Twan Kieboom MA-thesis in Philosophy Supervisor: Dr. Christian Skirke Second reader: Prof. dr. Franz Berto
On the matter of psycho-physical properties
An investigation into the ontological commitments underlying contemporary naturalistic
explanations of cognition and the mind
University of Amsterdam 2017
Table of contents
Introduction Natural science and phenomenological adequacy...1
Part 1 Phenomenology and the meaning of scientific explanation...7
1.1. What does it mean to be a naturalist? ...9
1.1.1. Husserl and naturalism...10
1.1.2. Same difference: causal versus constitutive explanations...14
1.2. From empiricism to eliminativism...17
1.2.1. Reductionism, irreducibility and emergent properties...17
1.2.2. Eliminative materialism...21
1.3. Kant, Newton and speculative realism ...26
1.3.1. Transcendental idealism and correlationism...26
1.3.2. Speculation in scientific theory...31
Part 2 A contemporary naturalistic approach to explaining the mind...35
2.1. Dynamical systems theory...37
2.1.1. Watt’s non-computational “Centrifugal Governor”...39
2.1.2. A dynamical stance with respect to cognition...43
2.2. The intrinsic mind...47
2.2.1. Cognition without subjectivity?...48
2.2.2. Cognition as intrinsic existence...53
Part 3 In defence of dualism...56
3.1. The inconceivability of monism...59
3.2. The limits of explanation...64
Conclusion The physical identity of conscious experience?...72
1 Introduction
Natural science and phenomenological adequacy
Natural science aims to give true explanations of the natural phenomena that inhabit our world. Science looks to identify those stable regularities that bind phenomena together, even if the relations that connect them often do so in ways that are not directly perceivable. Through technology, scientific knowledge improves our grip on the world, allowing us to use the workings of the world to what we suppose is our benefit. Much which was once considered contingent and chaotic is now understood as structured according to ever more general “laws of nature”. As a result, in contemporary western culture we tend to cling to the idea that there could very well be some ultimate order tying all the phenomena in the universe together. It is this idea that in turn leads the scientifically minded westerner to implicitly adhere to a philosophical doctrine which I will call “optimistic naturalism”. To this doctrine we may ascribe two main tenets. The first tenet is the result of the success of natural science in subsuming more and more phenomenal events under laws, which leads the optimistic naturalist to inductively infer that (1) nature is uniform. The second tenet we arrive at from our constantly expanding understanding of formerly mysterious natural processes, a growing understanding which leads the optimistic naturalist to believe that there is nothing in nature that will fundamentally resist explanation and that therefore (2) nature is knowable. Climactically, thus, if the optimistic naturalist is right and nature is both uniform and knowable, science should ultimately be able explain the entire natural world as a structured phenomenal whole, leaving nothing unexplained. In principle, then, it follows that to a complete science no event is to appear unexpectedly. Of course, even if incomplete, the scientific project at its largest scope certainly transcends whatever possible project any individual might undertake. Accordingly, standing before the whole of scientific achievement, the individual can do nothing but trust that the networks of people and equipment somehow succeed in producing stable world-knowledge that is contingent only on the supposedly unchanging uniformity of nature.
Yet, as even those naturalists who find themselves in complete agreement with the above would have to concede, science itself is also but another phenomenon that the individual encounters in the world. Taken at face value, as a phenomenon on the personal level, scientific engagement presupposes first of all the given that there is such a thing as “the phenomenal” or “phenomenality” in the first place. The world appears to us a full of meaningful questions that may potentially be answered. If it would not, or so would all of those say that share the phenomenological inclination, there would have been nothing to explain. While laws of nature
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extend beyond that which we can personally verify, if they are really to account for everything and thus be able to explain the relations between all phenomena, they must fundamentally also be understood as being able to explain why the one thing in nature we are the most certain of – our personal level experience – is structured the way it is. At the very basis, we would here need to find an explanation for why it is so that things appear to us at all. The naturalist would thus have to phrase the question as follows: what are those natural laws that explain the existence of phenomenal givenness itself?
Of course, such a question only is relevant if the presumed fact that there is such a thing as “experiential reality” is itself accepted as an unexplained scientific problem. The insight, however, that science is ultimately about the explanation of the appearances given to us, indubitable as such an insight might seem, is not a presupposition necessary to the practice of natural science. As we know from the philosophy of science – and here one may in the first place think of what we learn from Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) The structure of scientific revolutions – in practice a scientific community does not necessarily work from explanandum to explanans. Sometimes we try to give new explanations of what we do perceive but did not yet understand, but other times we retreat into dogmatism. In the latter cases we tend to only think along the lines of those explanatory stories that are readily available, gratifying our sense of comprehensively understanding of the world around us, in which case we easily disregard the possibility that these stories may merely be theoretical constructs that are convenient to our worldview. Thus instead of generating new theories in order to explain each and every mysterious phenomenon that is extracted from nature, one will just try to fit as many phenomena as possible into a given theoretical framework, thereby increasing the degree to which the framework may be of “explanatory value” without having to question its fundamental validity. As a result, it is de facto up to the scientific community to decide how to deal with those phenomena that do not fit the framework. If such phenomena do not cause problems for the continuation of the research program as a whole, scientists will not see any urgency in explaining the yet unexplained “noise in the data” and will continue trying to solve their puzzles using only those pieces that fit. In those cases, however, it is very much the task of the philosopher to point out that there are still other pieces to the puzzle.
One may recall the story of how such dogmatism was present in physics before the immense revolutions of the early 20th century; that it was thought by some that all the relevant
conceptual issues in the field had already been “solved” and that one should rather study something else. Now, this story itself may merely be the product of some Whiggish interpretation of the progress of physics, but I think there is a philosophical point to be made here regardless of that, namely that suggestions of the completion of any field of science should always be under heavy
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scrutiny. Scientific optimism should not collapse into hubris. Concordantly, while we may not be certain that this belief that physics was complete was ultimately of any real negative influence on the of development of relativity theory and quantum physics, we should be wary of such positions wherever they emerge. This then brings me to the point that I want to make here: I think it is safe to say there certainly is such a sense of elation to be found in today’s biological sciences. This claim I make looking at the attitude that many materialist neuroscientists show with regard to the completion of our understanding of the human mind. While in theoretical physics the ontologies that are used to describe phenomena in the everyday world are clearly insufficient, many in the field of neuroscience still seem to be stuck in the philosophical past. Mental properties are often still being explained away as neuronal “epiphenomena” and computational explanations of the mind seem to rely solely on early mechanistic philosophies.
