The microstructure view of the brain-consciousness relation

In Sven Walter & Helene Bohse (eds.), Selected Contributions to GAP. 6, Sixth International Conference of the Society for Analytical Philosophy (2008)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

How can consciousness, how can the mind be causally efficacious in a world which seems—in some sense—to be thoroughly governed by physical causality? Mental causation has been a nagging problem in philosophy since the beginning of the modern age, when, inspired by the rise of physics, a metaphysical picture became dominant according to which the manifest macrophysical world of rocks, trees, colors, sounds etc. could be eliminated in favor of, or identified with, the microconstituents of these entities and their basic physical properties, plus their effects on human or animal minds. Against the background of this ontology, the argument from causal closure, or the causal completeness of physics, exerts strong pressure to also identify consciousness with microphysical entities—or even to eliminate it in favor of the latter—the only other options apparently being either the denial of the causal closure of the physical level, epiphenomenalism about the mind, or the view that its physical effects are generally overdetermined. In this paper, however, I want to introduce what I call the “microstructure view” (MV) of the brain-consciousness relation, and I want to try to make plausible that the problem of mental causation can also be solved, or perhaps rather dissolved, on the basis of this account. On the MV, the minimal neuronal correlates of consciousness—of the global state of consciousness, or specific states of consciousness such as pain—are not identical with these states, but rather constitute their microstructure, or, as I shall also say, equivalently, compose them.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Summary of "Elements of Mind" and Replies to Critics.Tim Crane - 2004 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (11):223-240.
Mind--Brain Relationship and the Perspective of Meaning.R. Mukhopadhyay - 2018 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 25 (9-10):184-208.
The Origins of Qualia.Tim Crane - 2000 - In Tim Crane & Sarah Patterson (eds.), History of the Mind-Body Problem. New York: Routledge.
Kim and the Pairing Problem for Dualism.Jason Hyde - 2023 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 28 (1):127-47.
Searle on consciousness and dualism.Corbin Collins - 1997 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (1):15-33.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-02-12

Downloads
320 (#76,754)

6 months
63 (#87,373)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Michael Schmitz
University of Vienna

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The Rediscovery of the Mind.John Searle - 1992 - MIT Press. Edited by Ned Block & Hilary Putnam.
A modified concept of consciousness.Roger W. Sperry - 1969 - Psychological Review 76 (6):532-36.
Three varieties of causal overdetermination.Eric Funkhouser - 2002 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (4):335-351.
Trying out epiphenomenalism.Peter Bieri - 1992 - Erkenntnis 36 (3):283-309.

Add more references