This essay critiques the return to objects posited by certain new materialisms, most specifically the speculative realism of Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier. It argues that their “non-relational” and “autonomous” ontology represents a neo-positivist conception of reality. In place of such an atomistic ontology, I will suggest that the new materialisms develop a more productive, “non-reductive materialism”—a term drawn from analytic philosophy of mind. I will interpret Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy as crucial examples of such a materialism on (...) the continental side. Rather than being based on the non-relational innerness of an object, this position instead takes into account matter’s fundamentally extended nature. Confirmed by examples such as the growing evidence for neuroplasticity, the externalist, non-reductive view advances the new materialist argument that matter is “agentive” and “active” rather than “mechanic” and “passive,” without slipping into an anti-social-constructionist biologism or behaviorism. (shrink)

Can physicalism (or materialism) be non-reductive? I provide an opinionated survey of the debate on this question. I suggest that attempts to formulate non-reductive physicalism by appeal to claims of event identity, supervenience, or realization have produced doctrines that fail either to be physicalist or to be non-reductive. Then I treat in more detail a recent attempt to formulate non-reductive physicalism by Derk Pereboom, but argue that it fares no better.

Derk Pereboom has recently elaborated a formulation of non-reductive physicalism in which supervenience does not play the central role and realization plays no role at all; he calls his formulation “robust non-reductive physicalism”. This paper argues that for several reasons robust non-reductive physicalism is inadequate as a formulation of physicalism: it can only rule out fundamental laws of physical-to-mental emergence by stipulating that there are no such laws; it fails to entail the supervenience of the mental on (...) the physical; it appeals to two relations that are physicalistically unacceptable; and it rules out certain epistemically possible ways that the world might turn out to be according to current physics. This paper further argues that the difficulties faced by Pereboom’s robust non-reductive physicalism can all be avoided if physicalism is instead formulated by appeal to a carefully-defined relation of realization. (shrink)

Some of the oldest and deepest questions in philosophy fall under the umbrella of consciousness and mind: What is the mind and how is it related to the body? What provides our thoughts with content? How is consciousness related to the natural world? Do we have distinctive causal powers? Analytic philosophers have made significant progress on these and related problems in the last century. Given the high volume of work on such topics, this chapter is necessarily selective. It offers major (...) touchstones but is slanted in favor of work that touches base with the sciences. The chapter starts by describing the progression of thought on the mind-body problem, from dualism and behaviorism to non-reductive materialism. It then describes the problem of intentionality, with a focus on partial solutions from Dretske and Millikan, ending with a brief discussion of 4E theories of mental content. The section on the problem of consciousness starts with the well-known knowledge and modal arguments before describing some attempted initial solutions, such as eliminative materialism and panpsychism. Finally, there is a brief section on agency and free will, which focuses on the link between free will and consciousness. (shrink)

We contest the unsubstantiated assumption of both materialists and non-materialist that the ontological status they propose applies to all humans and that the competing claim is false for all - ie we reject both the claim of non-materialists that all humans share the same fundamental aspect of having a "non-material consciousness" (nmc), as well as the contrasting claim of materialists that none do (being fully material as according to eliminative materialists/reductive physicalists etc). Instead, the basic proposition of this paper, (...) our ‘ontological conecture’ (OC) - an updated version of our 1998 website article “Mindless Materialists” - is that the central tenets of proponents on both sides are true, but only regarding themselves. A signature feature of nmc is that brains associated to it are capable of knowing of its existence directly, and as a corollary we would propose that if a sophisticated brain does not know it is associated to nmc then most likely this is because it is in fact not so associated. Thus, in accordance with our OC we will consider a brain’s statements on this issue (that it does or does not possess nmc) as not merely its ‘philosophical position’ but as an authoritative statement, a reflection of an ontological fact. Furthermore, we propose that only those who possess nmc are capable of understanding what it is, so that although they are well-qualified to know directly that they themselves possess it, in contrast those who lack nmc and possess only material consciousness (mc) cannot even comprehend what non-materiality means - they will understandably tend to consider it a non-existent absurdity, which contention would be quite correct in a purely-material reality, such as they effectively inhabit. -/- Terminology reflecting ontological status: Since according to our OC those brains which categorize themselves as non-materialists are presumed to indeed be associated to nmc, for usefulness in phraseology we’ll refer to people whose brain is so associated as being nmc’s (not merely “espousing nmc”). Materialists say they are conscious but that theirs is a material consciousness (abbrev: “mc”) , and since according to our OC we accept this self-determination we will refer to them as being “mc’s” or being materialist (not merely “espousing materialism”). -/- Are materialists mindless or are non-materialists delusional? Notoriously, it is impossible to prove that one possesses nmc (which is a sort of corollary to the fact that it is directly self-known) - being non-material, nmc cannot be detected via the scientific method. However just as those with nmc cannot prove they possess it so too one cannot prove or determine via measurement that materialists do not possess it. Nevertheless we feel that our OC is the simplest solution to the conundrum of how there are materialists if a brain can directly sense its associated nmc. In sum, although of course it is impossible to prove that any particular person possesses or lacks nmc, given all the above our OC considers - as stated by the title of this paper - a brain’s self-identification as "materialist" or “non-materialist” (dualist, panpsychist, idealist etc) as reflecting the absence or presence of an associated real non-material awareness/consciousness, rather than merely as a statement of a philosophical stance. An alternative solution is implicit in the above - that all humans possess nmc just that materialists are those whose brains lack the awareness of theirs, or that the brain-aspect which communicates to others has no access to it. -/- Towards developing more constructive dialogue between mc’s/nmc’s, and greater self-confidence and independence among nmc’s in the face of materialist dominance of the intellectual-climate: A large part of the overall paper is devoted to not just pointing out the futility of communication of the sort usually engaged in - ie based on the erroneous underlying assumption that both sides of the debate are ontologically the same - but also suggesting ways to make the debate less frustrating by a recognition of the OC. Greater clarity in discussions can be achieved partly via a deeper understanding of the different meanings the same term might have to nmc’s/mc’s and suggestions relevant the construction of a sort of translation algorithm to utilize in discussions (as a simple example, substituting ‘higher-level cognitive material brain-processes’ for ‘mind’ when that term is used by an mc); by the frank statement by nmc’s engaged in dialogue with mc’s that the existence of nmc is not up for discussion; by learning how the existence of our nmc colors the meaning we give to certain terms in ways we were not aware of, meanings which are absent for mc’s; and in general via the recognition by the nmc that the dialogue is with a person lacking nmc. -/- Perhaps materialists are right: In the interest of ‘reciprocity’, the paper also offers an alternative/opposing view to the central proposition, to the effect that the materialist claim is correct, and it is a defect of brain wiring or structure which is the source of an active illusion of "self-awareness" underlying the philosophical claims of non-materialists. A prospective source of this illusion is offered - an analog of the sense of presence experienced during ‘sleep paralysis’. (shrink)

