If certain neural mechanisms are the correlates of consciousness, then what is the ground of these psychophysical correlations? Is it the relation of causation or production (understood emergentistically), or the relation of constitution or composition (understood reductionistically)? If the former, then the neural mechanisms of consciousness are not identical with (states of) consciousness; and if the latter, they are.Gertie wrote: ↑August 15th, 2022, 8:33 amI see reducibility of the process of conscious emergence as a sort of reverse engineering. If the claim is that conscious experience emerges from or is caused by physical processes of material brain stuff, then if you reverse that process all you're left with ontologically is the physical stuff which the physical processes have reconfigured (into simpler or more complex parts). Reducibility in the materialist sense that ultimately everything is theoretically reducible to the physicalist standard model of particles interacting as a result of forces, rather than each part being splittable. (I don't know what it would mean to say experiencing is splittable, or 'flavours' of experience like pain or joy or red are ontologically splittable into parts, it seems like a category error, and doesn't help us understand experience as emergent or caused).
New properties of brains resulting from processes are therefore reconfigurations of the same brain stuff, and therefore reducible to the brain stuff in that sense. Is this a valid interpretation of reducibility in philosophy of mind? Or am I using the wrong terminology?
There is a distinction between existential (ontological) reduction and explanatory reduction.
According to ontological emergentism, higher-level conscious phenomena are reductively explainable in terms of, but not existentially reducible to, i.e. not identifiable with, lower-level neural mechanisms. The conscious phenomena and the neural mechanisms producing them occur on different (distinct) levels or layers of being; so they are different from one another, and cannot be identified or equated with one another.
If X is an emergent phenomenon on level Ln reductively explainable in terms of (properties of and relations between) Ys on level Ln-1, then X is caused but not constituted by the Ys, such that X ≠ Ys.
According to ontological reductionism, conscious phenomena are both reductively explainable in terms of and existentially reducible to, i.e. identifiable with, neural mechanisms.
However, as Kim explains below, if X is identical with the Ys, and X is explainable in terms of (the properties of and relations between) the Ys, then it may be that this sort of explanation isn't properly called a reductive explanation, because it's a one-level explanation outside the emergentist context of levels or layers of being.
Scientific reduction: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scie ... reduction/
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"Reduction is a procedure whereby a given domain of items (for example, objects, properties, concepts, laws, facts, theories, languages, and so on) is shown to be either absorbable into, or dispensable in favour of, another domain. When this happens, the one domain is said to be 'reduced' to the other."
("Reduction, Problems of," by Jaegwon Kim. The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig. London: Routledge, 2005. p. 891)
"Central to the concept of reduction evidently is the idea that what has been reduced need not be countenanced as an independent existent beyond the entities in the reduction base—that if X has been reduced to Y, X is not something 'over and above' Y. From an ontological point of view, reduction must mean reduce—it must result in a simpler, leaner ontology. Reduction is not necessarily elimination: reduction of X to Y need not do away with X, for X may be conserved as Y (or as part of Y). Thus, we can speak of 'conservative' reduction (some call it 'retentive' or 'preservative' reduction), reduction that conserves the reduced entities, as distinguished from 'eliminative' reduction, which rids our ontology of the reduced entities. Either way we end up with a leaner ontology. Evidently, conservative reduction requires identities, for to conserve X as Y means that X is Y, whereas eliminative reduction has no need for (in fact, excludes) such identities."
(Kim, Jaegwon. "Making Sense of Emergence." In Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, 8-40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. pp. 20-1)
"A certain picture seems widespread and influential in recent discussions of issues that involve reduction and reductive explanation—especially, in connection with the mind-body problem. The same picture is also influential in the way many think about the relationship between the 'higher-level' special sciences and 'basic' sciences. What I have in mind is the idea that reducing something is one thing and reductively explaining it is quite another. There supposedly is a vital difference, from both the scientific and philosophical point of view, between reducing psychological phenomena to biological/physical phenomena and reductively explaining the former in terms of the latter. The significance of the difference, on this line of thought, derives from the purported fact that reductive explanation is often an achievable scientific goal whereas reduction is an overreaching metaphysical aspiration that is seldom, if ever, realized.
To see what this picture is and appreciate its appeal, consider two domains (or 'levels', if you like) of phenomena, M and P. (For concreteness, we may think of M as 'mental' and P as 'physical'.) To reduce M to P, we must show, to use J.J.C. Smart’s suggestive phrase, that the M-phenomena are 'nothing over and above' the P-phenomena. A proposed reduction might be 'eliminative'—that is, it consists in showing that there really are no such things as M-phenomena ('there really are no such things as caloric fluids; there is only molecular motion'). If such a reduction goes through, there trivially are no M-phenomena over and above P-phenomena. Whether eliminative reduction is a serious form of reduction can be debated, but we should keep in mind that 'reduction' is a term of art and there need be no harm in the idea of eliminative reduction.
