Rex Welshon

Emergence, Supervenience, and Realization

In the first section of this paper, I articulate Jaegwon Kims argument against emergent down ward causation. In the second section, I canvas four responses to Kims argument and argue that each fails. In the third section, I show that emergent downward causation does not, contra Kim, entail overdetermination. I argue that supervenience of emergent upon base properties is not sufficient for nomological causal relationsbetween emergent and base properties. What sustains Kims argument is rather the claim that emergent properties realized by base properties can have no causal powers distinct from those base properties. I argue that this is false.

Working memory, neuroanatomy, and archaeology

First, I categorize the papers presented in this issue according to a particular scheme: (a) those that support Wynn and Coolidge’s hypothesis that enhancement of working memory probably played a significant role in cognitive evolution in the Homo lineage, (b) those that expand understanding of working memory, and (c) those that criticize Wynn and Coolidge’s hypothesis. Second, I comment on the papers so categorized, focusing on the explanatory utility of working memory for particular cognitive advances in the Homo lineage as confirmed by archaeology and the computational prowess implied by those advances. Third, I suggest some avenues for future discussion, including what I think are two critical needs: first, clarification of what modern thinking is supposed to consist of and, second, clarification of what working memory is supposed to be. Finally, I make a methodological suggestion for embedding cognitive archaeological research in a larger research framework of comparative primate cognitive neuroscience.

Searching for the neural realizers of ownership unity

An argument is developed for the conclusion that certain neurological conditions and disorders are directly relevant for understanding the self s embodiment and the ownership of conscious experience enjoyed by such an embodied self. Since these neurological conditions and disorders provide evidence that there can be shifts of, and compromises to, ownership, they help identify neural substrates and realizers of such ownership. However, even if recent neuroimaging and neuropsychological nominees for neural substrates of ownership unity are core realizers of ownership, they are not its total realizers. Implications of the distinction between core and total realizers are discussed.

Anomalous Monism and Epiphenomenalism

: I argue that, on plausible assumptions, anomalous entails monism epiphenomenalism of the mental. The plausible assumptions are (1) events are particulars; (2) causal relations are extensional; (3) mental properties are epiphrastic. A principle defender of anomalous monism, Donald Davidson, acknowledges that anomalous monism is committed to (1) and (2). I argue that it is committed to (3) as well. Given (1), (2), and (3), epiphenomenalism of the mental falls out immediately. Three attempts to salvage anomalous monism from epiphenomenalism of the mental are examined and rejected. I conclude with reflections on the status of non-reductive physicalism.

Reply to Lukasz Kurowski’s “Ownership unity, neural substrates, and philosophical relevance”

I thank Lukasz Kurowski for his commentary on my (2013) “Searching for the Neural Substrates of Ownership Unity” (hereafter “Searching”). In this reply, I pass over the many agreements between the arguments and conclusions reached therein and what Kurowski has to say about those agreements. I am also intrigued by his neurointegrative account of consciousness, of which Kurowski provides a précis in sections 3.1 and 3.2 (pp. 4–7; all lone page numbers refer to Kurowski, 2016) and look forward to its further development. Kurowski thinks that the proposal in Searching for establishing “a relation of neural substrates to ownership unity . . . is insufficient” and that it leaves “the reader theoretically stranded” (p. 1). To substantiate these claims, he makes five specific criticisms of the proposed account of ownership unity and the proposed neural realizers of ownership unity, as follows:

Drive, Affect, Thought

Nietzsche’s dismemberment of the philosophical subject — the self — is well known. He argues repeatedly that Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and others use tendentious philosophical arguments to establish the existence of a bogus subject-substance that is distinct from the body and unified in virtue of being a conscious subject of thought and agent of action. Nietzsche counters that such a subject-substance does not exist and that the reasons provided by philosophers for thinking that it must exist are uniformly unsound. His alternative views about the subject emphasize its ephemerality and infiltration by the surrounding natural and social environments. On his alternative, the subject is a collection of drives organized as a dynamic system of nutrition and expansion — nutrition conceived not simply as an organic category but one that includes also culturally enriched affective dimensions and intellectual ambitions, and expansion conceived not simply as an organic category of increasing one’s spread of influence in the world but as one that includes also inward-directed discipline and mastery of drives.

