Pizhūhish/hā-yi Falsafī- Kalāmī
June 3, 2023
Mohammadjavad Elahieasl, Mahdi Zakeri
Panpsychism holds that fundamental physical entities have conscious states, and one key argument for it is that consciousness cannot emerge from non-conscious matter. Galen Strawson argued that emergence is either true (wholly dependent on and deducible from the fundamental level) or brute (wholly dependent but not deducible), and both are impossible. This paper argues that Strawson’s dilemma overlooks a third type of emergence, found in C. D. Broad’s historical emergentism, where the emergent property depends only partially on the fundamental level via fundamental laws of nature (nomism). Under this view, emergent properties require both the base level and trans-ordinal laws, making emergence coherent and possible. The paper concludes that Strawson’s argument does not refute emergentism.
Pizhūhish/hā-yi Falsafī- Kalāmī
June 12, 2026
Siamak Abdollahi, Mansour Nasiri
A precise understanding of human nature requires a subjective and phenomenological perspective. The paper argues that subjectivism must adopt a holistic viewpoint to effectively counter eliminativism, which denies the reality of conscious experience. The authors propose 'Subjective Holism' as a framework, not a definitive solution, that treats humans as integrated complex systems. This approach clarifies how mental and physical states emerge as properties within the system, aligning with the intuition of considering oneself subjectively as a whole. It reframes the question of human nature to how a unified whole possesses qualia like insideness and uniqueness, which are exclusive to the subject's conscious experiences.
Pizhūhish/hā-yi Falsafī- Kalāmī
December 12, 2024
Siamak Abdollahi, Mansour Nasiri
The explanatory gap in consciousness—how unconscious matter becomes conscious—arises from physicalist and dualist viewpoints. This paper proposes that adopting subjectivism and holism, forming a theory of subjective holism, can either dissolve the problem entirely (maximum answer) or at least point toward the correct way to solve it (minimum answer). The argument suggests that by shifting perspective away from eliminativism and dualism, the hard problem of consciousness need not arise, offering a positive resolution to the mind-body problem.
Pizhūhish/hā-yi Falsafī- Kalāmī
August 6, 2024
Robert van Gulick
Subjective facts about conscious experience—the 'what it is like' aspect—do not refute physicalism. A combination of nonreductive physicalism and teleo-pragmatic functionalism not only accommodates such facts but predicts them. Conscious minds are self-understanding autopoietic systems, a view that helps explain subjective experience. Global Neuronal Workspace theory is evaluated for its ability to address the Hard Problem of consciousness, and an augmentation involving another sense of subjective facts is proposed, again drawing on the idea of conscious minds as self-understanding systems.