Instead of trying to generate new ontological frameworks that go hand in hand with scientific advances, also in contemporary philosophy of mind it is ontological eliminativism that reigns as theorists like Daniel Dennett (e.g.: 1991, 2003, 2007), Paul Churchland (e.g.: 1981) and Patricia Churchland (e.g.: 1986) would readily dispose of any theory that would suggest some sort of “spooky” emergentism in order to explain how the material can give rise to the cognitive. It often seems that materialist philosophers would rather see the notion of mind destroyed than having to admit that about some aspects of the original mind-body problem we are still as fundamentally in the dark as was Descartes in the 17th century. As such, a lot of contemporary
philosophers tend to deny the validity of any such questions and treat them as “dissolved”, often refusing to address reformulations of Cartesian mind-body dualism that have also reappeared in the late 20th century through for example Nagel’s (1974) “what-it-is-likeness”, Levine’s (1983)
“explanatory gap” and Chalmers’s (1996) “hard problem of consciousness”.
For this thesis project we will look into some of the contemporary thinking on how to explain the mind as a natural phenomenon. While our starting point will be that of the optimistic naturalist, we will seek out the extent to which it is now possible to break up old dichotomies between world and mind, without taking illegitimate shortcuts that would have us stuck once more in dogmatic slumber. The eliminativists certainly have to be refuted insofar as they would want to discard all non-reductionistic explanations of the mental as not explaining anything at all. It is to be understood that their rhetorical move is only possible if the phenomenon of consciousness is held to be dissolvable into material interactions rather than investigated as the very special explanandum that it is in and for itself.
It was exactly this idea that one could “naturalize” consciousness as if it were just another material object in the world against which Edmund Husserl stood up when he laid the foundations
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for phenomenology as a true science of consciousness more than a century ago. In the footsteps of Husserl and later existential phenomenologists, many have joined in this fight against the reduction of conscious beings to psychologistic billiard balls. Not in the least by also pressing the need for retaining some concept of “action” (as opposed to mere (un)conscious “event”) that is for example needed to account for the agency special to human beings.1 Not so different from the
reductionism in Husserl’s time, contemporary reductionism too stems from natural science’s privileged position in cultural discourse, not to mention the esteem received by what is broadly and opaquely referred to as “the scientific method”. The latter is the optimistic naturalist’s idea of a finished unified methodology of science, warranting the knowability of nature. In practice, however, science incorporates the presuppositions of realism as well as those of instrumentalism, the imperatives of foundationalism as well as those of pragmatism and the dogma’s of rationalism as well of those of empiricism. While the anti-metaphysical sentiments of hard-nosed methodological naturalists may bias them in favor of instrumentalism, pragmatism and empiricism, I would argue that due to this bias they tend to turn a blind eye to the very reasons why we engage in science and philosophy in the first place: to find and understand the truth about nature.
If we would indeed succumb to a materialist ontology, then a deep existential nihilism seems to be the only reasonable explanation.2 However, I believe there is some comfort for those
that do not want to be stuck in nihilism resulting from cultural scientism and do not want to settle for the answer that matter is all there is: it can be shown that as soon as one accepts even the most minimal definition of subjective experience, eliminative materialism cannot be anything but a self-defeating philosophy. The latter insight we clearly get from Husserlian phenomenology alone.
Husserl’s writings range from the very start of the 20th century when he argued against
psychologizing logic (Husserl, 1975) up to his final lectures on the crisis in the European sciences in the late 1930s (Husserl, 1970). It is important to know that his legacy has not been forgotten and has now even made it into contemporary naturalistic thought. In the second half of the 20th
century, despite the rise of geneticism and neurocentrism,3 there have been a lot of developments
that tried to improve what I would call the phenomenological adequacy of what we now call cognitive science. The first step here was the cognitive revolution of the 1950s, which delivered a blow to
1 As an example, Sellars (1963) introduced a distinction between the “manifest image” and the “scientific image”,
arguing that the former “enjoys a practical, if not theoretical, priority over the scientific image” (Brassier, 2007; 6). Similar intuitions are shared by those engaged in existential phenomenology, which first saw the light of day through the works of Husserl’s most (in)famous student Martin Heidegger (Brassier, 2007; 9), but also by diverse contemporary naturalist thinkers such as Daniel Dennett (e.g.: 1984) and Evan Thompson (2007).
2 We see Brassier (2007) argue for this implication and also find this in for example in Thomas Metzinger’s no-self
doctrine (see Zahavi, 2014).
3 See Patricia Churchland’s (1986) canonical work Neurophilosophy for one of the most comprehensive accounts of the
philosophical underpinnings of the reductionist neuro-biological project that she calls the “unified science of the mind-brain”.
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behaviorism, opening up the limited scope of psychological to include the more internalist notion of cognition, allowing for a study of the processes underpinning language, memory, attention, consciousness and so on.4 Of course, the computationalism that followed,5 while trying to account
for the mental in the form of mental states, would do no justice to what Husserl envisioned as a science of the mind. That being said, current non-computational and anti-representational theoretical trends in cognitive science do however include more directly the insights from phenomenology. At the same time, however, what counts as phenomenology has since then also been expanded through a canon of multiple authors that were inspired also by later phenomenologists that have diverged from Husserl’s original ideas. For example, later phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre do not, like Husserl, cling to notions of pure consciousness nor support the possibility of the phenomenological reduction. Prima facie, this has made such authors seemingly more compatible with the closely related contemporary non-dualistic naturalist cognitive scientific frameworks of embodied cognition, extended cognition, embedded cognition, enactivism and situated cognition. However, due to this latter line of thought some strain of eliminativism might have been ushered into phenomenology itself. That is to say: in their ever more radical disavowal of Cartesianism, later phenomenologist may already have been disregarding some of our experiential reality in favor of their own theoretical endeavors, much like the natural scientists both in Husserl’s time and today.6
Of course, there is another, more fundamental, problem that is still apparent: cognitive science itself ultimately remains a natural science. Even if methodologically some strands of cognitive science may draw on phenomenology, ontologically also these cognitive scientists are still implicitly committed to the realist (read: physicalist) ontology that Husserl rejected as inadequate for understanding consciousness. The main question this thesis will try to answer is thus what kind of a metaphysical framework, if any, would be suitable for a phenomenologically adequate understanding of the mind as a natural phenomenon.
In the first two sections of the first part of this thesis project the goal will be to show that the phenomenologist’s problems with respect to naturalism (1.1) as well as the naturalist’s problems with respect to emergentism and eliminativism (1.2) are the product of a specific take on what it means to say that nature is uniform. Both issues may be dissolved by an elucidation of a unity of explanation that is not reliant on mechanistic philosophy and thus may allow for trans-ordinal laws.
