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Topic: Emergent materialism

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	Materialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Materialism is the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to 'exist' is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of 'material' and all phenomena are the result of material interactions.
		Materialism is sometimes allied with the methodological principle of reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description -- typically, a more general level than the reduced one.
		For Marxism, materialism is central to the "materialist conception of history", which centers on the empirical world of actual human activity (practice, including labor) and institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Materialism (675 words)

	Atheistic Materialism or Physicalism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Materialism (or physicalism) can signify either a broad metaphysical view, or, more narrowly, a type of theory of mind.
		Metaphysical materialism is a specific kind of naturalism which contends that everything that exists is either physical or dependent upon the physical.
		In the broad sense, nonreductive materialism holds that everything is physical or at least dependent upon the physical; and in the narrower sense it holds that the mind can have both physical and nonphysical aspects even though it must be instantiated in a physical system like the brain.
	www.infidels.org /library/modern/nontheism/materialism (281 words)

	Integrative Science: The Death Knell of Scientific Materialism? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		In particular, scientific materialism largely excludes considerations of the problem of consciousness from its method; and in more extreme cases, outright denies that it is “real,” let alone a fundamental principle of nature.
		The logic of its method perhaps makes this unavoidable; for scientific materialism’s basic assumption is that consciousness, mind, are epiphenomena (outcomes) of the electrochemical activity of the physical brain, and are thus reducible to the “random” activity of physical matter as constrained by deterministic physical laws.
		Emergent materialism is a monist ontology based on the belief that physical principles may trigger processes that determine the development of emergent processes, including the living processes, too.
	designeduniverse.com /bb/integrativescience (3677 words)

	Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Emergence Blog
		Tracking emergentism and its constellation of issues is another way of tracking the philosophical dualisms that pervade our intellectual culture and the legitimate and mystifying ways in which scientists and philosophers attempt to transcend them.
		So then all that is objective are the material components of the building, and only sans their form (as bars, as concrete, etc.), which means that their chemical composition even is not entirely objective, since concrete is already crushed stone without water, and then you add water.
		You are confusing the material reality of man-made objects (which are no less material for being man-made) with the system of social and economic relations in which buildings function (not to mention the functionality of buildings themselves).
	www.autodidactproject.org /my/emergence-blog.html (6980 words)

	[No title]
		Materialism is considered in this approach, as usual, as being a monism, and not a pluralism.
		Comparing the material influence of our consciousness to such bodily energetics as related to cramps, we may led to a recognition that consciousness is able to exert a finite and measurable influence on our own body.
		Materialism led to a general practice to give up the original aim of science exploring reality and to prefer instead serving the material concepts and constraints of our societies.
	philsci-archive.pitt.edu /archive/00001032/01/URAM2.rtf (15108 words)

	Chapter 14
		Finally, when I reflect on mentality and materiality as carefully as I can, I cannot see that the presence of the former logically entails that of the latter, I do not find the least difficulty in conceiving of a being which had all the factors of mentality and none of the factors of materiality.
		Emergent Materialism regards materiality as a "differentiating attribute" in the looser sense, and it regards mentality as an emergent characteristic of certain material aggregates.
		Materialism is supposed to be incompatible with Idealism only because it happens to be associated with a particular view about the actual laws of matter and the actual configuration of matter in the Universe.
	www.ditext.com /broad/mpn14.html (18359 words)

	Materialism
		Materialism itself is a meme, a specific, culturally determined way of thinking about reality.
		A slightly longer definition: Philosophical materialism (physicalism) is the metaphysical view that there is only one substance in the universe and that substance is physical, empirical or material.
		All of which proves, not that materialism is wrong, only that, as in the insightful parable of the blind men and the elephant, it pertains to one aspect of Reality, not the Totality.
	www.kheper.net /topics/worldviews/materialism.htm (2197 words)

