A general definition of consciousness that accommodates most views (Vimal, 2010b) is: “ ‘consciousness is a mental aspect of a system or a process, which is a conscious experience, a conscious function, or both depending on the context and particular bias (e.g. metaphysical assumptions)’, where experiences can be conscious experiences and/or non-conscious experiences and functions can be conscious functions and/or non-conscious functions that include qualities of objects. These are a posteriori definitions because they are based on observations and the categorization.” (...) Non-conscious experiences are equivalent to relevant proto-experiences and nonconscious functions are equivalent to related proto-functions at various levels as these terms are precursors of respective conscious subjective experiences and conscious functions aspect of consciousness. The non-conscious experiences and non-conscious functions may be considered as a part of the definition of mind and/or awareness. (shrink)

When so much is being written on conscious experience, it is past time to face the question whether experience happens that is not conscious of itself. The recognition that we and most other living things experience non-consciously has recently been firmly supported by experimental science, clinical studies, and theoretic investigations; the related if not identical philosophic notion of experience without a subject has a rich pedigree. Leaving aside the question of how experience could become conscious of itself, I aim here (...) to demonstrate that the terms experience and consciousness are not interchangeable. Experience is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down, but I see non-conscious experience as based mainly in momentary sensations, relational between bodies or systems, and probably common throughout the natural world. If this continuum of experience — from non-conscious, to conscious, to self-transcending awareness — can be understood and accepted, radical constructivism (the “outside” world as a construct of experience) will gain a firmer foundation, panexperientialism (a living universe) may gain credibility, and psi will find its medium. (shrink)

The present work is focussed on the completeness of physics, or what is here called the Completeness Thesis: the claim that the domain of the physical is causally closed. Two major questions are tackled: How best is the Completeness Thesis to be formulated? What can be said in defence of the Completeness Thesis? My principal conclusions are that the Completeness Thesis can be coherently formulated, and that the evidence in favour if it significantly outweighs that against it. In opposition to (...) those who argue that formulation is impossible because no account of what is to count as physical can be provided, I argue that as long as the purpose of the argument in which the account is to be used are borne in mind there are no significant difficulties. The account of the physical which I develop holds as physical whatever is needed to fix the likelihood of pre-theoretically given physical effects, and hypothesises in addition that no chemical, biological or psychological factors will be needed in this way. The thus formulated Completeness Thesis is coherent, and has significant empirical content. In opposition to those who defend the doctrine of emergentism by means of philosophical arguments I contend that those arguments are flawed, setting up misleading dichotomies between needlessly attenuated alternatives and assuming the truth of what is to be proved. Against those who defend emergentism by appeal to the evidence, I argue that the history of science since the nineteenth century shows clearly that the empirical credentials of the view that the world is causally closed at the level of a small number of purely physical forces and types of energy is stronger than ever, and the credentials of emergentism correspondingly weaker. In opposition to those who argue that difficulties with reductionism point to the implausibility of the Completeness Thesis I argue that completeness in no way entails the kinds of reductionism which give rise to the difficulties in question. I argue further that the truth of the Completeness Thesis is in fact compatible with a great deal of taxonomic disorder and the impossibility of any general reduction of non-fundamental descriptions to fundamental ones. In opposition to those who argue that the epistemological credentials of fundamental physical laws are poor, and that those laws should in fact be seen as false, I contend that truth preserving accounts of fundamental laws can be developed. Developing such an account, I test it by considering cases of the composition of forces and causes, where what takes place is different to what is predicted by reference to any single law, and argue that viewing laws as tendencies allows their truth to be preserved, and sense to be made of both the experimental discovery of laws, and the fact that composition enables accurate prediction in at least some cases. (shrink)

D. C. Dennett propounds a ?multiple drafts? conception of consciousness which is both materialist and anti?realist (in something like Dummett's sense). Thus there is no determinate truth as to what the components of someone's consciousness were over any particular period and the order in which they occurred. In opposition to this an anti?materialist form of psychical realism is defended here. There really is a precise something which it is like to be a conscious individual at each moment. The main difficulty (...) in accepting this view is that it seems to make it quite contingent what type of consciousness performs what function in the economy of the organism, e.g. that pleasure acts as a positive, pain as a negative, reinforcer of behaviour. There is a problem here which can only be avoided by abandoning the Humean doctrine that there cannot be necessary relations between distinct existences. (shrink)

In this thesis I set forth what I understand to be the criteria of a Christian anthropology. From this, I then evaluate the major anthropological systems that Christians tend to employ to develop their accounts of human persons, with special attention given to Christian materialism, substance dualism, and Thomistic hylomorphism. I contend that neither Christian materialism nor substance dualism adequately satisfy the criteria of a Christian anthropology, and that some of the best examples of these perspectives have unique philosophical problems (...) of their own. I then consider Thomas Aquinas’s hylomorphic account of human persons and argue that, while it does not perfectly satisfy the criteria of a Christian anthropology, it does fair better than both Christian materialism and substance dualism, and that there are ways to modify his account to enable it to better satisfy the Christian criteria. (shrink)