4 The most important event leading up to the cognitive revolution being Chomsky’s (1959) radical critique of the
behavioristic theory of language processing.
5 With the best representative of computationalist philosophy probably being Fodor (e.g.: 1975).
6 Here I think in the first place of Heidegger’s “conviction that the manifest image enjoys a philosophical privilege
vis-à-vis the scientific image, and that the sorts of entities and processes postulated by scientific theory are in some way founded upon, or derivative of, our more ‘originary’, pre-scientific understanding” (Brassier, 2007; 7), resulting in an utter disregard for fundamental scientific questions and the choice to not even speak of consciousness.
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In the third section of the first part I will then try to carve out a philosophical position for myself somewhere in between optimistic naturalism and transcendental phenomenology, which I will reconcile with a metaphysics that may be understood as strand of so-called “speculative realism”. This metaphysical position should provide some minimal general criteria for any phenomenologically adequate science of the natural mind.
Following this, the second part of this thesis will consist in an investigation of the extent to which contemporary attempts to non-reductionistically explain the mind as a natural phenomenon can live up to the criteria that were set out in part one. In the first section (2.1) we will look into “Dynamic Systems Theory” (henceforth: DST) as a candidate to give exactly the type of phenomenologically adequate explanation we are looking for. DST is held to provide the methodological tools that could be used to build a physicalist foundation for (at least) James J. Gibson’s affordance theory (1977, 1979), Anthony Chemero’s (2009) radical embodied cognitive science and the strand of enactivism that was developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch (1992). In the second section of part two (2.2.1) it is to be critically evaluated to what extent the DST approach may account for subjectivity. The short answer is that on its own DST cannot succeed here because it does not start out from an ontology that includes subjectivity as something with intrinsic existence. In the following paragraph (2.2.2) in which we consider Giulio Tononi’s (2012a, 2014) “Integrated Information Theory” (henceforth: IIT) we will however see that it may still be possible to end up with a naturalist explanation of the mind that is both non-reductionistic and in line with methodological naturalism. The cost of this possibility is having to break with a narrow physicalist ontology and thus allow for a theory that is ultimately a dualistic mapping from consciousness to its physical substrate. This is a setback for the optimistic naturalist: if the metaphysics underlying IIT are correct, nature cannot be completely uniform in the sense that one will not be able to get rid of a set of irreducible trans-ordinal laws.
In the third and last part of this thesis project I then consider the viability of a dualist metaphysics as the foundation for a phenomenologically adequate cognitive science. In the first section (3.1) I will argue for the claim that even the most minimal adherence to Husserl’s phenomenological description of the structure of consciousness – committing to experience as having both an intentional and a subjective aspect – already refutes the very possibility of a monist explanation of reality. Following this, in the final section (3.2) I will consider four different dualistic models and argue that even given the most plausible one, it may still be the case that we are fundamentally unable to give a unified explanation of the mind. This, I will hold, is ultimately due to the finitude of experience which too becomes apparent as a result of the intentional structure of consciousness.
7 Part 1
Phenomenology and the meaning of scientific explanation
“With this most radical and consequential explication of what is intentionally included and what becomes intentionally motivated in ‘my’ ego and in my essential variants, it becomes apparent that
the universal de facto structure of the given Objective world as mere Nature, as psychophysical being, as humanness, sociality of various levels, and culture is, to a very great extent (and perhaps
much further than we yet can see), an essential necessity.”
Edmund Husserl (1931; 137)
“[F]or to explain a phenomenon is not to explain it away. It is neither the aim nor the effect of theoretical explanations to show that the familiar things and events of our everyday experience are
not ‘really there’.”
Carl Gustav Hempel (1966; 78)
The first part of this thesis will consist of an analysis of the tension between the Husserlian project and the ideal of natural science, hopefully opening up some space for a renewed non-reductionist analysis of natural consciousness. To do this, in section 1.1 first the concepts of naturalism and reductionism will be elucidated and contrasted with phenomenological explanation. Using the first chapter of Ray Brassier’s (2007) book Nihil Unbound, in section 1.2 of this part there will be an exposition of how metaphysical naturalism has led us to eliminative materialism. After refuting the eliminative materialist position in favour of phenomenology, we still need to secure a phenomenological position that is non-idealistic and thus allows for the mind as a natural phenomenon. In section 1.3 we therefore turn to a contemporary realist philosophy inspired by Quentin Meillassoux’ (2008) work After Finitude. The third section of this chapter will consist of a so-called “speculative realist” reading of phenomenology that is to expose the necessity of having all of the intentional acts that constitute conscious experience rooted in a minimally realist philosophy of “material” subjects that allow for consciousness to emerge.
This philosophical conclusion may then once again be used as a starting point for scientific theory, constituting another rationalist turn in cognitive science. One might here draw a parallel to
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Kant’s transcendental project which tried to obtain the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, the difference being that Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”, was aimed at acquiring indubitable knowledge on the basis of deduction, whereas the project defended by me will be more akin to a “Newtonian Revolution” in which – very dubitable – general formal criteria are to be suggested for the demarcation of those physical systems that are to be constitutive of the phenomenon of conscious experience.
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1.1. What does it mean to be a naturalist?
The goal of this section is to investigate whether or not the explanations we get from transcendental phenomenology are compatible with naturalist explanations. In general we can distinguish between at least two very different modes of explanation that correspond to two different conceptions of the goals of ontology and metaphysics. On the one hand there is this conception of explanation as a project that intends to give the most general description of what is, or, so to say, to create a “catalogue of being”, whereas, on the other hand, there is the more metaphysical conception of explanation which thinks of it as an exposition of the grounds for why things are the way they are, i.e.: reasons and laws. The former approach may be associated with entities ranging from Aristotelian categorizing to the Quinean conception of ontology as the product of an empiricist epistemology. The latter we may already find in Plato’s theory of forms and continues all the way through rationalism to Kantian transcendental philosophy and modern theory-driven science.
The tension between the two approaches is the product of their differing epistemological ambitions. For the project of ontological categorization this ambition is staunchly empirical as it essentially consists in the creation of a list of what is there purely on the basis of experience. The ambition of the project of metaphysical explanation is of a more transcendental nature as it deals with the conditions of possibility that need to be satisfied in order for things to be able to be the way they are.7 For the empiricist our certainties are constrained by the brute facts of experience
whereas those who adhere to the latter conception would generally hold that through the creation of general theories we can in principle justifiably go “beyond the data” and discover categorical laws that are then held to describe the structure of reality.8 It is the belief in the existence of such laws of
nature (whether we may discover them or not) that I hold to be the defining feature of the naturalist.9
7 This latter notion of explanation is similar to the notion of philosophical explanation introduced by Robert Nozick
in his like named book Philosophical Explanations, where he states that “[m]any philosophical problems are ones of understanding how something is or can be possible” (Nozick, 1981; 8).