	Emergent Evolution
		Emergent evolution agrees with Materialism and Materialistic Pantheism in considering the physical universe as the substratum of existence.
		Coming to Emergent Evolution from the other direction, metaphysical and spiritual thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo see evolution as an emerging out of matter of higher qualities, culminating in the spiritual culmination that Teilhard terms the Omega Point and Sri Aurobindo Supramentalisation.
		Carl Jung is another great visionary who seems to hold an emergent theory of evolution (the Collective Unconscious and then Consciousness evolving out of the original nonconscious biological and elemental substratum), even if he does not articulate it such a specific or clear manner.
	www.kheper.net /evolution/emergent.html (483 words)

	Learn more about Materialism in the online encyclopedia. (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Materialism expresses the view that the only thing that exists is matter; if anything else, such as mental events, exists, then it is reducible to matter.
		It typically contrasts both with dualism and with phenomenalism (also known as idealism), and like those theories, has had a long history with many varieties and many distinguished proponents.
		Materialism has also developed as a pejorative label for a lifestyle pursuing wealth, money, and objects rather than spiritual or mental development.
	www.onlineencyclopedia.org /m/ma/materialism.html (320 words)

	SELLARS' EPISTEMOLOGY AND MATERIALISM
		Following the lead of Sellars, Emergent Materialism can be characterized as a Materialism which recognizes, in addition to the physical properties (of inanimate "matter") studied by physics, a hierarchy of "emergent" properties {41} to correspond to the sentient aspects of living organisms.
		Sellars' variety of Emergent Materialism, when applied to the study of human beings, can then be seen as requiring the emergence of physical entities, sensa, to correspond to human sense impressions ("raw feels").
		Materialism must be interpreted as the claim that mentalistic concepts can be defined in terms of physicalistic concepts together with concepts of sense qualities, neither of these latter two types being definable in terms of the other.
	www.ditext.com /chrucky/chru-1.html (4922 words)

	Consciousness and mind as emergent phenomena or emergent properties of the brain
		A frequently used materialist argument against the existence of the mind as a non-physical continuum is to claim that it is an 'emergent property' or 'emergent phenomenon' of the brain.
		Emergent properties are usually properties that are more easily understood in their own right than in terms of properties at a lower level.
		So we can dismiss all claims that consciousness, mind and awareness are emergent properties of matter or brains, because we need the presence of a mind for emergent properties and phenomena to appear in the first place.
	home.btclick.com /scimah/emergent.htm (2340 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Explicates their view of emergent causal powers and laws in terms of fundamental configurational forces, a coherent idea that turned out to be false.
		With consideration of qualia as a radical emergent.
		Consciousness is an emergent property of brain dynamics that itself governs low-level flow of excitation.
	consc.net /biblio/3.ascii (11559 words)

	Types distinguished by departures from the paradigm (from Materialism) -- Britannica Concise Encyclopedia - The ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Such a Materialist allows the concept of material thing to be extended so as to include all of the elementary particles and other things that are postulated in fundamental physical theory—perhaps even continuous fields and points of space-time.
		Inasmuch as some cosmologists even try to define the elementary particles themselves in terms of the curvature of space-time, there is no reason why a philosophy based on such a geometricized cosmology should not be counted as Materialist, provided that it does not give an independent existence to nonphysical things such as minds.
		Another common relaxation of the paradigm is that which allows as compatible with Materialism such a theory as epiphenomenalism, according to which sensations and thoughts do exist in addition to material processes but are nonetheless wholly dependent on material processes and without causal efficacy of their own.
	www.britannica.com /ebc/article-68535?tocId=68535 (1023 words)

	Taxonomy as a contribution to science
		Emergent properties are the result of functionally integrated hierarchical systems.
		The concept of emergent properties in biology has a long history, being based at heart in the metaphysical traditions of the Germans (Harwood 1994), and being the only concept that eternally keeps biology from being considered a branch of physical science (Smocovitis 1992).
		There is a continuous gradation between the outlook of reductionism and holism, and one is not bound to any particular point along this axis by virtue of inherent or proven validity, therefore to adopt a holistic or reductionistic position is merely a subjective choice.
	www.largocanyon.org /science/taxon.htm (2769 words)

