During these twenty or thirty years, neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, cognitive scientists and others have accumulated various interesting findings about human beings and computer simulations of human cognitive abilities. Artificial neural-networks, experiments on split-brain subjects, “blind-sight” phenomena and so on. Many of these findings suggest that many of the cognitive processes in human beings, many more than we usually think, may be “automatic” and “merely physical” processes.
On the other hand, if we take the Evolutionary Theory seriously and apply it to “consciousness”, we seem to have to admit that consciousness has its own causal efficacy over and above “physical” causation in the usual sense of the word. For, as Cairns-Smith points out (and as William James pointed out long time ago), there is a remarkable correlation between pleasure and pain of our (conscious) feelings, on the one hand, and biological advantage and disadvantage of the corresponding bodily situations, on the other. This correlation cannot be understood without assuming that consciousness has evolved somehow in the adaptationist way. And that seems to require that consciousness have causal efficacy which cannot be reduced to that of the brain states that “realize” the consciousness.
From these considerations, it seems to follow that the physicalist principle of “supervenience” is false, and also that physics, as the science responsible for all physical phenomena, should include consciousness as its proper object.
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