The tradition of pragmatism has, especially since Dewey, been characterized by a commitment to nonreductive naturalism. The notion of emergence, popular in the early decades of the twentieth century and currently re-emerging as a central concept in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, may be useful in explicating that commitment. The present paper discusses the issue of the reality of emergent properties, drawing particular attention to a pragmatic way of approaching this issue. The reality of emergents can be defended as (...) a pragmatically-useful ontological commitment; hence, pragmatism can be employed as a tool in the debate over the structure and reality of emergence. This strategy of justifying ontological commitments is examined through historical and systematic discussions of the pragmatist tradition. It turns out, among other things, that while classical pragmatists did not specify any technical notion of emergence in the contemporary sense, their non-reductively naturalist views are relevant to the more recent emergence discussions -- especially because they rejected the metaphysical realism typical of today’s ontologically-oriented emergence theories. (shrink)

This article deals with the difficulties of the yet intuitive causal interpretation of the mind–body connection emphasized by metaphysical, theoretical and experimental considerations. It shows that a decisive contribution to determining the nature of this connection can be provided experimentally. This experimental test is designed within the framework of a general systems theory capable of representing the concepts of complementarity and entanglement that are involved in the description of the mind–body connection.

The quantum-like approach of psychosomatic phenomena suggests an explanation of the correlations between mind and body in terms of quantum-like entanglement, that is, without appealing to any concept of psychophysical, efficient causality. This approach is developed within the Hilbert space formalism and its general consequences are drawn. It is first illustrated by a simple, qualitative model of the placebo effect which shows that representing psychosomatic states by entangled states can explain that purely psychological factors can produce a-causal changes of physiological (...) parameters. Then, a dynamical, quantitative and predictive model of bipolar disorder which makes use of the unitarity of the temporal evolution of psychosomatic states due to biological and psychological rhythms is worked out. This model can explain some current observations, like for example the severe fluctuations in mood between depression and mania, and it can forecast the moment of shifting. In addition, it justifies the efficiency of chronotherapy on theoretical basis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Is free will a necessity or a luxury for an understanding of applied ethics? This paper offers an argument for why it is the former. First some reasons are offered why applied ethics, under the influence of Rawls's metaethics, has eschewed the topic of free will. It is shown why this is a mistake — namely, how applied ethics will falter without such a theory. The paper then argues for a conception of free will and indicates what ethical and (...) public policy implications may flow from this theory. (shrink)

. Prospects for uniting religion and science are brightened by recently changed views of consciousness and mind‐brain interaction. Mental, vital, and spiritual forces, long excluded and denounced by materialist philosophy, are reinstated in nonmystical form. A revised scientific cosmology emerges in which reductive materialist interpretations emphasizing causal control from below upward are replaced by revised concepts that emphasize the reciprocal control exerted by higher emergent forces from above downward. Scientific views of ourselves and the world and the kinds of values (...) upheld by scientific belief undergo basic transformations, making them more compatible with religious motivation and moral responsibility. (shrink)

For a long time, philosophers have considered the conundrums of consciousness, self-awareness and free will. Much more recently, scientists have joined in and begun to unravel the secrets of mind. Biologists, physicians and psychologists, studying the human brain, but also physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, working on organizational principles of intelligent information processing systems, have contributed to the subject. This contribution explains several “roads to self-awareness”, all of them based on the natural sciences. The first one follows our bio-psychological evolution. (...) The second road starts with the engineer’s point of view and mainly builds on information science and technology, in particular robotics. The third road taken is the most abstract; it exploits complex dynamic systems and their emergent properties. Despite their different origins and methods, these lines of investigation converge. That is, the findings of various fields can be combined into a unified theory of mind and self-awareness, which is the main purpose of this paper. This overall synthesis suggests that the mind results from a multi-hierarchical organizational structure, and self-reflexive flows of information in embodied systems. In addition to this, stable self-awareness appears spontaneously in sufficiently complex robots, when the system’s capability of describing itself crosses the level of conceptually clear information processing. As an application, one obtains a number of construction principles for mentally developing systems that are explained towards the end of this contribution. (shrink)

E. O. Wilson argues that we must use scientifically based reason to solve the values dilemma created by the loss of a transcendent foundation for values. Peter Singer allows that sociobiology can help us understand the evolutionary origin of ethics, but denies the claim that sociobiology or any science can furnish us with ultimate ethical principles. We argue that Singer's critique of Wilson's attempt to bridge the gap between fact and value using empirical reason is unconvincing and that Singer's own (...) ethical principle of disinterestedness requires major support from empirical reason and is not sustainable by pure reason alone. (shrink)