	Emergent materialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		In the philosophy of mind, emergent (or emergentist) materialism asserts that the mind is an irreducible existent in some sense, albeit not in the sense of being an ontological simple, and that the study of mental phenomena is independent of other sciences (M.D. Robertson).
		The other main group of materialist views in the philosophy of mind can be labeled non-emergent (or non-emergentist) materialism (M.D. Robertson), and it includes identity theory, philosophical behaviorism and eliminativism (eliminative materialism).
		In philosophy in general, emergent materialism means (article still incomplete)...
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Emergent_materialism (167 words)

	The Relationship of Dialectics and Emergentism
		Emergentism, a notion put forward by the theory of self-organisation, introduces the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts: The parts are a necessary condition for the whole, but not a sufficient one.
		Emergent Evolution deals with emergent qualities of systems that occur at an evolutionary transition from one organisational level to another.
		Emergentism and Dialectics are closely related: Emergence shows dialectical aspects because old system qualities are preserved (2) in the form of new ones and the system is lifted to a new level/state (3) by the emergence of new qualities.
	cartoon.iguw.tuwien.ac.at:16080 /christian/infoso/dialecticsemergence.html (1983 words)

	Metaphysics and the Mind body problem
		At that time, the claim that the mind is identical to the brain in all respects, that mental states are identical to brain states, facts about mentality are reducible to physical facts, i.e.
		facts about matter and material processes, was shown to be untenable by such diverse philosophical-materialist approaches as Modern Functionalists, Property Dualists, and Supervenience theorists, all of whom agreed that human consciousness is irreducible to or inexplicable in terms of natural processes.
		By the early Federation age the hyperturing AI Thought of Ganymede, one of the Twenty Four, demonstrated conclusively (to any intellect of first toposophic or greater that is....) that only five (strict definition) or 7 (loose definition) metaphysical options were tenable.
	www.orionsarm.com /topics/mind-body_question.html (403 words)

	Warren Shrader’s papers (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		I then gesture toward an account of MOE that incorporates my revised understanding of an emergent property but entails that the dependence relation holding between emergent properties and physical properties is causal dependence rather than mere supervenience.
		In this paper I explain how two UOC arguments against materialism, one described by Kant and one by William Hasker, both misfire in that key premises are rendered dubious by the possibility that conscious states are emergent states of the brain.
		I then suggest a new UOC argument against the causal emergence theory, which entails that each conscious state is an emergent state of the brain that is, in part at least, a causal consequence of the brain’s exemplifying a certain physical configuration.
	www.nd.edu /~wshrader/papers (1216 words)

	JCEPS: Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies
		Emergent powers of objects, social forms and human beings are those by virtue of their constitution.
		However, it is the 'predominance' of the economic (or material) base that is "the general illumination which bathes all other colours and modifies their particularity" [Marx 1973: 107].
		Where this results in the inequitable distribution of material, social and ideational resources, the structural advantage of non-producers to appropriate surplus labour from direct producers is furthered.
	www.jceps.com /index.php?pageID=article&articleID=14 (10627 words)

	Roger Wolcott Sperry, August 20, 1913—April 17, 1994 \| By Theodore J. Voneida \| Biographical Memoirs (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		"Materials and Methods" would tell me exactly what I would need to carry it out, and "you pretty well know that the results will turn out one way or another, so you should write it up both ways." "Finally," he said "the Discussion section will assist you in critiquing your results, whatever they are.
		He describes his reasons for retaining the term mentalism in preference to Bunge's (1977) "emergent materialism" or Natsoulas's (1987) "physical monism," emphasizing that this new form of mentalism must be viewed as a "quite different intermediate position which is monistic, not dualistic."
		It was his great hope and sincere belief that if we humans could simply be persuaded to put our collective minds together and use the enormous emergent powers that they are capable of generating, we would not merely improve the quality of life on the planet, we would ensure our very survival.
	www.nap.edu /html/biomems/rsperry.html (3898 words)

