- November 28th, 2021, 5:09 pm
#400353
The ontological(ly reductionistic) position I accept and defend is compositional/constitutional materialism (aka mereological physicalism) about mind and consciousness: All mental or experiential phenomena are composed of or constituted by neural processes or mechanisms.
From this point of view, the neuroscience of consciousness is looking for (explanations of) those neural mechanisms of subjective experiences which constitute them and are thereby identical to them (rather than mere correlates of them).
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"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."
(pp. 18-20)
"How, then does a nonconscious phenomenon produce or become a conscious phenomenon? The problem with this characterization is that we easily imagine some nonconscious entity (a neuron, say) somehow 'producing' consciousness. But that image is misguided. Nonconscious phenomena do not mysteriously become conscious phenomena, or unaccountably 'emit' them. Rather, at one level of organization there are nonconscious phenomena that, when collectively interrelated, form a higher level of organization where there are conscious phenomena. The nonconscious phenomena do not mysteriously emit consciousness, they collectively constitute it. To ask, 'How does a nonconscious phenomenon produce or become a conscious phenomenon?', is like asking, 'How does a subatomic particle become an atom?' or 'How does a water molecule emit liquidity?' or 'How does a DNA molecule become alive?' The questions ascribe a higher-level feature to a lower-level entity, which in none of the cases makes any sense. Furthermore, it makes little sense to ask, 'Why is this experience of color (say, seeing the sun near the horizon as a red-orange circle) exactly like this?' Well, things are what they are: a pattern of phenomenal features is what it is, an electron is what it is, and a DNA molecule is what it is, and not something else. Does it make sense to ask, 'Why is an electron an electron?' or 'Why is a DNA molecule a DNA molecule?' I do not think these questions make any sense, and therefore require no explanation.
Instead of these misguided questions, we should form an image of a multilevel hierarchical organization in nature, where it is possible to move from one level to another, without any gaps. Yet, at the different levels, quite dissimilar entities and events are found. In the cases where we truly understand the mechanisms behind complex biological phenomena, we move across the levels and see that even a gapless natural continuum can support all sorts of radically different things."
(p. 358)
(Revonsuo, Antti. Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. p. 358)
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"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)
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"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
and Prove the existence of a Universe existing independently of conscious observation 
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