Atla wrote: ↑June 5th, 2019, 11:07 amIf you would, you would understand that materialism by definition can't solve the explanatory gap, as I explained. Then maybe you could get out of this trap that you are in.
That's why it is that even though we've mapped the correlations between "mental events" and "material events" to a remarkable degree, there has never been any progress on the explanatory gap.
You're wrong insofar as it is by no means impossible
by definition for (materialistic) neuroscience to solve the hard problem and to close the explanatory gap.
You're right insofar as
mere psychophysical correlations aren't explanatory. We want an explanation of those correlations, so what the neuroscience of consciousness (NSC) must discover in the CNS aren't only
the neural correlates of consciousness but also
the constitutive neural mechanisms of consciousness. For these
are explanatory, making neuroreductive explanations of conscious/experiential events/states possible.
Generally, such mechanistic explanations have both "piercing explanatory power" and "ontologically unifying power" (C. Gillett); and if they are available in NSC —
which is not yet the case—, they thereby provide a scientific vindication of the materialist assumption that phenomenal consciousness or what Antti Revonsuo calls "the phenomenal level of organization in the brain" is a purely neurological or physicochemical process, such that the neural mechanisms of consciousness are justifiedly identifiable with consciousness itself: NMC = C
"According to biological realism, the primary target is to find neural phenomena in the brain that go beyond mere correlative relationships with consciousness. The relationship between the phenomenal level and the lower neural levels is not correlation but hierarchical constitution. The phenomena at the lower neural levels constitute the higher phenomenal level. Thus, what neuroscience should be looking for, it if aims at discovering ad explaining consciousness, are the constitutive mechanisms of consciousness (CMC), rather than just the NCC."
(Revonsuo, Antti.
Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. p. 297)
"Constitutive Explanation
Constitutive explanation involves moving downward in the hierarchy and looking at a smaller-scale spatiotemporal grain or a lower level of organization. It is accomplished by showing that the phenomenon appearing as an integrated whole at one level can be decomposed to its constituent parts and their causal interactions at the immediately underlying, lower levels of description. Constitutive explanations describe the lower-level mechanisms that the entity is composed of, or whose activity, when taken as a whole, simply is the phenomenon to be explained by the description of the mechanism.
An illuminating example from biology is the cell. A single cell, taken as a whole, is an independent living unit. The constitutive explanation revealing what makes the cell tick descends to the immediately lower levels of organization where the different parts of the cell and their causal interactions are to be found.
When the same strategy is applied to the explanation of consciousness there is, first of all, the phenomenon to be explained (the explanandum): consciousness. It resides at some specific level of organization in the brain (the phenomenal level). The lower-level, nonconscious neurophysiological mechanisms, whose activity as a whole constitutes consciousness, reside at a lower level of organization in the brain.
The current search for the direct NCC appears to be the empirical approach to the constitutive explanation of consciousness. However, the notion 'neural correlates of consciousness' requires considerable clarification. The relationship between an explanandum and its lower-level constituents must be stronger than mere correlation, for correlation is not an explanatory relationship. The cell membrane, the nucleus, chromosomes, cell organelles, and other microscopic parts of the cell are not merely the biological correlates of life, but crucial microlevel constituents that explain why the whole system is alive. In the same vein, the constitutive explanation of consciousness should describe such part-whole or mereological relationships between the lower- and higher-level phenomena that make their hierarchical connection truly explanatory."
(Revonsuo, Antti.
Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. pp. 18-20)
"Perhaps most famously, across the sciences we find explanations that explain higher-level entities (whether individuals, properties, or processes) in terms of lower-level entities that scientists take to compose them and hence these explanations use vertical relations. For example, we explain the inheritance of traits between parent organisms and their off spring using molecules taken to compose them. We explain the refractive index of a crystal using the properties and relations of the atoms that compose it. Or we explain the movement of the earth’s surface using the tectonic plates, and currents of magma, taken to compose the earth. We use the term 'compositional explanation' to refer to such explanation, though philosophers have used various names for it.(3 And we term the vertical relations that such explanations posit 'scientific composition' relations where this includes relations between individuals, properties/relations, and also processes.
(3 Other terms include 'reductive explanation', 'microstructural analyses', 'functional explanation', 'constitutive explanation', or 'mechanistic explanation'.)"
(Aizawa, Kenneth, and Carl Gillett. "Introduction: Vertical Relations in Science, Philosophy, and the World: Understanding the New Debates over Verticality." In
Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground, edited by Kenneth Aizawa and Carl Gillett, 1-38. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. p. 2)
"The Scientific Revolution was powered, at least in large part, by explanations that pierced the manifest image of common sense by explaining its level of everyday individuals, properties, and processes using qualitatively distinct, lower-level entities taken to compose them. And such explanations have now been iterated through all the levels of nature. For example, we take the corrosive action of glaciers to be explained by the movement of the ice molecules that we take to compose glaciers. We explain the motility of cells using the properties and relations of the molecules that we take to compose them. We understand why kidneys clean blood in terms of the properties and relations of the cells taken to compose them. And we could easily go on, and on, through such explanations across the sciences. Given their nature, such explanations are plausibly termed 'compositional' explanations, since they are founded around showing how lower-level entities of one kind (whether individuals, properties, or processes) compose entities of very different kinds at higher levels. Philosophers of science have used a range of other terms for compositional explanation, including 'reductive explanation', 'functional explanation', or 'mechanistic explanation', and there is a substantial body of work on the nature of such explanation, including a recent burst of research. Oddly, however, a couple of the key features of compositional explanations have not received much philosophical attention.
First, compositional explanations allow us to explain one kind of entity, such as a cell or its moving, in terms of the qualitatively different kinds of entity taken to compose it, like molecules or molecular processes of polymerization, and this hence results in what I term the 'Piercing Explanatory Power', or 'PEP', of compositional explanations. Second, we should mark that once we have successfully supplied a compositional explanation of certain entities in terms of certain others that compose them, then we have established that these entities are in some sense the same. Most importantly, a successful compositional explanation consequently shows that the mass-energy, or force, associated with a certain entity just is the mass-energy, or force, of certain component entities. This is what I will term the 'Ontologically Unifying Power', or 'OUP', of compositional explanations.
Our vast array of compositional explanations in the sciences, from fundamental physics to condensed matter physics or materials sciences, on to chemistry or biochemistry, through cytology and physiology, and now even beginning to encompass the neurosciences and psychology have had intellectual impacts in all kinds of ways. For instance, compositional explanations have been central to the centuries-old unification project in physics that has now established that there are no special forces, or energies, and that the only fundamental forces and energies are all microphysical in character. Connected to the later finding, and again driven by compositional explanations, working scientists now routinely assume the global claim that everything in nature is either identical to a microphysical entity or is composed by microphysical entities. (I will call this thesis 'physicalism' here.)"
(Gillett, Carl. "The Metaphysics of Nature, Science, and the Rules of Engagement." In
Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground, edited by Kenneth Aizawa and Carl Gillett, 205-247. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. pp. 205-7)
- By Belinda
- By Pattern-chaser