	[No title]
		He made some good points, but for me at least, the writing style kept getting in the way: particularly the combination of the book feeling like it was aimed at a 3rd grade reading level and the self-conscious "hey, look at me--I'm writing!" tone to it.
		Emergent's love-affair with mysticism (Celtic Christian and Eastern Orthodox) is troubling.
		Meanwhile, an "emergent church" in my neighborhood has moved their weekly tithing to online giving.
	www.xanga.com /item.aspx?user=smilax&tab=weblogs&uid=276730131 (1227 words)

	Printable version - The Origin of Consciousness [Part II]
		Emergent properties of matter [are] described as properties that emerge from matter when special circumstances apply to it, such as the organization of the matter into large numbers of similar units that can interact with each other.
		Thus, while the emergent materialists may claim that mental states emerge from the physical substratum of the brain without being reducible to the brain, the fact remains, as Ernst Mayr noted, “emergentism is a thoroughly materialistic philosophy” (1982, p.
		He began by noting that, in emergent materialism, “the traditional difference between the physical and the mental (as subjectively perceived) is deliberately retained, but with these previously separate, dual realms not inextricably merged...” (1994, p.
	www.apologeticspress.org /articles/print/496 (14738 words)

	Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Essay: Critique of 'Dialectic of Enlightenment'
		Rationalism conceives this expansion as a division of labor between the passive masses and the active elite.
		Because it does not and cannot doubt that harmonious progress is inevitable by this path, the essence of rationalism is uncritical or vulgar materialism, and uncritical or vulgar idealism.
		In the springtime of capitalism this rationalistic division of labor was the basis of a common attempt of individual men associated in a natural environment to achieve control over nature.
	www.autodidactproject.org /my/dofe.html (1358 words)

	PA143
		The alternative which I wish to pose for the official dogma of a ghost in a mechanism is, basically, that man is a substantival monism, a material body which is special for reason of its capabilities (not its added substantival ingredient).
		The view of C.D. Broad as present in The Mind and Its Place in Nature[18] is that of emergent materialism: reality is material with mind being an emergent characteristic thereof; the mind is dependent upon the nervous system in addition to a distinct, yet further emergent factor, psychic quality.
		We conclude that the materialism position is not a suitable answer to the mind-body question; personal language cannot be reduced to physicalistic language, made to be forever false, or seen as denotatively identical with physicalistic judgements.
	www.cmfnow.com /articles/pa143.htm (6330 words)

	Monism - Wikpedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Physicalism or materialism, which holds that only the physical is real, and that the mental can be reduced to the physical
		Functionalism, like materialism, holds that the mental can ultimately be reduced to the physical, but also holds that all critical aspects of the mind are also reducible to some substrate-neutral "functional" level.
		Indeed there may be no such method; this is a case of nonreductive physicalism, or perhaps emergent physicalism/materialism.
	www.bostoncoop.net /~tpryor/wiki/index.php?title=Monism (811 words)

	Realism
		One important way of doing so was to insist that material objects do exist independently of our perception of them.
		According to Alexander, individual beings must be spatial and temporal in essence, but sometimes come to exhibit such emergent properties as sensation, cognition, and even spiritual intuition.
		In the book's final chapter, he distinguished seventeen distinct theories about the relation between mind and body, arguing that emergent materialism is most likely to be correct.
	www.philosophypages.com /hy/6o.htm (621 words)

	Holistic Junction: Articles
		In addition, I had a personal desire to understand the pope's comprehension of materialism and where he precisely stood (in relation to his counter proposals/beliefs) on the subjects.
		As one thread led to another, I stumbled across many informational links and discovered that there are multiple types of materialism, some of which are really quite esoteric and rooted in metaphysics.
		Through my quest, I found a link that has tremendous wealth of information, including siblings to other metaphysical sub-disciplines such as ontology, Philosophy of religion, Philosophy of mind, and Philosophy of perception.
	www.holisticjunction.com /displayarticle.cfm?ID=3601 (379 words)

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