. The question of whether nature can embody love or be considered in this sense as “friend” is a thorny problem for Christian theology. The doctrines of finitude and sin argue against nature as a realm of love, whereas the doctrine of creation out of nothing, which links God and the creation so forcefully, would seem to argue for such a view of nature. This paper explores the thesis that Western culture has not offered a concept of nature rich enough (...) to allow for an understanding of it as a domain of gracious-ness. From pre-Socratic times through the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, nature was conceived of as a realm of defect or lacking in creative possibilities. Christian theology has consistently spoken of nature in terms that defy the limitations of the authorized views proposed by the ambient Western cultures. The present times, under the influence of the sciences, have furnished for the first time an authorized concept of nature that is large enough and dynamic enough to entertain the dimension of grace. Consequently, ours is a time of great promise for developing a more adequate theology of nature. (shrink)

The topic of sociobiology and ethics opens up a range of questions that have to do with important relationships: between the history of nature and human being, between biological evolution and psychosocial evolution, between is and ought, between language usages in one domain and another. The task of ethics is properly to discern what sociobiology has to tell us about the fundamentals of life and persuasively to direct our actions in accord with those fundamentals, in a manner that is consistent (...) with our essential humanity. From the theological perspective all of this transpires within the creative will of God. (shrink)

Established religions integrate a society's everyday secular realities with humankind's numinous experience of the holy. Powerful emotions nourish the cultural expression of the archetypes propelling the “ritual dances” of art, sport, and technocracy. During sacred moments such as mother‐infant or adult bonding, neuroendocrine triggers activate lifelong ties. The cultural canon of the left cortex contrasts with the intuitive right. Brainstem “switches” alternate the left's cool, extraverted, sympathetic drive for control with the right's “warm” attachment behavior and dreaming sleep. Psychic trauma (...) damages flexibility with resultant alexithymic blindness to emotions and archetypes. Substance abuse and narcissistic overemphasis on control ensue. (shrink)

Technology interfaces with society in several ways, one of the most important of which is in the domain of values. Technology is values driven. These values are sometimes expressed in dramatic rhetoric and visual images that qualify as metaphysical or even religious proposals. The flamboyance of these proposals is ap parently necessary in order to galvanize public support for the technologies in question. This article focuses on the prominent value in our culture to shape and reshape nature and takes as (...) case studies recent National Aeronautics and Space Administration proposals and the Human Genome Project. The conclu sion is that a kind of spirituality drives the use of technology, and this fact ought to be recognized and reflected upon. (shrink)

A recent scientifically and historically grounded theory on human genetic and cultural evolution suggests why the religious elements of culture became the primary source of both peaceful cooperation within societal ingroups and at the same time of destructive wars with outgroups. It also describes the role of religion in the evolution of ape‐men into humans. The theory indicates why human societal life is not long viable without the underpinning of a healthy, noncoercive, religious faith; why sound religious faith is weak (...) now; and why we may hope both for better morals and for worldwide cooperation in peace. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo analisa a questão da causalidade descendente em relação a sistemas emergentes. A partir das considerações de Emmeche, Køppe e Stjernfelt, que são aqui criticadas, e em parte com base naquelas de Pattee, o artigo apresenta uma interpretação do tipo de relação que existe entre as condições de base de um evento e este último, e as relações entre a totalidade de um sistema e suas partes, empregando as noções de comunidade e de finalidade interna, noções essas devidas (...) a Kant. ABSTRACT This paper deals with the question of downward causation in connection with emergent systems. Beginning with the comments offered by Emmeche, Køppe, and Stjernfelt, which are criticized here, and partially based on those of Pattee, the paper puts forward an interpretation of the kind of relation that exists between the basal conditions for a given event and the event itself, and the relations between a given system as a whole and its parts making use of the concepts of community and internal purposiveness, concepts due to Kant. (shrink)

This paper deals with the questions of emergence and complex (mental and social) systems and with downward determination from the viewpoint of perspectival realism. These are issues concerning the foundations of the human sciences, generally speaking, and particularly psychology and sociology. A criterion is put forward, which distinguish metaphysicalfrom ontological (conceptual) problems, and the notions of complex, hierarchic system and causation that would be suitable for those that defend emergence and perspectivist foundations of the human sciences are discussed. Este artigo (...) trata das questões da emergência de sistemas complexos (mentais e sociais) e da determinação descendente do ponto de vista do realismo perspectivista. Essas são questões sobre os fundamentos das ciências humanas em geral e, em particular, da psicologia e da sociologia. É proposto um critério para distinguir problemas metafísicos de problemas ontológicos (ou conceituais), e são discutidas as noções de sistema complexo hierárquico e de causação que seriam adequadas para uma fundamentação emergentista e perspectivista das ciências humanas. (shrink)