A more central form of reduction is 'conservative' (or 'preservative', 'retentive') reduction whereby the reduced phenomena survive as legitimate entities of the world. It’s only that they now turn up as entities in the base domain. Heat was conservatively reduced—it survives as molecular kinetic energy—whereas caloric fluids were eliminated. Genes were conservatively reduced; vital forces and entelechies were eliminated. If M-phenomena are to be conservatively reduced to P-phenomena, they must be shown to be 'nothing over and above' the P-phenomena, and it is hard to see how this could be done unless each M-phenomenon is claimed, and shown, to be identical with a P-phenomenon. That is, reduction appears prima facie to require the identification of M-phenomena with P-phenomena, and this means that M is turned into a subdomain of P. This is no surprise: reduction must reduce, and if M is reduced to P, M-phenomena no longer exist as something extra, something in addition to P-phenomena.
In contrast, when we think about reductive explanation—that is, explaining M-phenomena on the basis of P-phenomena (including P-laws)—a natural train of thoughts seems to lead to a considerably different picture. Suppose we explain an M-phenomenon in terms of P-phenomena. We now understand why, and how, this M-phenomenon arises from certain P-phenomena: it is because these particular P-phenomena constitute an underlying mechanism whose operations yield phenomena of kind M. Prima facie, this doesn’t seem to undermine, or affect in any way, the ontological status of the M-phenomenon vis-à-vis P-phenomena. It apparently remains an entity with a legitimate, independent standing in its own right; it’s only that its existence and character has now been made intelligible in light of the underlying phenomena and mechanisms. There seems no reason to think such an explanation of an M-phenomenon carries any commitment, explicit or implicit, to the claim that it is 'nothing over and above' the underlying P-phenomena; nor does it appear to imply, or suggest, that the M-phenomenon must be identified with a P-phenomenon. As an analogy, think about causal explanation: we do not think that a causal explanation of an event adversely affects its status as an entity. The effect remains an independent entity ontologically distinct from the cause. If something like this is right, reductive explanation should be possible even where there is no reduction. Or so it seems at first blush.
Conversely, it is difficult to see why we should expect reduction to yield reductive explanation: M-phenomena may be nothing over and above P-phenomena, but that in itself says nothing about explanation, something that has essential epistemic dimensions. If an M-phenomenon is identical with a P-phenomenon, there seems no specifically M-phenomenon that needs to be, or can be, reductively explained. The M-phenomenon is a P-phenomenon after all, and it is prima facie a bit incoherent to talk of ‘‘reductively’’ explaining a P-phenomenon in terms of other P-phenomena. It almost seems as though reduction might actually preclude reductive explanation. It is clear in any case that there are issues about reduction and reductive explanation that need to be sorted out and clarified."
(Kim Jaegwon. "Reduction and Reductive Explanation: Is One Possible Without the Other?" 2007. Reprinted in Essays in the Philosophy of Mind, 207-233. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. pp. 207-9)
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The concept of (causal) emergence as such isn't an explanatory one, since it doesn't explain how the (causal) emergence transpires, but only that it does.Gertie wrote: ↑August 15th, 2022, 8:33 amI'm not sure if it makes a real difference anyway if you're a materialist monist. Because these simple experiential properties or caused phenomena have to have some form of existence if you consider them real. For property dualitists they are properties of the material brain, and it is the sum of the properties which comprise the material brain. So experiential properties are either material or something else. If experience is a material emergent property of the brain, emergence hasn't explained anything, and it's just a claim that material stuff can be third person undetectable, which is the antithesis of materialism. If materialists believe experience is some other real thing which isn't material, what is it?
Experiences surely don't belong to the ontological category substance or material (mass of matter), since they are neither a kind of thing (in the narrow ontological sense of this term) nor a kind of stuff. So they are either occurrences (occurrents)—facts/states (of affairs)/events/processes—or "adherences"/"inherences"—attributes: properties (qualities/quantities/quiddities) or relations.Gertie wrote: ↑August 15th, 2022, 8:33 amFor Searle experiences aren't properties of the brain, presumably to escape that issue, but something else (which brains generate causally by internal interactions) which aren't composed of material brain stuff. So what is that real something else if it's not a substance or a property?
For both - if experience isn't a substance, but is real, what do they claim it is?
If experiences are conceived as occurrences, they are (in my ontological understanding) havings (undergoings) of experiential properties/qualities by objects/subjects; and if they are conceived as "adherences"/"inherences", they are experiential properties/qualities (of objects/subjects).
There is a species of qualities which are called "passibiles qualitates" ("passible qualities") by medieval philosophers, and which had already been introduced by Aristotle with his category pathos, Lat. passio, Engl. passion. Passible qualities or passions (passive affections) of subjects are qualities of them which are dynamically "suffered" or "undergone" rather than statically possessed or had by them.
Experiences qua experiencings are properly called experiential passions. As a species of qualities they belong to the genus quality, which itself belongs to the family of properties—which itself belongs to the order attribute.