Abstract
This chapter provides indirect motivation for dual-aspect-pan-proto-psychism by highlighting the places where more standard solutions to the mind-body problem fail. Emergentism is rejected, and well-known serious weaknesses of various types of physicalism and dualism are pointed out.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Yes, functionalism is a kind of reductionism, since it reduces mental properties to a functional role they play. Under functionalism, ontologically speaking, only brain states and brain processes exist. But this is not the place to argue for this claim.
- 3.
On the interesting difference between physicalism and physicSalism, see Strawson (2006, p. 54): “[…] real physicalism can have nothing to do with physicsalism, the view—the faith—that the nature or essence of all concrete reality can in principle be fully captured in the terms of physics. Real physicalism cannot have anything to do with physicsalism unless it is supposed—obviously falsely—that the terms of physics can fully capture the nature or essence of experience.”
- 4.
“The Terminator 2: Judgment Day”, 1991, James Cameron.
- 5.
In Goff’s (2017a, p. 3 and 14) terminology, physicalism is unable to respect the Consciousness Constraint: “The Consciousness Constraint—Any adequate theory of reality must entail that at least some phenomenal concepts are satisfied. (A concept is satisfied when it truly corresponds to reality, for example, the concept of God is satisfied if and only if God exists.)” See also Goff's (2017a) Chap. 2.
- 6.
Supervenience is standardly defined as follows: “A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, ‘there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference’” (Bennett and McLaughlin 2005).
- 7.
See Descartes’ “Sixth Meditation”: “One the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing; and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of my body, in so far as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it” (Descartes 1984).
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Benovsky, J. (2018). The Mind-Body Problem, the Standard Failures of the Standard Solutions to It, and the Threat of Emergentism. In: Mind and Matter. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05633-9_2
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