This is a first tentative examination of the possibility of reinstating reduction as a valid candidate for presenting relations between mental and physical properties. Classical Nagelian reduction is undoubtedly contaminated in many ways, but here I investigate the possibility of adapting to problems concerning mental properties an alternative definition for theory reduction in philosophy of science. The definition I offer is formulated with the aid of non-monotonic logic, which I suspect might be a very interesting realm for testing notions concerning (...) localized mental-physical reduction. The reason for this is that non-monotonic reasoning by definition is about appeals made not only to explicit observations, but also to an implicit selection of background knowledge containing heuristic information. The flexibility of this definition and the fact that it is not absolute, i.e. that the relation of reduction may be retracted or allowed to shift without fuss, add at least an interesting alternative factor to current materialist debates. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(2) 2006: 102-112. (shrink)

In Explaining Attitudes, Baker argues that we should treat our everyday practices as relevant to metaphysical debates, resulting in a stance of realism with respect to intentional explanations. In this chapter I will argue that if one is going to be a practical realist about anything, it should be the self, or subject of attention. I will use research on attention combined with the stance of practical realism to argue in favor of a substantive self. That is, I will present (...) an account of the self that directs and controls attention, in line with our everyday view of the self. I will contrast this account with what I call the “illusion view,” which presents the self and its apparent causal power in the case of attention as an illusion. My account of the self will make use of several of Baker's ideas, including non-reductive materialism and broad supervenience. (shrink)

Twenty years ago, Richard Boyd suggested that physicalism could be formulated by appeal to a notion of realization, with no appeal to the identity of the non-physical with the physical. In (Melnyk 2003), I developed this suggestion at length, on the basis of one particular account of realization. I now ask what happens if you try to formulate physicalism on the basis of other accounts of realization, accounts due to LePore and Loewer and to Shoemaker. Having explored two new formulations (...) of physicalism, I conclude that my 2003 formulation remains the most promising. (shrink)

Safety principles in epistemology are often hailed as providing us with an explanation of why we fail to have knowledge in Gettier cases and lottery examples, while at the same time allowing for the fact that we know the negations of sceptical hypotheses. In a recent paper, Sinhababu and Williams have produced an example—the Backward Clock—that is meant to spell trouble for safety accounts of knowledge. I argue that the Backward Clock case is, in fact, unproblematic for the more sophisticated (...) formulations of safety in the literature. However, I then proceed to construct two novel examples that turn out problematic for those formulations—one that provides us with a lottery-style case of safe ignorance and one that is a straightforward case of unsafe knowledge. If these examples succeed, then safety as it is usually conceived in the current debate cannot account for ignorance in all Gettier and lottery-style cases, and neither is it a necessary condition for knowledge. I conclude from these troublesome examples that modal epistemologists ought to embrace a much more simple and non-reductive version of safety, according to which the notion of similarity between possible worlds that determines in which worlds the subject must believe truly is an epistemic notion that cannot be defined or reduced to notions independent of knowledge. The resulting view is shown to also lead to desirable results with respect to lottery cases, certain quantum phenomena, and a puzzling case involving a cautious brain-in-a-vat. (shrink)

What happens to the inner light of consciousness with the death of the individual body and brain? Reductive materialism assumes it simply fades to black. Others think of consciousness as indicating a continuation of self, a transformation, an awakening or even alternatives based on the quality of life experience. In this issue, speculation drawn from theoretic research are presented. -/- Table of Contents Epigraph: From “The Immortal”, Jorge Luis Borges iii Editor’s Introduction: I Killed a Squirrel the Other (...) Day, Gregory M. Nixon iv-xi Research Essays The Tilde Fallacy and Reincarnation: Variations on a "Skeptical" Argument Teed Rockwell 862-881 Death, Consciousness, and Phenomenology, Steve Bindeman 882-899 The Idealist View of Consciousness After Death, Bernardo Kastrup 900-909 Consciousness, a Cosmic Phenomenon—A Hypothesis, Eva Déli 910-930 The Theory of a Natural Afterlife: A Newfound, Real Possibility for What Awaits Us at Death, Bryon K. Ehlmann 931-950 Near-Death Cases Desegregating Non-Locality/Disembodiment via Quantum Mediated Consciousness: An Extended Version of the Cell-Soul Pathway, Contzen Pereira & J Shashi Kiran Reddy 951-968 On the Possible Existence of Quantum Consciousness After Brain Death, Massimo Pregnolato & Alfredo Pereira Jr. 969-991 Science and Postmortem Survival, Edward F. Kelly 992-1011 Explorations ISS Theory: Cosmic Consciousness, Self, and Life Beyond Death in a Hyperdimensional Physics, Chris H. Hardy 1012-1035 Does the Consciousness End, Remain Awake, or Transform After Death? Radivoj Stankovich (with Micho Durdevich) 1036-1050 Big Bang Spirituality, Life, and Death, Ken Bausch 1051-1063 Death, Consciousness and the Quantum Paradigm, Ronald Peter Glasberg 1064-1077 Living With Limits: The Continuum of Consciousness, Donald Brackett 1078-1098 Mysticism, Consciousness, Death, Mike Sosteric 1099-1118 What Dies? Eternalism and the Afterlife in William James, Jonathan Bricklin 1119-1140 Theories of Consciousness and Death: Does Consciousness End, Continue, Awaken, or Transform When the Body Dies? Roger Cook 1141-1153 It’s the Other Way Around: Matter is a Form of Consciousness and Death is the End of the Illusion of Life in the World, James P. Kowall & Pradeep B. Deshpande 1154-1208 Statements A Feminine Vision for the World Consciousness, & a New Outrageous Ontology, Lorna Green 1209-1217 The Mask of Eternity: The Quest for Immortality and the Afterlife, Iona Miller 1218-1228 Are We Really “such stuff as dreams are made on”? Chris Nunn 1229-1225 Is the Afterlife a Non-Question? (Let's Hope Not), Deepak Chopra 1226-1230 Life After Death? An Improbable Essay, Stuart Kauffman 1231-1236. (shrink)

