AAP2010 Abstracts
Use the form below to search abstracts by Author, Institue or Keyword.
| Title | Prof |
| First Name | Max |
| Surname | Velmans |
| Institution | Goldsmiths, University of London |
| Title of Paper | Reflexive Monism and the Psychophysical Universe |
| Select a Stream | Philosophy of Mind |
| Abstract | Classical dualist ways of viewing the relation of consciousness to the embodied brain and external world split human nature in ways that make it difficult to put it back to together again. However, materialist reductionism conflicts with the evidence of everyday conscious experience. Neither approach provides a satisfactory understanding of how conscious phenomenology relates to the material world. In this paper I suggest that dualism and reductionism share assumptions about the nature of conscious experience that do not correspond to that experience. Consequently, their debate about the nature of consciousness starts in the wrong place, leading to an impasse. I then introduce Reflexive Monism, which provides an alternative, dual-aspect monist approach, treating consciousness and brain as two, intimately related aspects of psychophysical mind. The human mind is, in turn, embodied and embedded in a wider psychophysical universe—a view that has intriguing convergences both with the views of Gustaf Fechner, the founder of psychological science and Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. This natural, non-reductionist worldview provides an alternative departure point for understanding mind/body relationships, including the nature and function of consciousness, how consciousness relates to its neural correlates, how to understand the causal interactions between consciousness and brain, how subjectivity, and intersubjectivity relate to ‘objectivity’, and so on. While it is not possible to elaborate on these and many other relationships in the time available, they are analysed in depth in Velmans (2009) Understanding Consciousness, Edition 2. By way of introduction, I will focus here on just three issues: how Reflexive Monism alters the way one thinks about the relationship of the perceived world to the world described by physics, how it alters the way one thinks about the nature of mind, and how it changes the way one thinks about the “hard problem” of consciousness. |