8 This is not to say that hard-nosed instrumentalist empiricists de facto do not formulate laws on the basis of induction
but rather to say that for them these laws will not get any metaphysical or ontological status beyond that of a heuristic.
9 From this one may infer that for example Quine would not really count as a naturalist. Since naturalism ultimately is
a foundationalist thesis, there may very well be some truth to this. When Quine (1969) talks about “naturalizing” epistemology, he holds philosophy to be continuous with science and rejects the need for a foundationalist philosophy as a justification of something like the scientific method. On the contrary, Quine argues that epistemology should follow science and that the best guideline for understanding how we come to our beliefs would thus be the science of psychology. From a phenomenological standpoint, however, Quine has uncritically committed himself to a specific (narrow) kind of metaphysical naturalism (i.e.: the view that all knowledge is the result of the stimulation of receptors) that would first need to be true in order to warrant his meta-epistemological claim that psychology (as a natural science) is actually the best way to gain knowledge on how we gain knowledge. To me, whether or not we should accept such a narrow idea of knowledge’s place in nature is in itself a philosophical (or, if you wish; scientific) question to which the answer is not evident. This becomes more clear as contemporary neuroscientists and neurophilosophers (see section 1.2) would claim that it would not be psychology, but neuroscience that is to achieve Quine’s purpose here. Now, whereas the phenomenologist has a foundation for arguing that such claims would be wrong, from Quine’s perspective there would be no defence against the neuroscientists who now just present us with a better scientific understanding of the receptor-brain interactions that Quine held to be fundamental to our knowledge, even if their
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In this section it will be argued that phenomenological explanation is ultimately very similar to the naturalist’s scientific explanations. Phenomenology deals with the structure of consciousness: its transcendental explanations have a similar epistemic ambition (to elucidate some sort of necessity) as well as a similar logical structure (making use of if-then rules and part-whole relations).
1.1.1. Husserl and naturalism
Husserl created phenomenology on the basis of the idea that a true science of consciousness cannot be achieved through a focus on nature. Phenomenology traditionally obfuscates the distinction between rationalism and empiricism. On the one hand it intends to be an a priori rationalistic science that deals with the “transcendental” conditions that need to be satisfied in order to let experience be the way it is, while, on the other hand, it intends to be “empirical” in that sense that it is tied to experience.10 Phenomenology is special in that it does not intend to give a deductive – nor, for that
matter, inductive – explanation of the nature of things beyond their “experiential reality” or “givenness”. Originally then, phenomenology is a purely descriptive science and does not intend to ground that which is experiential in terms of that which is not, but rather dissolves questions trough a better description of experience itself.11 Naturalism, on the contrary, is interested in
explaining the absolute: the nature (or structure) of ultimate reality. It is the naturalist philosopher's belief that regardless of the nature of our experiences, which are often unpredictable and sometimes even chaotic, there must be some order out there that explains why things are the way they are or at least allows there to be a true description of reality’s constitution.12
being right would destroy the very folk-psychological concept of “knowing” in the first place. As we will also see in section 1.2, without (personal) experience as the foundation of science (instead of some non-foundational pragmatic notion of the scientific method as “whatever it is that scientists do”), empiricism may just as well collapse into an eliminativism that does not even take experience seriously.
10 The term empirical here is bracketed as it is meant only in its negative sense of being non-rationalistic. In its method
phenomenology primarily reflects on phenomena rather than that it is trying to deduce knowledge from first principles as would methodologically fit the rationalist tradition. At the same time, the phenomena phenomenology reflects on are not those that are particular or contingent, but exactly those that are ubiquitous in experience, i.e.: the structural features of intentionality. This being said, the presumption that there are such features in the first place, could of course be portrayed as an implicit rationalist first principle.
11 Indeed this is what is meant when phenomenological reflection is described as “experiencing experiencing” that
does not posit experience as an object (Husserl, 1931; 34).
12 One could even argue that holding on to such a belief in the uniformity of nature is a requirement not just for the
naturalist philosopher, but for the pre-scientific natural philosopher as well. Answers to the question what makes an metaphysical naturalist may differ. For Husserl the defining aspect is an ontological commitment to those and only those entities that can be accounted for by the physical sciences (Moran, 2013; 96-97). Arguably, however, one could also hold on to a broader definition of naturalism that only places it in opposition to something like super-naturalism, i.e.: a realism that intends to account for those things bearing no relation to the empirical world. My conception of naturalism is more in line with the latter kind, i.e.: the naturalism of the natural philosopher. This naturalism, while it cannot be reduced to realism due to its opposition to views like super-naturalism, is not committed to either the reductionist ontology of the materialist either.
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In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy Husserl himself gives a very clear exposition of what he understands as naturalism:
“Naturalism is a phenomenon consequent upon the discovery of nature considered as a unity of spatiotemporal being subject to exact laws of nature. With the gradual realization of this idea in constantly new natural sciences that guarantee strict knowledge regarding many matters, naturalism proceeds to expand more and more. [T]he natural scientist has the tendency to look upon everything as nature, [just as] the humanistic scientist sees everything as ‘spirit’, as a historical creation. By the same token, both are inclined to falsify the sense of what cannot be seen in their way. Thus the naturalist, to consider him in particular, sees only nature, and primarily physical nature. Whatever is, is either itself physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or it is in fact psychical, but then merely as a variable dependent on the physical, at best a secondary ‘parallel accompaniment’. Whatever is belongs to psychophysical nature, which is to say that it is univocally determined by rigid laws.” (Husserl, 1965; 79)
Husserl is here taking aim at exactly the type of dogmatic thinking that lies at the basis of the eliminative materialism that runs rampant today. He correctly points out that it is difficult for scientists to even conceive of the possibility that their theoretical framework might not be adequate to give a full explanation of all the phenomena that may be encountered. Indeed, instead of considering the explanation of meaningful phenomena such as consciousness a scientific objective, naturalistic thinkers would rather choose to “falsify” (read: eliminate) what they cannot explain. Husserl here also anticipates epiphenomenalism when he speaks of the “secondary parallel accompaniment” of the psychical to the physical. The most interesting part of this passage, however, is the final sentence, in which Husserl seems to call into question whether there could be “rigid” natural laws that determine the mental. It is precisely here that we may want to start bracketing what Husserl is saying. After all, it is not clear how science is to give any explanation without being able to refer to (supposedly) non-contingent law-like generalizations. That is to say: without the presumption that there is some determinate (read: rigid) fashion in which phenomena are to be understood, there can be no science whatsoever.13 We may thus wonder what Husserl has
in mind here, especially given that he meant phenomenology to be the science that is to elucidate the non-contingent structure that underpins our everyday experience.14
13 That is: if science is understood in the sense of epistèmè and not as doxa. Of course, Husserl has his own theory of
truth that should be taken into account here, but which is beyond the scope of this project. I do believe that his notion of “fulfilment” as an alternative to “correspondence” does ultimately not make it so that one could no longer meaningfully distinguish between “objective” and “interpretative” science.