Much of contemporary philosophy of mind is marked by a dissatisfaction with the two main positions in the field, standard materialism and standard dualism, and hence with the search for alternatives. My concern in this paper is with two such alternatives. The first, which I will call non-standard materialism, is a position I have defended in a number of places, and which may take various forms. The second, panpsychism, has been defended and explored by a number of recent (...) writers. My main goals are: (a) to explain the differences between these positions; and (b) to suggest that non-standard materialism is more plausible than panpsychism. (shrink)

Given some reasonable assumptions concerning the nature of mental causation, non-reductive physicalism faces the following dilemma. If mental events cause physical events, they merely overdetermine their effects (given the causal closure of the physical). If mental events cause only other mental events, they do not make the kind of difference we want them to. This dilemma can be avoided if we drop the dichotomy between physical and mental events. Mental events make a real difference if they cause actions. But (...) actions are neither mental nor physical events. They are realized by physical events, but they are not type-identical with them. This gives us non-reductive physicalism without downward causation. The tenability of this view has been questioned. Jaegwon Kim, in particular, has argued that non-reductive physicalism is committed to downward causation. Appealing to the nature of actions, I will argue that this commitment can be avoided. (shrink)

Within the discourse surrounding mind-body interaction, mental causation is intimately associated with non-reductive physicalism. However, such a theory holds two opposing views: that all causal properties and relations can be explicated by physics and that special sciences have an explanatory role. Jaegwon Kim attempts to deconstruct this problematic contradiction by arguing that it is untenable for non-reductive physicalists to explain human behavior by appeal to mental properties. In combination, Kim’s critique of mental causation and the phenomenal concept strategy (...) serves as an effectual response to the anti-physicalist stance enclosed within the Knowledge Argument and the Zombie Thought Experiment. (shrink)

Non-reductive physicalism is committed to two theses: first, that mental properties are ontologically autonomous, and second, that physicalism is true. Jaegwon Kim has argued that this view is unstable – to honor one thesis, one must abandon the other. In this paper, I present an account of property realization that addresses Kim’s criticism and that explains how the two theses are indeed comfortably compatible.

This short paper is a "quick and dirty" introduction for non-philosophers (with some background in propositional logic) to Jaegwon Kim's famous supervenience argument against non-reductive physicalism (also known as the exclusion problem). It motivates the problem of mental causation, introduces Kim's formulation of the issue centered around mind-body supervenience, presents the argument in deductive form, and makes explicit why Kim concludes that vindicating mental causation demands a reduction of mind.

Jeagwon Kim's exclusion argument is a well-known argument against non-reductive physicalism in the contemporary debate on mental causation. In this essay, we will first discuss two versions of the exclusion argument: the simple version and the sophisticated version. Secondly, we will take a conservative strategy to defend the kind of non-reductive physicalism initiated by Donald Davidson: the Token Identity Theory. Namely, we will explain where Kim failed to appropriately understand Davidson's work and argue that the simple version and (...) the sophisticated version of the exclusion argument won't work against the clarified token identity theory at all. Lastly, Since much of Kim's inappropriate interpretation of Davidson's work is rooted in their difference in metaphysics, there is reason to believe the proper understanding and evaluation on contemplation as such on mental causation, non-reductive physicalism, and other related problems can't be achieved without finding an appropriate metaphysical frame. (shrink)

This paper examines the status of naturalism in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and John Dewey. Despite the many points of overlap and agreement between Husserl’s and Dewey’s philosophical projects, there remains one glaring difference, namely, the place and status of naturalism in their approaches. For Husserl, naturalism is an enemy to be vanquished. For Dewey, naturalism is the only method that can put philosophy back in touch with the concerns of human beings. This paper will demonstrate the remarkable similarities (...) between Husserl’s and Dewey’s thought before contending that Dewey’s “naturalistic humanism” offers a conception of naturalism which is compatible with Husserlian phenomenology. Furthermore, reading these two philosophers together, this paper argues, can point the way forward to a naturalism which avoids the dismissal of the contributions made by knowing subjects carried out by dominant contemporary strains of reductive naturalism. (shrink)

Defining the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties has turned out to be one of the most difficult and controversial tasks in contemporary metaphysics. It is generally assumed that a definition of intrinsicness should aim to avoid as many counterexamples as possible and reduce the notion to less controversial philosophical notions. In this paper, the author argues for a new methodological approach to defining intrinsicness. Rather than trying to cover as many intuitive examples as possible, a definition of intrinsicness should (...) reflect the crucial features of our intuitive understanding of the notion, and one of these features is that the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction has to be characterized in a non-reductive way. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that there is such a barrier created by self-conscious intentional states—conscious intentional states that are about one’s own conscious intentional states. As we will see, however, this result is entirely compatible with a scientific theory of mind, and, in fact, there is an elegant non-reductive framework in which just such a theory may be pursued.

