Naturalizing the Mind - Royal Road or Blind Alley?
April 27-28, 2014
Tucson AZ, USA
Keynote Talks
April 27, 9.30 am
William Seager (University of Toronto):
Naturalization: The Promises and Perils of a Philosophical Dream
The wellspring of naturalism is a laudable opposition to
supernaturalism. The latter view holds that there are mysterious
extra-mundane elements of reality, unruly intrusions into our world. The
denial of supernaturalism is nice, but defining naturalism as this mere
denial generates an extremely modest doctrine. The bite of naturalism
arises when it aligns itself with a certain view of the world, a view
which takes the physical – as described by fundamental physics and
nothing more – as the totality of reality. The project of what might be
called "strong naturalization" is then to show, for any phenomenon, how
it depends upon, arises from and is "nothing over and above" the
fundamental physical basis of the world.
Since the middle of the last century it has become widely accepted that
strong naturalization has almost succeeded. In broad outline, we are in
possession of a naturalistic viewpoint which can, in the words of the
physicist Sean Carroll, "account for everything we see in our everyday
lives". Leaving aside residual controversy about this general claim, I
want to focus on what seems to be the one remaining recalcitrant
phenomenon: consciousness. Is consciousness truly a roadblock to
naturalization? What are the special obstacles which consciousness has
thrown up in the path of strong naturalization? From this point of view,
the recent history of the philosophy of mind has a curious character of
perpetual retreat, from the most ardent and clear cut modes of
naturalization to ever more circuitous, circumscribed and hedged
linkages to the stuff of fundamental physics.
This curious philosophical trajectory forces us to consider whether
strong naturalization is in fact unattainable. Is this project merely a
dream, dashed by the fact that there are dreams? We should also ask,
what would the failure of strong naturalization mean for philosophy and
our general view of ourselves and our place in the world?
April 27, 2 pm
Michael Silberstein (Elizabethtown College):
Experience Unbound: Neutral Monism, Emergence And Extended Mind
The hard problem (HP) is a conceptual problem that cannot be resolved by
any empirical means alone, but rather demands a metaphysical solution.
The explanatory gap (EG) is at least in part an empirical problem, i.e.,
what would constitute a scientifically robust explanation of phenomenal
experience (PE). There has been a renewed attempt on the part of some to
provide an emergentist resolution to the HP and the EG. The hope was
that such an account could provide an alternative to the odious choice
between materialism and dualism without epiphenomenalist implications.
Neutral monism in one form or another has often been taken as a
competitor to an emergentist ontology of PE and is currently enjoying a
resurgence in some quarters. Here it is argued that emergence and
neutral monism properly conceived actually go hand in hand, and taken
together, can discharge the HP without any hint of epiphenomenalism.
Building on recent previous work (Silberstein and Chemero 2012a and b,
Silberstein 2012) it will be further argued that extended accounts of
cognitive science and neuroscience grounded in dynamical systems theory
and graph theory, in combination with the new aforementioned ontology,
could together help resolve the EG.
April 28, 9.30 am
Steve Horst (Wesleyan University):
Beyond Reduction
One of the most popular and long-lived approaches to naturalizing the
mind is the attempt to reduce mental phenomena to physical, biological,
or neural phenomena.Reductionism has held a special allure among
philosophers for a number of reasons: the intuitive appeal of part-whole
explanations, reductive explanation's resemblance to the axiomatic
method in mathematics, its apparent promise as a strategy for unifying
different knowledge domains, and the fact that true reductions, when
successful, are almost unique in yielding both metaphysical
necessity/and/ complete explanations.Reductionism was a very influential
view in philosophy of science, both in early modernity and through much
of the twentieth century, and some central contemporary issues in
philosophy of mind – the explanatory gap and the hard problem of
consciousness – are framed as claims that conscious mental states (and
perhaps they alone) are not reducible to physical phenomena.In fact,
however, most philosophers of science today would agree that true
intertheoretic reductions are in fact rare even in the natural
sciences.I propose an explanation of both the appeal and the failure of
reductionism in terms of a cognitivist approach to philosophy of science
called "Cognitive Pluralism", and then explore what implications
post-reductionist philosophy of science has for philosophy of mind.If it
is "explanatory gaps all the way down", what are the implications for
dualism and for reductive, non-reductive and eliminative physicalisms?Is
the mind-matter gap different from the other explanatory gaps?And, if
the Cognitive Pluralist analysis is correct, is there any hope more
generally for a "unified science", or that scientific theories generally
can provide answers to metaphysical questions?
April 28, 2 pm
Harald Atmanspacher (ETH Zurich):
A New Kind of Reality - Varieties of Dual-Aspect Thinking
In the philosophy of mind and in psychology as well as cognitive
science, the program of naturalizing the mind is conventionally
understood as the attempt to reduce whatever appears mental to physical
explanations. In recent decades this has become a central motif in
cognitive neuroscience and consciousness studies, where it features as
the reduction of conscious states to brain behavior. On the long run,
the resulting physicalism can be viewed as a counterposition against
both idealist positions and Cartesian dualism. But is physicalism the
only alternative to them?
The answer is no. At least since Spinoza, there is a tradition of
dual-aspect thinking in which both the physical and the mental are
construed as aspects of an underlying reality, which is itself neutral
with respect to the mind-matter distinction. I will present and compare
some of the variants of dual-aspect thinking in the 20th century, such
as Betrand Russell's neutral monism, the holistic dual-aspect monism of
Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, David Bohm's implicate order, and natural
dualism due to Dave Chalmers. They can all be viewed as versions of a
naturalization that aims at a concept of nature beyond the duality of
the mental and the physical.