Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind

• Published in: Philosophy (London) Vol. 87; no. 1; p. 141
• Main Authors: Gillett, Grant, Kim, Jaegwon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Cambridge University Press 01.01.2012
• Subjects: Brain; Causality; Cognitive processes; Learning; Metaphysics; Neural networks; Ontology; Swahili; Truth
• ISSN: 0031-8191; 1469-817X
• DOI: 10.1017/S0031819111000611

Dependence of the sort Kim wants is asymmetric and transitive and ultimately grounded in the physical structure of this world: 'every ostensibly non-physical phenomenon can be reductively explained in terms of physical phenomena' (211). [...]the explanatory value of mental properties, for Kim, depends on the causal powers of their physical realizers. [...]we find that a set of competing descriptions, in a literal sense (i.e. according to the pictures we form when we take things literally), that are incompatible with one another have equally compelling claims to truth at the fundamental level. What is more if, having delineated a set of states, a new subject did not have a neural state fitting the parameters (which are, as argued, probably unspecifiable) but who did understand the use of boojum, then the mental ascription is authoritative and the brain-based specification of the state has to be modified. [...]the individuating conditions of the set of brain states seen as realizers depend on a term defined in a nexus of mental connections rather than on anything generated by neuroscience. [...]the states that a brain gets into may only be explicable on the basis of the history of that brain as the brain of a person located in the human life world at a certain point such that certain adaptations have shaped its neural networks - learning Swahili, then being removed to New York, then being trained as a microsoft graphics designer for 'Sim' games, and so on.