In this paper, I reference a Paradigm Case Core Conception of Violence, which each individual has, and can share with others to various degrees. This is shown to imply that because we cannot get at violence itself, and can only interpret violence in relationships that involve humans, we cannot avoid politicizing our conceptions of violence in our empathic, intersubjective relationships. This is demonstrated by outlining various claims concerning violence, and by utilizing Edith Stein's phenomenological account on empathy and intersubjectivity, and (...) Alfred Schütz’s characterizations of commonsense constructs and typicalities, as well as theorists who define violence in reductive and non-reductive ways. (shrink)

Katerina Kolozova is a Macedonian philosopher whose publications from last two decades aim to analyze various topics using François Laruelle’s “non-philosophy” or “non-standard philosophy.” Non-philosophy could be roughly described as radicalized deconstruction: Laruelle claims that not everything can be grasped by a philosophy: for Laruelle, “philosophy is too serious an affair to be left to the philosophers alone.”1 Non-philosophy opposes the “principle of sufficient philosophy” through which philosophy determines and decides what is real. According to Laruelle, the ultimate limit of (...) philosophical thought and its self-proclaimed sufficiency lies in its inherent tendency to close itself in a transcendental system of autofetishist conceptions, which presume that one can grasp the Real (“The Real is neither capable of being known or even ‘thought,’ but can be described in axioms. [...] Even ‘immanence’ only serves to name the Real which tolerates nothing but axiomatic descriptions or formulations.”) by a philosophical thought, or that the Real could be mediated only through human thought. Laruelle criticizes this tendency of philosophy, which is usually expressing itself through the structure of “philosophical Decision.” (“To philosophize is to decide Reality and the thoughts that result from this, i.e. to believe to be able to order them in the universal order of the Principle of Reason [Logos].”) Katerina Kolozova use Laruelle’s non-philosophy to explore more explicitly political topics. In the Cut Of Th e Real (2014), she criticized certain dogmatism of poststructuralist philosophy and feminist theory, namely their symptomatic rejection of the Real and the One. In Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism (2015) and The Lived Revolution (2016) Kolozova presented a rereading of Marx, whose work she found relevant for the critique of speculative philosophical dimension of the capitalist economy, embodied in the 2008 global finance crisis, and in the latter book, she explored the possibility of a new political solidarity, based on “bodies in pain.” Kolozova doesn’t call to philosophically reconstruct Marx’s thought for the current situation, but she goes back to Marx with the help of Laruelle’s non-Marxism, contrary to the usual approach of Marxist philosophers, who often try to create certain philosophical system of Marx’s work. Together with Eileen A. Joy, Kolozova edited the anthology After the “Speculative Turn” (2016), which addressed recent realist and materialist tendencies in feminist philosophy. In her most recent book, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (2019), Kolozova aimed to explore broader philosophical foundations of neoliberal capitalism, and its dealing with nonhuman animals and their suffering. According to Kolozova, “We have to start by coming to terms with what we did to the animals in the constitutive act of philosophy and via proxy to all those dehumanised that belong to the species of man ‘by courtesy’ only.” . (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of mind tends to theorize about the propositional attitudes primarily in terms of belief and desire. But there is a propositional attitude, sometimes called ‘entertaining,’ that seems to resist analysis in terms of belief and desire, and has been thought at other times and places (notably, in late nineteenth-century Austrian philosophy) to be more fundamental than belief and desire. Whether or not we accept the fundamentality of entertaining, it certainly seems to be an attitude ill understood in contemporary (...) philosophy of mind. The purpose of this paper is to make first steps – very first steps – toward a more mature understanding of entertaining. (shrink)

A review of Andrew Melnyk, A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Non-modalists about essence reject the idea that metaphysical modality is prior to essence, e.g., in the sense that the latter can be reduced to or defined in terms of the former. On the contrary, according to these theorists, the explanation, if anything, proceeds in the opposite direction: metaphysical modality does not explain, but is instead explained in terms of, essence. Thus, for non-modalists like Aristotle, Kit Fine and E. J. Lowe, one of the primary theoretical roles of essence is to (...) provide an explanatory basis for metaphysical necessity and possibility. This chapter explores a range of different types of explanatory connections which raise the question of how the non-modalist’s program of explaining metaphysical modality in terms of essence is best carried out. The considerations advanced in this chapter suggest that non-modalists must proceed by way of a non-logical case-by-case engagement with specific cases, since no logical “one-size-fits- all” strategy appears to be available. (shrink)

In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. The main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious forms-of-life and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this essay, I interrogate the theoretical (...) presuppositions of biopolitical rationality. I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers using biopolitics as an interpretative model. I re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower finds itself anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions of ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’ and Francesco Vitale’s work on ‘biodeconstruction’, I deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality and attempt to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. In particular, I follow the tracks of “the monster” in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Malabou. Foucault tells us that the monster is a singular figure, parasitic and subversive, beckoning a life beyond life, at once organic and non-organic, located at the limit between the normal and the exceptional, and exceeding the scope of biopolitical normativity in both theoretical and practical terms. It exists at the intersection of what Foucault names “the symbolics of blood” and “the analytics of sex”. As such, it materialises a self-transformative dimension of the living which remains, I argue, inadequate to Malabou’s representation of plasticity. The monstrous is a self-deconstructive motif calling for another biopolitical rationality, before or beyond ontological reductions or reconstructions. (shrink)

The authors of this book reconstruct the philosophical, methodological and theoretical assumptions of non-Marxian historical materialism, a theory of historical process authored by Leszek Nowak (1943-2009), a co-founder of the Poznań School of Methodology. In the first part of the book, philosophical assumptions of this theory are compared with the concepts of Robert Nozick, Immanuel Wallerstein, André Gunder Frank and analytical Marxism. In the second part, non-Marxian historical materialism is compared with the concepts of Eva Etzioni-Halevy, Andrzej Falkiewicz, (...) Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, Theda Skocpol and Karl August Wittfogel. (shrink)

This essay is divided into two parts, deeply intermingled. Part I examines not only the origin of conscious experience but also how it is possible to ask of our own consciousness how it came to be. Part II examines the origin of experience itself, which soon reveals itself as the ontological question of Being. The chief premise of Part I is that symbolic communion and the categorizations of language have enabled human organisms to distinguish between themselves as actually existing entities (...) and their own immediate experience of themselves and their world. This enables them to reflect upon abstract concepts, including “self,” “experience,” and “world.” Symbolic communication and conceptualization grow out of identification, the act of first observing conscious experiencing and intimating what it is like, mimesis, a gestural protolanguage learned through imitation, and reflection, seeing oneself through the eyes of others. The step into actual intentional speech is made through self-assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity. These three become the spiral of human cultural development that includes not only the adaptive satisfaction of our biological needs, but also the creativity of thought. With the mental-conceptual separation of subject and object – of self and world – the human ability to witness the universe (and each other) is the ground of our genuinely human quality. Consciousness gives human life its distinctively human reality. It is, therefore, one and the same ability that enables us to shape planet Earth by means of conceptual representations (rather than by means of our hands alone) while also awakening us to the significance of being. -/- Looking beyond human self-consciousness to investigate the origin and nature of awareness itself in Part 2, reductive objective materialism is found to be of little use. Direct experience also falls short in that, in order to be transformed into objective knowledge about itself, it must always be interpreted through and limited by the symbolic contexts of culture and the idiosyncratic conceptualizations of the individual. Awareness-in-itself must thus be considered ultimately unexplainable, but this may more indicate its inexpressible transcendence of all symbolic qualifiers than its nonexistence. It is suggested that awareness is not “self-aware” (as in deity) but is instead unknowing yet identical with the only true universal: the impetus of creative unfolding. Our human knowledge, as an expression of this unfolding, is seen to emerge from our conscious experiencing and, in turn, to have the power – and enormous responsibility – of directing that experience. Our underlying symbolic worldviews are found to be autopoietic: They limit or open our conscious experience, which, in turn, confirms those worldview expectations. As we explore a future of unforeseeable technological breakthroughs on an ailing planet who patiently copes with our “success,” truly vital decisions about the nature, meaning, extent, and future of conscious experience will have to be made. (shrink)

