Supervenience, Transcendence, and Mind
September 5, 2014 at 7:46 pm
(This post was last modified: September 5, 2014 at 7:56 pm by bennyboy.)
Let's say I'm looking at lights at an intersection. I observe the red one, wait until it turns off and the green one turns on, and then proceed to drive. How important is the specific mechanism which produced lights of those colors? Surely, you need some kind of mechanism capable of producing light. But ultimately, what is the source of that green light? It is in the intentionality of the designers. If the LED lights at the intersection had not been invented, the designers would have used light bulbs, or colored lamps with oil fires inside them, or whatever. The green-ness was inevitable, but the mechanism on which it supervenes is arbitrary. I would term this "transcendence"-- the greenness is independent of the mechanism underlying it, because it doesn't matter HOW the greenness occurs, only that it does.
Let's say we have a brain and a computer which function identically, i.e. that the computer perfectly simulates all the functions of the brain, and that we choose to accept as true that the computer is actually "sentient." What does this mean, when two very different mechanisms are capable of producing sentience? I'd argue that while sentience definitely seems to need a physical structure on which to supervene, it is a transcendent property. It has taken the keys of that underlying mechanism, and now exists independently, as an entity in its own right. Now, some will claim that's just an illusion, that it is the framework of the brain (or computer or pneumatic tubes) which is responsible for the sentience. But in this view, ALL things must be said to be supervenient-- on spacetime, on the balance of the 4 fundamental forces in the universe, etc.
Yet we don't usually say, "The 4 fundamental forces in the universe create mind." We isolate the most immediate causal context as though it is isolated from the universe. So: the brain causes mind. And: a mind thinks, feels, has ideas, and acts with will. But not: the brain thinks, feels, has ideas, and acts with will. This is because we've already established that minds are the same, without regard to the underlying mechanism behind them. That property must therefore be thought of as transcendent.
So here is the rule I'd like to discuss: "A supervenient property, once supervened, should be considered transcendent-- independent of the mechanical structure/function upon which it supervenes."
Let's say we have a brain and a computer which function identically, i.e. that the computer perfectly simulates all the functions of the brain, and that we choose to accept as true that the computer is actually "sentient." What does this mean, when two very different mechanisms are capable of producing sentience? I'd argue that while sentience definitely seems to need a physical structure on which to supervene, it is a transcendent property. It has taken the keys of that underlying mechanism, and now exists independently, as an entity in its own right. Now, some will claim that's just an illusion, that it is the framework of the brain (or computer or pneumatic tubes) which is responsible for the sentience. But in this view, ALL things must be said to be supervenient-- on spacetime, on the balance of the 4 fundamental forces in the universe, etc.
Yet we don't usually say, "The 4 fundamental forces in the universe create mind." We isolate the most immediate causal context as though it is isolated from the universe. So: the brain causes mind. And: a mind thinks, feels, has ideas, and acts with will. But not: the brain thinks, feels, has ideas, and acts with will. This is because we've already established that minds are the same, without regard to the underlying mechanism behind them. That property must therefore be thought of as transcendent.
So here is the rule I'd like to discuss: "A supervenient property, once supervened, should be considered transcendent-- independent of the mechanical structure/function upon which it supervenes."