14 On a closer reading of Cartesian Meditations I have found that also Husserl himself may not be completely averse to
the idea of disclosing an ontology of the objective world that would parallel the structure of experience. On the one hand Husserl continues to emphasize that the ultimate task of philosophy remains to be “an elucidation by virtue of
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What is clear, however, is that instead of the transcendental realism of the modern scientist who presupposes that consciousness is to find its place in a larger natural world, the Husserlian phenomenologist is to find nature only as a meaningful entity within consciousness. In contemporary literature the relation between nature and phenomenology is still a topic of controversy. There are some who try and tighten the bonds between phenomenology and naturalistic sciences such as psychology and neuroscience in a project coined “naturalizing phenomenology”.15 While this may seem to be straightly in opposition to the original motive for
the Husserlian project and thus somewhat of a contradictio in terminis, if we look at this from Merleau-Ponty’s more ontologically committed phenomenology, such naturalization may not be too far-fetched.16 Other authors, such as Dermot Moran, deny that this as a possibility by pressing that
Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is a form a transcendental idealism (Moran, 2013; p. 107). Following Husserl’s own words, such conceptions press that “[s]ubjects cannot be dissolved into nature, for in that case what gives nature its sense would be missing” (Husserl, 1952; 297). Whatever room there may still be for nature in phenomenology, in general there is a consensus amongst scholars that the phenomenological project cannot be in line with a naturalism that is reductionistic. Instead, according to Shaun Gallagher, it is the case that “[t]he ‘truth’ of naturalism is not the naturalism which Husserl cautioned against, but a redefined non-reductionist naturalism that correlates with a redefined phenomenology” (Gallagher, 2012; 93).
One may at this point wonder what the essence of phenomenology is, such that it can be redefined as to add something to the naturalist’s natural science, methodologically, without having it discredit the latter’s realist metaphysical ambitions.17 The answer to this question is that in the
the ultimate and most concrete essential necessities; and these are the necessities that satisfy the essential rootedness of any Objective world in transcendental subjectivity and thus make the world intelligible concretely: as a constituted sense” (Husserl, 1931; 137). On the other hand however, as was also cited as the motto to the first part, he states that “(…) it becomes apparent that the universal de facto structure of the given Objective world as mere Nature, as psychophysical being, as humanness, sociality of various levels, and culture is, to a very great extent (and perhaps much further than we yet can see), an essential necessity” (Idem; 137). This acceptance of an “essential” universal structure of nature does not remove Husserl all too far from some sort of minimal overarching naturalism after all.
15 See for example: Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenmenology and Cognitive Science edited by Petitot et
al. (1999), or more recently: “On the possibility of naturalizing phenomenology” by Gallagher (2012).
16 That is to say: Merleau-Ponty (1962) does not require the epoché for his phenomenology of embodiment. Instead
of positing a Husserlian purely immanent consciousness as ultimate foundation, for Merleau-Ponty subject and world are co-constitutive. This commits him to presuppose certain notions that take him beyond the ontology of self-sufficient consciousness. As such a reciprocal relation between natural science and phenomenology also becomes conceivable.
17 In this thesis the naturalist is taken to be scientific realist, at least in ambition. The naturalist may be agnostic with
regard to whether or not scientific theory is ultimately able to describe ultimate reality, but should agree that the aim of scientific theory – as a kind of practical necessity – must always be to give the best possible explanation of the workings of nature. Given that the best possible explanation would be the true explanation, realism is the natural scientist’s only sensible working hypothesis. Epistemologically, Van Fraassen’s (1980) “constructive empiricism” is a good framework for the naturalism I envision, combining the instrumentalist notion of empirical adequacy with the realist notion of truth, for example by leaving room for the existence of unobservable theoretical entities, that is to say, for the possible “truth” of theories that describe such entities, without having to commit to their reality whenever they appear in theory.
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first place phenomenology is a critical philosophy. A good way of looking at this critical core of phenomenology, or so I would want to suggest, is as science turned in on itself. That is to say, science turned back towards its own fundamental possibility condition: experience. It is not, like philosophy of language, primarily an investigation into whether or not claims that intend to relate to extra-linguistic reality succeed in doing so, but seeks to understand how phenomena are to be distinguished in the first place. Of course, the eliminative materialists we will find in section 1.2 may protest here that one runs the risk of pointing out “same differences”, that is to say differences that do not make any causal-empirical difference, but this ultimately reduces to a problem of dogma, not of method. In the first place the empiricist may just disregard the unverifiable distinctions made by the phenomenologist. Furthermore, even if things that seem different would turn out to be the same, this does not excuse the naturalist from explaining how it was possible that this seeming took place to begin with. If one could explain the latter phenomenon, this explanation would certainly make us understand why our previous distinction was misguided.
For the moment then, let us now take the perspective of a natural philosopher intending to the best of his ability to be non-dogmatic, a philosopher that is only a naturalist in the sense, which we touched upon earlier, of searching for some natural explanation of conscious experience. Being a naturalist in this sense would not stop him from engaging in phenomenology as well. This is to say: the naturalist is only seeking an orderly explanation of the flow of his experiences. Prima facie, he might say, this could as well be a phenomenological explanation; it could even be so that the stream of consciousness is not grounded in any underlying mind-independent reality.18 The
naturalist’s question into the “nature of consciousness” would thus certainly seem phenomenologically valid as it does not seem to be necessarily reductionistic or narrowly physicalistic.19 Suppose that phenomenology could be ontologically understood as committed to a
monism of self-enclosed consciousness. Even in this case the naturalist could still pass as a critical natural philosopher if he can abstain from dogma by not laying claim to any definitive description of nature. That is to say: one may still be a naturalist also if one leaves undecided whether the nature of the absolute is ultimately nothing more than self-enclosed consciousness, or if there is an
18 While it could be the case that consciousness is indeed self-enclosed, in a recent unpublished paper I argue that an
ontological commitment to a Husserlian transcendental intersubjectivity, one is committed to minimal realist conception of subjects. On a renewed reading of Cartesian Meditations, I take Husserl himself also to say as much in the fifth meditation (see Husserl, 1931; 128-130). See also footnote 35 for my independent argument.