Understanding the policymaking process in an emerging economy in the global south, such as Bangladesh, holds significant importance. The country's remarkable socio-economic development, once the most impoverished in the region, has been facilitated by post-globalization economic transformation. While the literature on institutional change has predominantly focused on states in industrialist countries, this dissertation presents an innovative theoretical approach. It deeply explores primary case materials to illustrate how the state engages in policy evolution in a developing country's gradual shift from the (...) import substitution model towards globalization and deregulation. The central argument posited is that Bangladesh's globalization, particularly through its private sector-led garment exports, stands as a significant success story. Bangladesh is now the world's second-largest garment exporter after China. This achievement is attributed to the entrepreneurial development it fosters and its role in driving socio-economic change. Moreover, it has enabled the mobilization of resources, reducing aid dependence, enhancing climate resilience, improving public health and wellbeing, empowering women, and addressing critical needs in physical infrastructure and human development. The argument presented here diverges from the conventional explanation found in the literature, which tends to emphasize the role of external forces, particularly institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and donors, in triggering policy reforms in Bangladesh. These reforms, commonly linked with structural adjustment packages implemented during the balance of payments crisis, are frequently perceived as predominantly influenced by external pressures. Additionally, the influence of the business class or Bangladeshi non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is often asserted. This dissertation proposes an alternative explanation by suggesting that ideational viewpoints within the state, specifically the ideas espoused by top technocrats and political executives, played a significant role. It argues that these internal ideational factors were more influential than materialistic ones, highlighting the causal role of the policy process driven by endogenous imperatives. The introduction of the dissertation addresses the research problem and research puzzle while suggesting conjectures after problematizing existing arguments. The significant economic transformation observed in Bangladesh today is portrayed as the outcome of a gradual process spanning several decades. The transition towards promoting the private sector and embracing globalization commenced in 1991, following a series of incremental changes dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. During these periods, the institutional path progressed towards empowering the private sector and embracing globalization, laying the groundwork for a trajectory led by the private sector in the context of globalization. The theory chapter serves to establish the conceptual and theoretical foundation for analyzing both economic change and transformation by examining the evolutionary nature of the process. The study adopts an institutional change framework, drawing on the theory of gradual change and focusing on concepts such as layering and tipping points. Within this framework, causal variables such as powering and puzzling, social learning, and ideas are identified. The methodological approach is grounded in historical institutionalism, employing the process-tracing "within case" method. The selection of cases deliberately targets an important yet under-researched area—the policy process in Bangladesh concerning the success of garment-led industrialization. This dissertation fills a noticeable gap in the literature through rigorous analysis, enabling an in-depth exploration of the institutional dynamics spanning four governments from 1972 to 1991. The study relies on substantial primary materials, including interviews with key officials. Each empirical chapter not only presents data but also connects the findings to conceptual and theoretical conjectures, underscoring the significant contributions of this research. The key causal variables identified include the concepts of ‘puzzling’ and ‘social learning’ within the state capacity framework, along with a narrowly defined and developed concept of a "policy committee." The learning process entails technocrats engaging in what Hugh Heclo and Peter Hall term as "social learning," where they play a crucial role in addressing policy challenges, particularly during times of uncertainty and political turmoil, based on their learning from past experiences. Additionally, the concept of ‘powering’ is highlighted, emphasizing that while technocrats provide policy recommendations, it is ultimately the political executive who endorses policies. The interplay between ‘puzzling and powering’ and ‘social learning’ shapes the outcomes of the policy process. The first empirical chapter focusing on the Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Government (1972-1975) illustrates the emergence of policy learning during this period. Initially, this government pursued import substitution under strict government controls, with a predominant public sector. The historical context of exploitation under Pakistani rule and the centralization of industry by West Pakistan fostered socialism as an ideal for East Pakistan's economic emancipation. Additionally, close ties with India and the Soviet Union reinforced this socialist tendency. However, due to severe economic conditions resulting from stringent control on private investment and emphasis on large-scale public investment, policy puzzling and learning ensued. As a result, incremental changes were initiated, allowing limited private sector participation. The second empirical chapter explores the General Ziaur Rahman government's tenure (1975-1981) and how deregulation was consolidated within a layering step, paving the way for a shift towards globalization. General Zia and his technocrats, operating under authoritarian conditions, acknowledged the inefficacy of existing policies. Furthermore, General Zia's inclination towards the West fostered closer collaboration with donors. The Multifiber Agreement (MFA) presented an opportunity for garments, coinciding with the decline in jute exports. This government opened up industrial sectors for private participation, and banks provided funding across various sectors, with special emphasis on the burgeoning garment industry. The chapter also explores the origins of the garment industry during this period. Notably, Noorul Quader Khan, upon retiring as cabinet secretary, collaborated with a Korean multinational, Daewoo, with the support of General Zia, leading to the establishment of Desh Garments—a pioneering venture that catalyzed the export orientation of the sector. The third empirical chapter delves into the economic policies of the General Hussain Muhammad Ershad Government (1982-1990), highlighting its emphasis on greater private sector involvement. Under this administration, there was a political inclination towards globalization and deregulation, leading to the appointment of technocrats aligned with this vision. The leadership believed that promoting the private sector would be more effective in job creation. Despite facing significant political opposition, efforts towards disinvestment were made, eventually resulting in compromises like public-private partnerships. The decentralization of administration and restructuring of ministries aimed at promoting industrialization and economic globalization driven by the private sector at the regional level. Initiatives such as the Industrial Promotion and Development Company, with support from organizations like the International Finance Corporation, aimed to boost the private sector. Efforts towards globalization were synchronized with the establishment of an export processing zone in Chittagong, focusing on promoting private and foreign investment. Foreign investment promotion was encouraged through diplomatic efforts and legislative measures to safeguard investors. Currency devaluation was utilized to stimulate exports, along with some degree of import liberalization. The chapter convincingly argues that the groundwork for globalization, initiated under General Zia, came to fruition under General Ershad. The final empirical chapter contends that the system shifted towards globalization and deregulation in 1991. Although a severe balance of payments crisis occurred in 1989, it wasn't perceived as the sole cause of the industrial policy of 1991. The democratic uprising in 1990 led to the downfall of the military-backed government and the rise of a democratic government. The chapter argues that while economic and political changes may have been intertwined, the economic shift in 1991 was primarily driven by ideas within the state and driven by endogenous imperatives. It examines preceding periods to illustrate how the tipping mechanism might have operated, detailing the roles of top technocrats and political executives. The chapter provides insights into key policymakers and their ideas, as well as their interactions with industrialists, entrepreneurs, and representatives of multilateral organizations like the World Bank. Significant reform measures, including tariff reduction, the introduction of value-added tax, banking sector reform, and the adoption of floating exchange rates, are outcomes of the policy change. Additionally, sectors such as power, banks, and telecommunications, formerly monopolized by the public sector, are now deregulated. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is discuss an application of non-Marxian historical materalism to explanation of non-European societies. Until now this theory has been limited to interpretation of European societies. In order to grasp development of non-European societies (e.gr. Mexico) the extension of typology of societies is proposed which constitutes a new scientific programme based on this theory of historical development.

