vision.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01584-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Consciousness. 2. Emergence (Philosophy) I. Title.
B808.9.V57 2011
126—dc22
2010045906
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
in memory of Sayra Vision

Contents
Preface ix
I Emergentism of the Mental Described and Defended
1 History and Background 3
1.1 Surveying the Landscape 3
1.2 Emergentism Depicted 5
1.3 Classical Emergentism 7
1.4 Problems and Refinements 9
1.5 Emergence and the Mental 13
1.6 Relevant Emergentist Theses 14
1.7 Theories of the Mental I: Eliminativism 19
1.8 Theories of the Mental II: Dualism 24
1.9 Variations on Physicalist Themes 25
1.10 Non-Reductive Physicalism Contrasted with Emergentism 31
1.11 Conclusion 33
2 Fleshing Out the View 35
2.1 Elaboration of Supervenience and Explanation 35
2.2 Supervenience Essentials 36
2.3 Supervenience and Emergentism 40
2.4 Explanation Essentials 50
2.5 The Conceptual Gambit 57
2.6 Some Alternative Formulations 59
2.7 Transition 62
3 Coincidence: Realization and Identity 63
3.1 From Supervenience to Realization 63
3.2 Realization and Identity 65
3.3 Objections 69
3.4 Artifacts as Temporary Properties of Matter 70
3.5 Identity and Persistence Conditions 72
3.6 Artifacts and Ontology 78
3.7 Causation: Oppositions and Propinquities 88
viii Contents
4 The Menace of Non-Physical Causation 93
4.1 Arguments against Mental Causation 93
4.2 The Lessons of the Criticisms 101
4.3 Too Many Causes 102
4.4 A Distinction between Mental and Neurological Properties 104
4.5 Downward Causation 108
4.6 Ultimate Particles and Descending Support 113
4.7 A Causal Nexus 122
5 Belief, Desire, and the Physical 125
5.1 Access Consciousness Revisited 125
5.2 Two Standards of Physicality 125
5.3 Access-Conscious Properties and Behavior 132
5.4 Elaborating and Augmenting 136
Interlude 141
II Orthodox Alternatives
6 Physicalism: Chauvinism and Pluralism 147
6.1 The Physicalist Landscape 147
6.2 Multiple Realizability 149
6.3 The Rudiments of Chauvinism 152
6.4 Levels, Functions, and Forms 157
6.5 Dora and Commander Data 160
6.6 Pluralism 166
7 Representationalism 177
7.1 Prologue 177
7.2 The Setting for Further Disccussion 180
7.3 Intensionality and Intentionality 182
7.4 Semantics Naturalized 187
7.5 A Feature of Content 194
7.6 Optimal Conditions 195
7.7 Teleological Semantic Arguments 197
8 Nonreductive Physicalism and Pure Token Identity 203
8.1 Introducing Pure Token Identity 203
8.2 A Most Curious Conundrum 208
8.3 Background Conditions for Identity Claims 210
8.4 Undisputed Cases and Complications 213
8.5 Token Physicalism Revisited 216
8.6 Materially Kosher Explanation 220
Epilogue 225
References 231
Index 243
Preface
The presence of sentience in a basically material reality is among the pri-
mary mysteries of existence. How does it fit? How could it have come
about? What could be the point of it? Working cognitive scientists, psy-
chologists, biologists, and neural researchers in general tend to ponder such
questions only in their off hours. To carry on, they need only acknowledge
that material states, typically brain states, subserve conscious ones. Further
detail about the character of this loosely specified relation will neither
accelerate nor impede their inquiries, nor will it require any reformulation
of carefully studied conclusions. This is not to say that their work has never
been integrated with such inquiries, but that is not because it is unfinished
without it, but because they have caught the philosophy bug. Empirical
studies require no more to proceed than something suspended tentatively
between causal dependence and identity.
Philosophers, on the other hand, are passionate about these differences.
They cannot leave the issue in a suspended state. In the present philosophi-
cal climate many have been hard at work to show that conscious states
and properties really are, at bottom, nothing over and above the matter
that brings them about. For some time those well-motivated efforts have
struck me as less than satisfactory, and thus I have undertaken to try to
find the source of my discomfort and to see whether it withstands care-
ful scrutiny. I have come to no more helpful a conclusion than that there
is little more to be said than that material configurations can give rise to
uncharted consequences. The result I arrive at is that conscious properties
and states are emergents, and that, although they depend for their existence
on their material bases (a dependence summed up by supervenience or real-
ization relations to the material), there are no further details to explain
that dependence. The more general message is that there need be nothing