19 Moran notes that Husserl himself has stated that there is a difference between the natural attitude and the naturalistic
attitude into which it developed. Whereas the former is indeed presupposed by any kind of inquiry, only the latter also construes nature according to the framework of the sciences (Moran, 2013; p. 97). Again what plays a role here is the conception of science and its methodology. One can indeed claim that what there “physically” is, is constrained by what we can investigate using our current scientific methodologies. This is what I would call “narrow physicalism”, which could be opposed to a conception of “broad” physicalism that takes the physical to be what we would have discovered were science to be complete and nature both uniform and knowable.
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underlying material reality still. Even assuming that we cannot justifiably decide between the two, the naturalist may still sensibly ask what the material possibility conditions must be in order for there to be experience at all,20 or what the nature – now understood in a realist objectivist sense –
of experience-constituting transcendental subjectivity is. In section three, especially 1.3.2, we will discuss in more detail what the import of such a speculative realist position would be, and why it should be construed not only as a sensible philosophical stance, but also as the correct methodological stance of theory-based natural science.
1.1.2. Same difference: causal versus constitutive explanations
The most obvious response to the question as to what the nature of experience-constituting transcendental subjectivity is, would be that it is simply to constitute experience. Yet, this should of course not count as any sort of informative explanation. Even for those phenomenologists who want to maintain a stark distinction between natural scientists’ causal explanations and their own constitutive-phenomenological explanations of intentional experience, there is a relevant “how”-question beyond the statement that experience “just is”. The phenomenological “how”-questions as to how experiences necessarily hang together, i.e.: what the structure of (the stream of) consciousness is, do not differ from the questions of natural science insofar that they are both dealing with part-whole relations. This also holds for the notion of causality itself. That is to say: causality is just this constitutive relation that is special to the individuation of events contrasted to the individuation of concurrent states.
To follow up on this point: it can be said that in our natural understanding of an individual event, the cause is only part of the complete event. Any event (read: any occurrence of some minimal change) is constituted by (at least) both its cause and its effect,21 the former being
understood as the necessary and sufficient condition for the latter.22 If, for a moment, the
phenomenon of change is not taken as an explanandum and we just look at phenomena as “static” wholes with temporal and a-temporal properties, then we do not have this problem of having to explain the coming about of events in time. This means that we can give a constitutive explanation
20 With “material possibility condition” here I do not mean to presuppose the truth of materialism, i.e.: the reductionist
idea that the material is all there is, but merely the possibility of there being a non-experiential entity that could be required to warrant the existence of consciousness.
21 Here I say that an event is constituted “at least” by its cause and effect because many would argue that an event is
more than merely the sum of the states that obtain at the beginning and the end of the event. This being said, while we may all agree that there is a problem with discretizing the experience of change, no true experience of pure continuity would allow for any distinctions.
22 Of course, ever since Hume, the notion of causality has been problematized beyond recognition, as it is impossible
to prove that necessary connections between supposed causes and supposed effects actually obtain. At the same time, Kant has convincingly shown that we need causality in order to even experience something as remaining identical to itself over time.
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just by distinguishing the parts from the whole. The presupposition of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology is that any experience is a composition of multiple senses or meanings, some of which can be stripped away (i.e.: suspended/bracketed) in the phenomenological attitude (i.e.: the epoché). For instance, my experience of the phenomenologically reduced tree (i.e.: the tree that is bracketed as not to presuppose anything that is implied through my belief in its existence) can essentially be a part of my experience of the tree that I experience in the natural attitude (in which it retains all its realist connotations). In turn, the natural attitude itself may also be seen as a part of what can be experienced in an overarching phenomenological reflection. What is clear is that the essence of any explanation consists in distinguishing parts that configure wholes.
Originally, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology focused mainly at disentangling the constitution of static (or at least temporally unified) experience, which indeed seems to be in opposition to the natural sciences which aim at elucidating causal mechanisms between temporally divorced phenomena. Logically, however, there is as much room for a causal theory of intentionality as there is for a non-causal realist theory of the mind as being partially constituted by subjectivity and partially by non-subjective “material”. While Husserl may at first (e.g.: Husserl, 1975 [original: 1900]) have rejected the former option by confining himself to the “static phenomenology” that is accessible through the epoché, inviting in rightful charges of idealism, in his later works (e.g.: Husserl, 1970 [unfinished original: 1936]) he has also introduced “genetic” and “generative” phenomenology that are specifically to deal with experience as it changes in time. Here the changes in our experiential reality are explained as being constituted by time-consciousness and the living body in case of genetic phenomenology and by our intersubjective, cultural and historical life-world in case of the generative variant. The question is thus not whether the pursuit of such latter theories is forestalled by phenomenology – which is de facto not the case – but rather the correct thing to ask is what such theories mean to us and whether or not the type of explanations of genetic and generative phenomenology are fundamentally different from those in natural science. It is this question that also drives the coming analyses of the theoretical frameworks that are now deployed by natural science to explain cognition and consciousness. Thompson (2007; 83) for example notes that “Husserl recognized, although the life-world is the horizon and ground of all experience, and must therefore be presupposed by science, science also “streams into” the life-world (Husserl, 1970; 113, 138)”.
One may then finally ask whether there is a difference between transcendental explanations and the causal-constitutive explanations in natural science. This has everything to do with the concept of the necessary and sufficient condition. Natural science generally does not allow for the same causes to have different effects or vice versa. Nor does it allow for any constitutive differences
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that do not make a difference.23 However, when the natural scientist is trying to explain some
phenomenon, he is asking a question as to what made it possible. For instance, with respect to the explanation of consciousness, one may ask for a general description of the type of situation that constitutes (if he is a strong emergentist parallelist (see 3.2)), or causes (if he is a non-narrow physicalist interactionist (see 3.2)) a state of consciousness. Unable to check for necessity, the natural scientist is in the first place concerned with finding some sufficient condition. Qassim Cassam (2007) notes that, similarly, transcendental explanation is primarily understood as specifying the enabling conditions of phenomena. Cassam however distinguishes these more general questions, which he calls “how-possible”-questions, from transcendental ones that also deal with the necessary conditions for the possibility of something. When a transcendental philosopher like Kant is trying to specify what one needs in order to have an experience in the first place, he is not aiming to find some sufficient cause for experience (i.e.: some worldly state-of-affairs), but rather a set of rules or some schemata according to which the possible can be demarcated from the impossible by a priori necessity. Here we run into an ambiguity in the use of the word “constitution”. This ambiguity becomes apparent when we say, as if often done when explaining Kant, that experience is constituted by the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e.: the categories), while, in fact, these concepts are merely formal. They do not “make up” an experience as do the red, blue and yellow squares make up a Mondriaan painting, but instead they constrain the set of all possible experiences.