In the standard thought experiments, dualism strikes many philosophers as true, including many non-dualists. This ‘striking’ generates prima facie justification: in the absence of defeaters, we ought to believe that things are as they seem to be, i.e. we ought to be dualists. In this paper, I examine several proposed undercutting defeaters for our dualist intuitions. I argue that each proposal fails, since each rests on a false assumption, or requires empirical evidence that it lacks, or overgenerates defeaters. By the (...) end, our prima facie justification for dualism remains undefeated. I close with one objection concerning the dialectical role of rebutting defeaters, and I argue that the prospects for a successful rebutting defeater for our dualist intuitions are dim. Since dualism emerges undefeated, we ought to believe it. (shrink)

Background: how mind functions is subject to continuing scientific discussion. A simplistic approach says that, since no convincing way has been found to model subjective experience, mind cannot exist. A second holds that, since mind cannot be described by classical physics, it must be described by quantum physics. Another perspective concerns mind's hypothesized ability to interact with the world of quanta: it should be responsible for reduction of quantum wave packets; physics producing 'Objective Reduction' is postulated to form the basis (...) for mind-matter interactions. This presentation describes results derived from a new approach to these problems. It is based on well-established biology involving physics not previously applied to the fields of mind, or consciousness studies, that of critical feedback instability. -/- Methods: 'self-organized criticality' in complexity biology places system loci of control at critical instabilities, physical properties of which, including information properties, are presented. Their elucidation shows that they can model hitherto unexplained properties of experience. -/- Results: All results depend on physical properties of critical instabilities. First, at least one feed-back or feed-forward loop must have feedback gain, g = 1: information flows round the loop impress perfect images of system states back on themselves: they represent processes of perfect self-observation. This annihilates system quanta: system excitations are instability fluctuations, which cannot be quantized. Major results follow: -/- 1. Information vectors representing criticality states must include at least one attached information loop denoting self-observation. -/- 2. Such loop structures are attributed a function, 'registering the state's own existence', explaining -/- a. Subjective 'awareness of one's own presence' -/- b. How content-free states of awareness can be remembered (Jon Shear) -/- c. Subjective experience of time duration (Immanuel Kant) -/- d. The 'witness' property of experience – often mentioned by athletes 'in the zone' -/- e. The natural association between consciousness and intelligence -/- This novel, physically and biologically sound approach seems to satisfactorily model subjectivity. -/- Further significant results follow: -/- 1. Registration of external information in excited states of systems at criticality reduces external wave-packets: the new model exhibits 'Objective Reduction' of wave packets. -/- 2. High internal coherence (postulated by Domash & Penrose) leading to a. Non-separable information vector bundles. b. Non-reductive states (Chalmers's criterion for experience). -/- 3. Information that is: a. encoded in coherence negentropy; b. non-digitizable, and therefore c. computationally without digital equivalent (posited by Penrose). -/- Discussion and Conclusions: instability physics implies anharmonic motion, preventing excitation quantization, and totally different from the quantum physics of simple harmonic motion at stability. Instability excitations are different from anything hitherto conceived in information science. They can model aspects of mind never previously treated, including genuine subjectivity, objective reduction of wave-packets, and inter alia all properties given above. (shrink)

The scope of the paper is to present the concept of the radical dyad of the “non-human,” in an attempt to think radical humanity in terms of Marxian materialism, which is the product of approaching Marx’s writings on “the real” and “the physical” by way of François Laruelle’s non-philosophical method. Unlike posthumanism, inspired by critical theory and the method of poststructuralism, the theory of the non-human, as a radical dyad of technology in the generic sense of the word (ranging (...) from the techné of speaking a natural language to AI technology) and the organic understood as physicality, does away with anthropocentrism. Moreover, it does away with any anthropomorphology of thought, that is, it does away with any theorizing or philosophy that is centered on the notion of (human) subjectivity or, to borrow a Laruellian term, any “posture of thought” that is molded according to the structure of subjectivity centered thinking. (shrink)

