Emergentism revisitedMusholt, Kristina (2006) Emergentism revisited. In: 10th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 23-26 June 2006, Oxford, UK. Full text available as:
AbstractThe “explanatory gap” (Levine, 1983) is proposed to be the “hard problem” of consciousness research and has generated a great deal of recent debate. Arguments brought forward to reveal this gap include the conceivability of zombies (Chalmers, 1996) or the “super-neuroscientist” Mary (Jackson, 1982). These are supposed to show that the facts of consciousness are not a priori entailed by the microphysical facts. Similar arguments were already proposed by emergence theories (Broad, 1925) in the context of the debate between mechanism and vitalism. According to synchronic emergentism, the property of a system is emergent, when it cannot - in principle - be deduced from a complete description of the system’s components. Here, I argue that apart from phenomenal properties there are many other properties that, even though they are clearly physical, are not reductively explainable either. The explanatory gap of consciousness is therefore only a part of a much more general problem.
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