Javad Darvish Aghajani
Abstract
Most of the scientific answers given to the problem of consciousness have either slipped towards reductionism or tried to explain it through functionalism. The common deficiency of most of them is ignoring the phenomenological and qualitative aspects of consciousness. The view of neural Darwinism has ...
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Most of the scientific answers given to the problem of consciousness have either slipped towards reductionism or tried to explain it through functionalism. The common deficiency of most of them is ignoring the phenomenological and qualitative aspects of consciousness. The view of neural Darwinism has the advantage that, despite being scientific, it leaves aside both reductionist and functionalist perspectives. This view seeks to explain consciousness through the mechanism of natural selection in forming neural groups. Although this theory overcomes most of the contemporary challenges that consciousness has faced, such as Blind-sight, it leaves the hard problem or the explanation of Qualia untouched. In this regard, this view suffers from a kind of inadequacy of empirical data to determine the theory. In this article, a proposal is made to complete and develop this theory in order to overcome the mentioned deficiency. This is done by introducing a Multiple Supervenience that is rooted in Dispositionalism. This relationship relates basic properties to higher-order properties but differs from the classical supervenience in that it can explain the specific causal relationship between levels. The paper shows that this Multiple Supervenience is applicable to the theory of neuronal Darwinism. In order to explain consciousness, Neural Darwinism uses the potential of individual neurons or groups of neurons and the stimuli obtained through external sensors, as well as emergent properties.