In this article, I have argued that persons are individual human beings capable of mental activities. In this sense, persons have not only physical properties, but also various forms of consciousness. I have mentioned that the relation between a person and his/her physical properties are contingent; not logical, but factual. I have also mentioned Descartes' view that a person is a combination of two separate entities- a body and a mind. Only mind is conscious; the physical properties that the person (...) possesses are properties of his or her body. It is conceivable that either should exist without the other. That is to say that the mind can exist without the aid of the body. I have provided a detailed summery of Strawson's theory because it goes against William's concept of person and give an account of person , which in turn, removes many of the difficulties of the mind-body relation. Strawson concludes that a person is not identical with his/her body. Like Descartes, he gives primary to the mental attributes of a person. Thus, the concept of a person is fundamental and metaphysical. This is the main theme of this article. (shrink)

This chapter will argue that the criminal law is most compatible with a specific theory regarding the mind/body relationship: non-eliminative reductionism. Criminal responsibility rests upon mental causation: a defendant is found criminally responsible for an act where she possesses certain culpable mental states (mens rea under the law) that are causally related to criminal harm. If we assume the widely accepted position of ontological physicalism, which holds that only one sort of thing exists in the world – physical stuff – (...) non-eliminative reductive physicalism about the mind offers the most plausible account of the full-bodied mental causation criminal responsibility requires. Other theories of the mind/body relationship, including elminativism and non-reductive physicalism, threaten criminal responsibility because they do not offer satisfactory accounts of mental causation. Eliminativism, as the name implies, eliminates the mental or is skeptical that it can do the causal work necessary to responsibility; and non-reductive theories disconnect the mental from the physical/casual world such that the mental can no longer have reliable causal effects. (shrink)

The first part of this book contains a selection of Leszek Nowak’s (1943-2009) works on non-Marxian historical materialism, which are published here in English for the first time. In these papers, Nowak constructs a dynamic model of religious community, reconstructs historiosophical assumptions of liberalism and considers the methodological status of prognosis of totalitarization of capitalist society. In the second part of the book, new contributions to non-Marxian historical materialism are presented. Their authors analyze mechanisms of the oligarchization of (...) liberal democracy, the democratization of real socialism, and the development of early modern Ottoman and post-war Chinese societies. The volume will be of interest to graduate and undergraduate students, as well as specialists who deal with the development of capitalist society, philosophy of history, the philosophy of social sciences and the political philosophy of liberalism. (shrink)

Consciousness has an important role in ethics: when a being consciously experiences the frustration or satisfaction of its interests, those interests deserve higher moral priority than those of a behaviourally similar but non-conscious being. I consider the relationship between this ethical role and an a posteriori (or “type-B”) materialist solution to the mind-body problem. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if type-B materialism is correct, then the reference of the concept of phenomenal consciousness is radically indeterminate between (...) a neuronal-level property that is distinctive to mammals and a high-level functional property that is much more widely shared. This would leave many non-mammalian animals (such as birds, fish, insects and octopuses) with indeterminate moral status. There are ways to manage this radical moral indeterminacy, but all of these ways lead to profoundly troubling consequences. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to paraphrase Theda Skocpol’s theory of social revolutions with the use of the conceptual apparatus of non-Marxian historical materialism. In the successive sections of this paper, the concepts of modernization, the nature of state power, an agrarian bureaucracy, and the mechanism of a victorious revolution are paraphrased. This paraphrase makes it possible to distinguish two kinds of agrarian bureaucracies, each resulting in social revolutions with different outcomes. A victorious revolution led to successful modernization (...) in the case of an economic agrarian bureaucracy, but not in the case of a political agrarian bureaucracy. (shrink)

Ethicists struggle to take reductive views seriously. They also have trouble conceiving of some supervenience failures. Understanding why provides further evidence for a kind of hybrid view of normative concept use.

The aim of this article is to outline the theory of a historical process developed within the framework of the Poznań School of Methodology, mainly by Leszek Nowak and a team of his co-workers. In the first part of the paper, the meta-philosophical and meta-theoretical assumptions of Poznań school are reconstructed and juxtaposed with the relevant assumptions of Western analytical Marxism. In the central part of the paper, the main ideas of adaptive reconstruction of historical materialism and non-Marxian historical (...) materialism are presented. In its final part, some problems of reception of Leszek Nowak’s theory of historical process in Polish People’s Republic and the Third Republic are discussed. (shrink)

As one of the seminal theorists further developing François Laruelle’s politically-poised “non-standard philosophy,” Katerina Kolozova’s approach to animality and feminism is part of a particular post-humanist Marxist continuum (which includes Rosi Braidotti, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles). Nonetheless, Kolozova distinguishes herself from this lineage by adhering to Laruelle’s method, liquidating philosophy of its anthropomorphic nexus. Thus, Kolozova also belongs to a more recently inaugurated and nascent tradition, working in tandem with post-Laruellean philosophers of media, technology, aesthetics and (...) feminist critique, such as Bogna Konior, Yvette Granata, Jonathan Fardy and John Ó Maoilearca. Within this variegated assemblage, Kolozova’s most recent project, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals(2019), saliently reconciles and radicalizes Haraway’s epochal dyad of the “inhuman”—a bifurcation riven by technology on one node and the animal on the other—by a resolution of superlative unity. This methodology, adhering to Laruelle’s system of“synthesis-without-synthesizing” attempts to dissolve the spectral chimeras that have haunted philosophy’s metaphysical heredity, proffering a generic identity. (shrink)

Despite the central presence of materialism in the history of philosophy, there is no universal consensus on the meaning of the word “matter” nor of the doctrine of philosophical materialism. Dictionaries of philosophy often identify this philosophy with its most reductionist and even eliminative versions, in line with Robert Boyle’s seventeenth century coinage of the term. But when we take the concept back in time to Greek philosophers and forward onto our own times, we recognize more inclusive forms (...) of materialism as well as complex interplays with non-materialist thought about the place of matter in reality, including Christian philosophy and German idealism. We define philosophical materialism in its most general way both positively (the identification of reality with matter understood as changeability and plurality) and negatively (the negation of disembodied living beings and hypostatized ideas). This inclusive approach to philosophical materialism offers a new light to illuminate a critical history of the concept of matter and materialism from Ancient Greece to the present that is also attentive to scientific developments. By following the most important connections and discontinuities among theoretical frameworks on the idea of matter, we present a general thread that offers a rich and plural, but highly cohesive, field of investigation. Finally, we propose building on rich non-reductionist materialist philosophies, such as Mario Bunge’s systemic materialism and Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous materialism, to elaborate powerful theoretical alternatives to both physicalism and spiritualism. (shrink)

