>--- In [email protected], "Robin Carlsen" <maskedzebra@...>
wrote:
>
> MIND AND COSMOS: WHY THE MATERIALIST NEO-DARWINIAN CONCEPTION OF
NATURE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE by Thomas Nagel
As a result of Robin's current fascination with Thomas Nagel ('Jason
does not have a proper or objective measure of his own knowledge when
placed against one of the world's greatest philosophers--whose *The View
from Nowhere* is considered by some philosophers to be the most
significant work of philosophy since World War II.'), I thought I would
post a diagram by Francisco Varela, a biologist, neuroscientist and
philosopher. Varela's diagram below, shows the various philosophers that
are promoting theories of consciousness on an axis of four basic types
of theories, according to how Varela interprets their various stands on
the issue. I am not arguing for or against a particular explanation
here. I have culled definitions for the four kinds of expanatory
theories that Varela used in case anyone is not familiar with them. I
circled Varela and Nagel on the diagram. As this diagram was made in the
mid-1990s, it is probably not fully up to date, and the positions of the
authors of various theories on the diagram may have drifted a bit since
then.
[Theories of Consciousness by Francisco Varela]
Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced
from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an
experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something,
as it is an experience of or about some object. In its most basic form,
phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of
topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of
conscious experiences.
Functionalism is the idea that what makes something a mental state of a
particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather
on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it
is a part, that mental states are constituted solely by their functional
role, that they they are causal relations to other mental states,
sensory inputs, and behavioural outputs. Functionalism is a theoretical
level between the physical implementation and behavioural output.
Reductionism concerns the relations between different scientific
domains. The basic question of reduction is whether the properties,
concepts, explanations, or methods from one scientific domain can be
deduced from or explained by the properties, concepts, explanations, or
methods from another domain of science. In a practical sense this means
a complex system is just the sum of its parts, and can be reduced to
accounts of its individual constituents. For example, can chemistry be
explained by quantum mechanics, or biology by chemistry and thence, by
quantum mechanics?
Mysterianism is a position proposing that the hard problem of
consciousness cannot be resolved by us, that we are cognitively closed
to its solution. The unresolvable problem is how to explain the
existence of qualia. (Qualia are the ways things seem to us, for
example, the taste of cilantro - some people love it and some people
hate it.)