Is it here then that we run into a fundamental gap between the phenomenological mode of explanation, grounded in formal-transcendental descriptions of (necessary) enabling conditions, and the (merely sufficient) causal-constitutive explanations produced by natural science? Obviously also this is not the case: ultimately also scientific laws consist of if-then rules that specify the relations which form the formal constraints on the change of natural phenomena. The more exact the science becomes, the more these if-then rules will become biconditionals and take the form of equations. Equations, in turn, can very well be understood as the mathematical expressions of necessary and sufficient conditions for those properties that are represented by the variables in the equation. As such, for example the equations of physics can either function as descriptions of synchronic states – here one may think of Newton’s relation between exerted force and the acceleration of a mass (F = ma) and Einstein’s relation between energy and mass (E = mc ^ 2) – or as explanations of how certain states can follow other states, for instance how much an object will accelerate if a certain force that is currently absent would be exerted or how much energy in the form of radiation and warmth would be generated in case some atom would be split.
23 This is why pragmatist physicalists like Dennett (e.g.: 1993, 2003, 2007) ultimately reject epiphenomenalism: all
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1.2. From empiricism to eliminativism
In this section it will be discussed how through the development of neuroscience, materialist philosophy has taken an eliminativist turn. One of the positions that are held by naturalist philosophers that have dabbled into eliminative materialism suggests that our explanatory folk-psychological notions are up for a complete revision in terms of interacting neurons (Churchland, P. M., 1981 and Churchland, P. S., 1986). Another is the position that the very notion of our first-person perspective does not even constitute a real explanandum in the first place (Dennett, 1993, 2003, 2007). In order to show how these views, if taken seriously, would ultimately amount to the elimination of the mind as a whole, we first need to look into what it means exactly to give a reductionist explanation of something and how this relates to notions of irreducibility and emergence. This will then be followed by a discussion of the differences between so-called “strong” and “weak” emergent processes (Chalmers, 2006). As a conclusion to this section it will be argued that a reductionistic explanation of mental phenomena (i.e.: an explanation of mental processes as “weakly emergent”) must result in the ontological elimination of the subjective or first-personal aspects of the phenomena in question.
1.2.1. Reductionism, irreducibility and emergent properties
The degree to which an explanation is reductionist plays an important role in the discussion of what constitutes an adequate explanation of a phenomenon. We have seen that for a theorist like Husserl psychologistic or physicalistic explanations of consciousness do not suffice for a true understanding of all of its facets. But what does it mean to say that an explanation of a phenomenon is reductionist? There is after all a certain sense in which every explanation is inherently reductionist. Indeed: to explain something is to describe it in terms of something else. This is immediately clear when we look at explanations that do not function as they should because they contain terms they are meant to explain.
Take the following example from Kierkegaard’s (1980) explanation of the self in The Sickness Unto Death: “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.” If at all, this explanation only acquires explanatory value upon further elaboration of Kierkegaard understanding of the concept of “relating”, through which the “self” before the “is” may be distinguished from the “self” that comes in the explanation. Were someone to give such an explanation of Kierkegaard’s conception of the self, then this would be a reductionist
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explanation, the self would now reduce to the thing or process described in more general and fundamental terms having to do with relationality. Another example of reduction in philosophy, perhaps a more successful one, is Spinoza’s (1979) explanation of God. In Ethics he famously equates God with Nature, which is usually understood as stripping away God’s anthropomorphic capacities in favour of some concept of natural necessitation (Natura Naturans) that lacks an overarching intentionality. This, however, is a different kind of reduction that we may refer to as “ontological reduction”. Here something, i.e.: “God-as-a-person”, is eliminated. To get away with such a reduction it is obvious that “God-as-a-person” cannot refer to some everyday phenomenon. Now, in contemporary science we see reductionism function both by explaining theoretical concepts in terms of more general concepts as well as by eliminating some concepts altogether. Usually reduction in science is called “inter-theoretic reduction”. According to Anthony Chemero (2009; 167) “[inter-theoretic] reduction is a matter of accounting for the facts, generalizations, and laws of one theory, the reduced theory, in terms of the facts, generalizations, and laws of a second, more general theory, the base theory, along with some bridge principles”. Now, if the reduction is successful, the reduced theory is entailed by the base theory and the bridge principles. A prime example of this would be the reduction of Newtonian mechanics to general relativity theory. Once one succeeds in bridging the different concepts in both theories (in this case translating “gravitational force” into a more generally applicable notion of the “curvature of space-time”) all the observations one may predict (i.e.: the “facts” spoken of by Chemero) using Newtonian mechanics can now also be predicted using general relativity.
Hence it seems that intertheoretic reduction does not necessarily entail ontological reduction. Measurements do not change after you explain them and therefore one does not have to be revisionist about earlier observations. This being said: it is of course so that the meaning of past observations can change in light of new discoveries, e.g.: also past instances of falling will now be understood as due to the curvature of space time, instead of due to gravity. Patricia Churchland (1986) takes this point one step further and insists that also inter-theoretic reduction may ultimately amount to ontological reduction after all. Sticking to an example from physics, she explains that in the transition from Newtonian mechanics to general relativity theory the concept of mass simply is not retained (Churchland, 1986; 286-288). This, I think is true in an important sense, but false in another. Indeed mass as a mathematically defined third-person “phenomenon” is different for Newton than it is for Einstein, but this does not extend to a mass’s experiential reality (e.g.: experiencing the weight of an object). Insofar the phenomenon of mass is first-personal, it does not have to change at all. It has been suggested that such theory change can indeed even change
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the way we perceive the world.24 As we will see from our discussion of eliminative materialism in
1.2.2, it is exactly in light of the possibility of having to reconsider the meaning of theoretical concepts that powers the eliminativist project. After all, in the case that we are dealing with a theory of the mind, we might be driven to reconsider the meaning of the terms we use to describe our own cognitive capacities, including those that we invoke in relation to the phenomemally “given”.25
This being said, ontological reduction is not required in order to adequately cope with an expanding physicalist understanding of the vast majority of the everyday phenomena we encounter. The everyday perception of tables, chairs, other people, etc., does not undergo all that much change the moment we learn that they are most fundamentally composed not of atoms, but of subatomic particles. In contemporary ontology it has been asked what it would mean for the ontological status of a composite object to know that it is nothing but a composite of elementary particles. It has been argued by Van Ingwagen (1990) that this means that, strictly, composites like tables and chairs do not exist at all, because there is no non-arbitrary criterion describing how material simples (elementary particles) should be grouped as to constitute distinct individual objects.26 For instance,
if we import into our ontology a table and a chair as two separate composite objects, the identities of the supposed individual that is the table and the supposed individual that is the chair are not delineable on the basis of the intrinsic properties of the simples. That is to say: the simples that are held to make up both the table and the chair could just as well be said to instead constitute any and all composite objects in the entire range of any and all possible selections of the simples organized
24 One should here think of a radical reading of the implication of Kuhn’s (1962) notion of “incommensurability” in
relation to the scientist’s perception of the world.
