physicalism

The present study has been conducted with the objective of elaborating the cultural implications in the view of Tehran’s comprehensive development plan based on content analysis method. The study seeks finding an answer to the question as to how much does Tehran’s development vision plan include the cultural issues in the metropolitan setting? The realm of the current research is the entire contents of the second five-year development plan of Tehran’s municipality (2014-2018). The explicit and implicit themes indicating the culture-related issues have been separated and, considering their interrelationships, the explicit themes have been explored. The information gathering instrument was the content analysis checklist and its reliability was confirmed by external auditors based on convergence coefficient in the course of coding. The results indicated that a considerable part of Tehran’s development plan is directed at modern morphological and structural elements, urban requirements, civil development and urban control and supervision policies and supervision and a lower deal of attention has been paid to the cultural, hypothetical and soft topics. These findings show that Tehran is still trapped in physicalist development and expanding culture decline.

The existence of subjective facts in the epistemic sense defined by Thomas Nagel’s famous article, “What is it like to be a bat?” might be taken to support an anti-physicalist conclusion. I argue that it does not. The combination of nonreductive physicalism and teleo-pragmatic functionalism is not only consistent with such subjective facts but predicts their existence. The notion that conscious minds are self-understanding autopoietic systems plays a key role in the argument. Global Neuronal Workspace Theory is assessed in terms of its potential to answer David Chalmers’ Hard Problem of consciousness. A suggestion is made for augmenting the theory that involves another sense in which facts about conscious experience are subjective. The idea of conscious minds as self-understanding systems again plays an important role.

According to a widely held view in the philosophy of mind, property dualism is a respectable theory whereas substance dualism need not be taken seriously. This paper argues that property dualism, as it is usually understood, is incoherent. The commitments that are meant to lead to property dualism actually lead to substance dualism. The argument presented here adds weight to David Chalmers’ suggestion that the serious nonphysicalist options are in fact various kinds of panpsychism and substance dualism. Along the way, I offer an account of the substance/property distinction, argue against the existence of substrata as distinct from substances and properties, and describe a new position that I call ‘transcendent panpsychism’. I identify some reasons why philosophers of mind might have overlooked the incoherence of property dualism and finish with some thoughts on the significance of my conclusion for developmental psychology.

Physicalists and dualists have failed to provide a convincing answer to the mind-body problem. This is because they, respectively, sacrifice mental causation and neglect the close relationship between the mind and the body. To tackle this, some contemporary philosophers, such as Timothy O’Connor and Jonathan Jacobs, have turned to the concept of strong emergentism. This perspective views the mind as an emergent physical substance with autonomous causal powers. If this standpoint is tenable, it holds promise for resolving the mind-body problem. Nevertheless, the idea of strong emergentism faces substantial challenges. This article aims to achieve two objectives. First, it addresses these challenges and asserts that, even in the face of the most serious concern, “the collapse problem”, a specific interpretation of strong emergentism remains unthreatened. Second, we contend that while O’Connor and Jacobs present a thought-provoking proposal, its clarity is hindered, and a thorough understanding is only possible when we perceive the emergent substance as more than merely physical.