In several places, John Bickle claims that current neuroscientific practice provides actual cellular/molecular reductions of certain mental states. He gives the case study of ‘memory consolidation switch’ as an example where recent findings suggest that this mental state/process can be reduced to the molecular ‘cAMP, PKA, CREB Pathway’. Taking this example, Bickle ‘waves the eleminativist flag’ by claiming that psychological explanations loose their pertinence (or, as he says, ‘became otiose’) once a cellular/molecular explanation replaces them. On this paper I’ll try (...) to show that, even if a reductive explanation of ‘memory consolidation switch’ is disposable, we cannot eschew reductively its causal/functional integrity, i.e.: the explanatory/causal context that defines the mental concept/process ‘memory consolidation switch’ in the first place. (shrink)

After a brief history of Brentano's thesis of intentionality, it is argued that intentionality presents a serious problem for materialism. First, it is shown that, if no general materialist analysis (or reduction) of intentionality is possible, then intentional phenomena would have in common at least one nonphysical property, namely, their intentionality. A general analysis of intentionality is then suggested. Finally, it is argued that any satisfactory general analysis of intentionality must share with this analysis a feature which entails the (...) existence of a nonphysical "level of organization". (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...) not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2, in Locke 1975; which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Essay, I.i.6). There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as David Hartley saw and Denis Diderot proclaimed more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong: see Armstrong 1968 and 1978.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century (Locke) to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

From Hegel to Engels, Sartre and Ruyer (Ruyer, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode; many speak of matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. Science or scientism, on this view, reduces the living world to ‘dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’, thereby also stripping it of its freedom (Crocker, 1959). Materialism is often wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with ‘Death of Nature’ echoes of de-humanization (...) and hostility to the Scientific Revolution (which knew nothing of materialism!), also a powerful Christian theme in Cudworth, Clarke and beyond (Overhoff, 2000). Here I challenge this view, building on some aspects of Israel’s Radical Enlightenment concept (Israel, 2001), which has been controversial but for my purposes is a useful claim about the dissemination of a home-grown Spinozism, sometimes reformulated as an ontology of the life sciences, an aspect Israel does not address (compare Secrétan et al., eds., 2007; Citton, 2006). First, I examine some ‘moments’ of radical Enlightenment materialism such as La Mettrie and Diderot (including his Encyclopédie entry “Spinosiste”), but also anonymous, clandestine texts such as L’Âme Matérielle, to emphasize their distinctive focus on the specific existence of organic beings. Second, I show how this ‘embodied’, non-mechanistic character of Enlightenment ‘vital materialism’ makes it different from other episodes, and perhaps more of an ethics than is usually thought (also via the figure of the materialist as ‘laughing philosopher’). Third, I reflect on what this implies for our image of the Enlightenment – no longer a Frankfurt School and/or Foucaldian vision of ‘discipline’, regimentation and order (as in Mayr, 1986) – but ‘vital’, without, conversely, being a kind of holist vitalism “at odds with the universalizing discourse of Encyclopedist materialism, with its insistence on the uniformity of nature and the universality of physical laws” (Williams, 2003): vital materialism is still materialism. Its ethics tends towards hedonism, but its most radical proponents (Diderot, La Mettrie and later Sade) disagree as to what this means. (shrink)

General Introduction: In [1] a Calculus of Qualia (CQ) was proposed. The key idea is that, for example, blackness is radically different than █. The former term, “blackness” refers to or is about a quale, whereas the latter term, “█” instantiates a quale in the reader’s mind and is non-referential; it does not even refer to itself. The meaning and behavior of these terms is radically different. All of philosophy, from Plato through Descartes through Chalmers, including hieroglyphics and emojis, used (...) referential terms up until CQ. This paper in this series of papers includes a relatively short but comprehensive discussion with the AI Claude 3.5 Sonnet on how the CQ impacts various theories of consciousness, including Materialism, Dualism, Idealism, and 14 others. (shrink)

I make what I believe is a spirited and lively treatment for the necessary abandonment of scientific materialist ontology in light of numerous difficulties that have arisen within the materialist approach when examined in the light of contemporary physics. Every effort is made to ensure that it is aimed at a non-specialized, intelligent audience (except for this abstract). Within this approach every attempt is made to avoid the jargon employed by specialists, which still remaining accurate. I make a case for (...) the abandonment of materialism in favor of a specific brand of idealism that fits with what cutting edge science requires at its epistemological foundation, but does not lead to disqualifying shortcomings that occasionally accompany some idealist prescriptions. I move from the suggested idealist remedy to how this idealism may mitigate aspects of the arrow of time dilemma. I also suggest this its employment in conjunction with holographic modeling may be especially efficacious in the contemporary scientific endeavor. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Eric Schwitzgebel argues that if materialism about consciousness is true, then the United States is likely to have its own stream of phenomenal consciousness, distinct from the streams of conscious experience of the people who compose it. Indeed, most plausible forms of materialism have to grant that a certain degree of functional and behavioral complexity constitutes a sufficient condition for the ascription of phenomenal consciousness – and Schwitzgebel makes a case to show that the (...) United States as a whole fulfills this condition. One way to avoid this counter-intuitive consequence of materialism about consciousness is to adopt what Schwitzgebel calls an “anti-nesting principle”: a principle that states that there can be no nested forms of phenomenal consciousness and that therefore a conscious whole cannot have parts that are themselves conscious. However, Schwitzgebel then proceeds in his paper to draw up various objections, notably based on thought experiments, in order to dismiss these kinds of “anti-nesting” principles. My aim in this paper is to present a version of a sophisticated anti-nesting principle that avoids Schwitzgebel’s objections. This principle is reasonable, intuitive, and as non-arbitrary as possible. Moreover, it can resist the objections mounted by Schwitzgebel against simple anti-nesting principles. This principle helps materialists avoid the implication that the United States has its own stream of consciousness, while granting consciousness to some entities which, in many cases, are intuitive instantiators of phenomenal consciousness. This principle therefore constitutes a way out for a materialist who wants to deny that the United States is conscious. (shrink)