Re: BHA: SEPM

["Andrew Brown" <Andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Meryvn,

I've been droning on about that little bit of PON for years now!

However, I don't think it is that significant. As I now interpret RB, he
is saying that *either* there will be an entirely new set of concepts
filling the gap between our current neurophysiological (and other
such) concepts and our 'psychological' ones, so defining a new
stratum, from which the psychological realm is emergent. *Or* we
will find the the concepts we do already have are adequate to be
able to vertically explain the psychological realm (though we as yet
have little clue how they do this). The former case can be said to
give us a new 'substance', just as the the chemical realm gives us
a whole set of sui generis substances called molecules. The latter
case doesn't. This is a perfectly valid use of the term substance I
think. And, given this use, then one can argue that there might be
a 'substance' dualism between mind object, without being 'idealist',
in the CR sense of that term (or there might not).

Still, as I write this, it does seem a perhaps overly charitable
interpretation, but there we are. In any case, at the end of the day
[I sound like a football manager] there seems nothing in CR to
deny the possibity that there is a new structure, or 'thing', hitherto
unknown, and *not* apparently emergent from known structures,
underlying 'thought'. A stucture which simply happens to be there.
Isn't this *exactly* the possibilty that CR leaves open re 'ultimate
entities'? Indeed, isn't this how we might interpret the various forces
such as magnetism? (And 'force' as in 'field of potential' is indeed
RB's likely candidate for 'ultimate entity').

Having said all this, it should also be stressed that, after PON, RB
appears to retract his statement on dualism. Thus you will find a
passage in SRHE where RB seems to explicitly rule out substance
dualism, and asserts the embodied nature of human agency. This
is repeated in later books.

Thanks,

Andy





On 9 Jan 2001, at 15:17, Mervyn Hartwig wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I had occasion to look up Bhaskar's first elaboration of his 'synchronic
> emergent powers materialist' account of mind again the other day, and
> noticed what I had not noticed before (or if I did, forgot) that Bhaskar
> at that stage (1979) left the way open for idealism (The Possibility of
> Naturalism, 124-5).
>
> He says in PON there are two possibilities on his account:  1). that
> 'mind just is a complex or set of powers ... historically emergent from
> and present only in association with (certain complex forms of) matter.'
> 2). that 'there is a substance, whose nature is at present unknown,
> which is the bearer of those powers'. Here again there are two
> possibilities: 2a) that the substance is material - suggested by
> neurophysiological evidence;  2b) that it is immaterial - suggested by
> paranormal phenomena. On 2a) SEPM 'reduces to a form of materialism,
> which could be characterised as a stratified monism'. On 2b) it reduces
> 'to a species of dualistic interactionism.'
>
> The scientific data, he said in 1979, is conflicting and does not
> allow us to decide between these.
>
> In FEW (2000) he might seem to be committed to 2b) - as concretely
> singularised spirit or godstuff the 'soul' constellationaly contains the
> mind and enters and departs bodies (as a set of dispositions). But in
> that case he would be committed to 'dualistic interactionism' whereas he
> still speaks of 'stratified monism'. So perhaps he's still committed to
> 1), except that 'matter' is now at bottom 'spirit'....
>
> Mervyn
>
>
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