title: Emergentism revisited
creator: Musholt, Kristina
subject: Philosophy of Mind
description: The “explanatory gap” 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 or the “super-neuroscientist” Mary. 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 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.
date: 2005-06
type: Conference Poster
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: http://cogprints.org/6018/1/EmergenzASSC10final.pdf
identifier:   Musholt, Kristina  (2005) Emergentism revisited.  [Conference Poster]    (Unpublished)  
relation: http://cogprints.org/6018/