Back to Sanity: Overcoming An Unworkable Reductionism in the Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

Reductive philosophers of mind tell us that scientific explanations can account for meaning with brain function and human action in terms of cause/effect outputs. Before accepting this, we should consider whether there is something lacking in these mechanistic descriptions. I will argue that there is something essential missing from an atomized depiction of experience, and I will show that there are powerful resources to create a picture that preserves it. I will contend that it is impossible for reductive accounts of self-consciousness to achieve a rich picture of human experience, and I will attempt to offer an alternative view.