Abstract
In the previous chapter I have proposed the concept of attractor-caused supervenience of the mental upon the physical. This type supervenience does not possess causal power, which gives freedom for the mental to cause mental as well as physical events. In its turn, the physical also have causal power to affect physical and mental events. Therefore the attractor-caused supervenience, on one hand, admits all the types of causation: inter-level, i.e., upward and downward causation as well as intra-level (horizontal) causation. On the other hand, the given relationship between the mental and the physical with respect to humans with well-developed consciousness obeys the general definition of supervenience. It means that each mental state of a human is coupled with some collection of the physical states of his/her body such that no changes in the mental state can arise without a change in the corresponding physical states. This approach opens a gate to resolving the Fodor-Kim dilemma via allowing the mental and the physical to be complementary components of an human individual whose interaction with each other gives rise to the mental-physical supervenience.
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Notes
- 1.
The linearity of filed generation should not been confused with the nonlinear properties exhibited by the generation of field energy by particles. This nonlinearity is due to the field energy being proportional to the square of the field intensity or, what is actually the same, the field-particle interaction being proportional to the particle density and the field intensity. Besides, this sentence does not contradict to the existence of many physical and technical systems where the individual dynamics of electromagnetic field plays a crucial role.
- 2.
The effects of gravitational field are also essential in the realm of our life but they may be left beyond the scope of our consideration and treated as some external conditions.
- 3.
Nomological: relating to or denoting principles that resemble laws, especially those laws of nature which are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but just are so English Oxford Living Dictionaries (access on 11 Dec 2016).
- 4.
A property is a systemic property if and only if a system possesses it, but no part of the system possesses it (Stephan 1999, p. 50).
- 5.
The absence of direct particle-particle interaction does not exclude the effects of the quantum indistinguishability of identical particles, in particular, the quantum entanglement. In fact, for a quantum ensemble of noninteracting identical particles the set of its states as a whole system is specified completely by the Cartesian product of individual states of the constituent particles—the basic elements of the ensemble states. The effects in question are due to the details of how the identical particles are distributed among these basic elements.
- 6.
The notion of the system state nucleus was introduced on page 112.
- 7.
- 8.
Zeitgeist meaning literally ‘spirit of the times.’ Zeitgeist is a term that has come to be associated with Hegels philosophy of history, though he himself does not use it. In his “Lectures on the History of Philosophy” (1805) Hegel tells us that ‘no man can overleap his own time, for the spirit of his time [der Geist seiner Zeit] is also his spirit’ (Magee 2010, p. 262.)
- 9.
I have used the symbol u to underline that whether such fields exist in the reality is u nknown.
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Lubashevsky, I. (2017). Strong Emergence Via Constitutive Fields. In: Physics of the Human Mind. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51706-3_4
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