25 This is to say: accepting the intertheoretical reduction from physical theories to other physical theories has little to
no effect with respect to our direct experience of everyday objects. Conversely, what does have this effect is the specific ontological reduction that is proposed both by Churchland (1981) and Churchland (1986). This is because the latter reduction is directed at the folk-psychological notions that we use to describe our own actions and experiences, not just at descriptions of the outside world. Using the terminology of Husserlian phenomenology, we may say that the eliminative materialist is critical not so much of our capacity to correctly identify the status of the intentional object or the noematic content of experience (e.g.: whether it is correct or not to speak of “the tree as the tree”), but rather of our knowledge of the status of noetic act itself. That is to say: the eliminativist is critical of the very manner by which we have access to these presumed intentional contents and may thus doubt whether it means what we think it does to speak of “seeing as seeing”, “attending as attending”, “remembering as remembering” and so on.
26 We should note here that, in order to save human personal individuality, Van Ingwagen (1990; 81-97) specifically
makes an exception for when the activities of material simples constitute a life. As such he is not a complete mereological nihilist. Given that living organisms then do constitute real composite objects, the necessary and sufficient conditions for life – whatever they may be – must at the same time be the conditions for a composite physical object’s individual identity. While Van Ingwagen (1990) cannot specify the organization which simples require in order to constitute such a particular life, he does believe that we need the latter in order to account for thinking (which he broadly understands as experience). He stresses the importance of subjectivity by stating that there is “a need for ‘one’, that is, for the individual thing that thinks” (Van Ingwagen, 1990; 118). As we will see, also for enactivists like Thompson (2007), due to a “deep continuity between mind and life”, a living system is held to be equivalent to a cognitive system. This would entail that the necessary and sufficient conditions that would constitute a life are identical with those that would constitute subjectivity. The problem however, as we will see in 2.2, is that even if we accept the idea that living systems harbour the individuality that is required (and perhaps even sufficient) for unified experience, we still only have a formal definition and thus have yet to explain why the systems we identify as living systems really do constitute such a unity. Without a notion of intrinsic subjectivity, this seems fundamentally impossible.
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as they are. If we then want to reject the existence of objects such as the “half-table-three-quarter-chair”, we should also reject the table and the chair as proper objects.
Such mereological nihilism however does not mean that our encounters with table-phenomena are not experientially distinguished from our encounters with chair-table-phenomena. There simply is no empirical controversy in this regard. Discussions such as these thus easily tend to conflate the question into what is real, with the question what is really experienced. This is to say: Van Ingwagen’s (1990) thesis could be correct and there would be no problem for phenomenology at all, given that we do not consider experience to be a “material being” (which Husserl and any phenomenologist I can think of would indeed not). For phenomenologists it is however without question that what we really experience directly are not quarks and electrons, but tables, chairs and other people, even as this on itself says nothing about the intrinsic reality of any of these objects.
As we will also see argued by Giulio Tononi in chapter two (2.2.2), experience itself has a special status in this debate because experiences are composites in the manner material objects arguable are not. In this view, insofar everyday phenomena are experientially individuated they could be said to be irreducibles, because an experience is describable only as a unified first-personal perspective on the experience’s experiential content (which in many cases translates to a subjective directedness towards the world) meaningfully distinct from all the other experiences that appear and disappear in the stream of consciousness. Consequently, the scientific question thus becomes how to explain that such subjective unity of experience can emerge in the first place.
David Chalmers (2006) distinguishes the type of emergence that would be required to explain irreducible subjective consciousness (“strong emergence”) from the type of emergence that is used by natural scientists in order to describe dynamic and complex processes as they appear in nature (“weak emergence”). The difference, according to Chalmers, is that “if there are phenomena that are strongly emergent with respect to the domain of physics, then our conception of nature needs to be expanded to accommodate them” (Chalmers, 2006; 245), whereas in the case of weak emergence “[a]s long as the existence of these phenomena is deducible in principle from a physical specification of the world (as in the case of the cellular automaton), then no new fundamental laws or properties are needed: everything will still be a consequence of physics” (Chalmers, 2006; 246). The fact that strongly emergent processes would not be predictable just on the basis of knowing the physical laws that describe the non-emergent “lower level” processes does not necessarily imply that they would not have to adhere to an overarching natural order that also constrains the occurrence of these processes. As Chalmers notes, there could still be so-called “trans-ordinal” laws “connecting the different levels of nature” (Chalmers, 2006; 248).
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In part two we will see that there is indeed a concern here for the a non-reductionist account of the mind based on dynamic systems theory that is still reliant on a narrow physicalist ontology that does not allow for strong emergence or the entities that would be its product (see 2.2.1). First however we need to make clear how the refusal of empiricism to accept a priori the existence of intrinsic subjectivity and irreducible experience leads to a materialism that is eliminativistic.
1.2.2. Eliminative materialism
There is a distinct sense of self-ascribed intellectual maturity that drives contemporary scientists in their implicit existential philosophy. Not only is it so that “reason is a slave to the passions”, as Hume had said, but man is a biological creature that is nothing more than the product of a vast series of genetic contingencies due to an undirected evolutionary process that itself has no deeper explanation than some fundamentally random cosmic accident some fourteen billion years ago. This is what most students in neuroscience believe and what many popularisers of science propagate across popular culture and the internet. The modern scientifically minded atheist “won’t be fooled again”. And to the extent that this would encourage critical thought, this would even seem to be a good thing. In his preface to Nihil Unbound, Ray Brassier has very compellingly expressed this same sentiment:
“Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home’, nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem.” (Brassier, 2007; xi)
Now, it is one thing not to want to close our ears to inconvenient truths, but what are the philosophical grounds for being a hard-nosed “realist-cum-nihilist” in the first place? What makes scientific-minded man so sure as to declare himself a mere cog in the machinery of nature? To understand this we could go back far into the history of philosophy, but given that this is somewhat beyond the scope of this thesis, we will not got further back in time than Kant.
For Kant, the world was already a deterministic whole, even though he founded transcendental idealism, he was also an empirical realist. Notwithstanding his rationalist moral philosophy, I would even say he could be regarded an optimistic naturalist as far natural science
