Pluralism and the Mind

Matthew Colborn

• 03 november 2011
• 9781845403287

Samenvatting:

Paul Feyerabend noted that '... the world which we want to explore is a largely unknown entity. We must, therefore, keep our options open and ... not restrict ourselves in advance.' (1975, p. 20). Given that consciousness is poorly understood and vaguely defined, such advice 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 in part because of the failure of mainstream approaches (like computationalism or dynamical systems) satisfactorily to address issues like subjective volition, autonomy and creativity. The author sees personal consciousness as active and classifiable as a subset of the wider problem of biological causation. ('Biological ca...