Embodiedness, Embeddedness, Teleology

Nietzsche was more than a dilettante about scientific knowledge of the human body and its functioning. A barometer of his interest in physiology is the frequency of the words ‘physiology’ and ‘physiological’ in his work. Where there is one reference to physiology in Human, All-too-Human, there are twelve in Daybreak, six in Gay Science, sixteen in Beyond Good and Evil, thirty-three in Genealogy of Morals, twenty-six in Twilight of the Idols, thirteen in Antichrist, seventeen in Ecce Homo, and hundreds more in the notebooks from 1880–1888 (Brown 2004). Nietzsche’s fascination with physiology can also be gauged by the books lining his bookshelves. He owned more than three dozen books and professional texts on physiology, medicine, and health, most of them purchased after 1875. If annotations are an accurate guide, he appears to have read many of these books cover-to-cover and some of them more than once (Brobjer 2004; Moore 2004). Moreover, Nietzsche himself acknowledges that physiology accounted for much of his reading after 1880. He wrote in Ecce Homo that by about 1880, ‘a truly burning thirst took hold of me: henceforth I really pursued nothing more than physiology, medicine, and natural sciences’ (EH ‘Human’ 3).

Naturalism, Science, Positivism

Nietzsche is to be taken at his word when he says that he wants to ‘translate man back into nature’ (BGE230). This task, which he admits may be ‘strange and insane’ (BGE230), is nevertheless a directive to anyone devoted to gaining knowledge of human psychology. Knowledge must turn its back once and for all on the errors, falsifications, and mystifications about human psychology that most of the contributors to the philosophical tradition have routinely supplied. We must instead ‘stand before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eye and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping to him all too long, “you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin!”’(BGE230). Since we have to be of nature if we are to stand before the rest of nature, our psychology must likewise be explicated using only naturalistic resources rather than the spiritual dualist drivel that the philosophical and religious salesmen have been peddling for centuries.

Self, Will, Power

Nietzsche is fascinated by all of the different kinds of selves there are and by the variety of psychological training programs we subject ourselves to in order to achieve them. The most superficial examination of his mature works reveals his astonishment at the self-directed tortures we are prepared to pursue in order to achieve internal organization and his bewilderment at our willingness to be convinced by philosophers and religious advocates that the best selves are those organized around pure reason, moral goodness, and asceticism. Across Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and Anti-Christ, he distinguishes dozens of regimens of psychological self-reorganization, most affiliated with moral codes and religious demands. To gauge how deep his interest in these matters is, consider only regimens associated with the ascetic ideal and mentioned in Genealogy of Morals. Here, he identifies at least twenty distinct self-training programs: self-denial and self-sacrifice (Preface 5); self-hypnotism (I 6); abstinence, dieting, self-abasement, self-depreciation (I 11); self-deception (I 14); self-torture (II 8, 22); self-consciousness (II 10, III 9)), self-tyranny (II 18); self-negation and self-elimination (III 3); self-mortification, self-martyrdom, self-misunderstanding (III 10); self-contempt and self-annihilation (III 17); and self-belittling and self-critique (III 25). These programs and their associated curricula turn us against ourselves and into kinds of selves that are sick, decadent, and resentful. Nietzsche denounces the religious peddlers who are their advocates, and he criticizes all of the colluding philosophers and scientists who provide domains of entities over which the programs range and species of causal intercourse that operate only within those domains.

Reflective Consciousness, Phenomenalism, Epiphenomenalism

Nietzsche develops negative arguments against conscious subject things, against the existence of certain species of consciousness perennially popular with philosophers, and against views of consciousness that fail to acknowledge its embodiment. He also argues positively that where it is discovered, reflective consciousness exists only as a property of psychological states and then only as a property of some but not all of those states. These arguments are the topic of Section I. Nietzsche’s speculative explanations imply certain contemporary views in neuroscience of consciousness and neuroscientifically informed philosophy of mind that fly under the banner of embodied and embedded cognitive neuroscience of consciousness.