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SUMMARY:The Emergence of Human Persons: Bewteen the Scylla of Dualism and 
 the Charybdis of Reductionism - Prof. Tim O'Connor\,  Indiana University
DTSTART:20130528T120000Z
DTEND:20130528T130000Z
UID:TALK44244@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:25203
DESCRIPTION:Is there nothing new under the sun?\n\nConsider the great vari
 ety of complex structures and patterns of activity that have appeared over
  time within our universe—physical\, chemical\, and (much later) biologi
 cal and psychological. Is there reason to say that all such systems are\, 
 at bottom\, nothing more than atoms in motion? This question has been with
  us\, unresolved\, ever since the seventeenth century\, when the strongly 
 anti-reductionist philosophy of nature handed down from the ancient Greek 
 Aristotle was displaced by the successes of the new mechanical-reductionis
 t philosophy.\n\nObstacles to simple versions of the mechanical philosophy
  soon became apparent\, but the basic ‘reductionist’ vision of the nat
 ural world as fully describable solely in terms of the properties and forc
 es that govern the world’s most elementary constituents continues to be 
 embraced by many thinkers. Opposition to this vision is generally rooted i
 n its manifest inability to explain the conscious mind. But the common ‘
 dualist’ alternative to reductionism is equally extreme: minds are wholl
 y distinct substances from bodies\, possessed of their own causal powers\,
  which include the power to affect and be affected by the brains and bodie
 s that belong to individual minds in a happy but theoretically strange ‘
 monogamy’.\n\nI will argue for the scientific viability of a middle path
 \, on which human persons (and other sentient animals) are wholly physical
 ly composed objects having ‘emergent’ capacities of consciousness\, th
 ought\, emotion\, and will: capacities that are causally sustained by but 
 irreducible to the properties and relations of our elementary parts.
LOCATION:Garden Room\, Library Building\, St. Edmund’s College
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