Physicalism, idealism and dualism represent the three major philosophical perspectives that attempt to address the relationship between the mind and the physical brain. However, in part due to the explanatory successes of 20th century science, physicalism has emerged as by far the most potent and influential of these ontological frameworks. While all physicalists subscribe to the belief that it is the material that ultimately forms the substrate for the mental, there are substantial differences regarding the neccessary constituents and the interactions required of these constituents to produce a coherent account of brain, and thus mind.
The aim of this talk is to illustrate the central differences between the various physicalist perspectives in particular concentrating on Penrose's argument for non-computational physicalism and Haken's notion of the ``slaving principle'' as applied to neurophysiological systems.
Over the last thirty years the research programme of synergetics (Haken 1987) has rigorously challenged the simplistic notions of reductionism within the physical, biological and sociological sciences. The two central insights of this research programme are the concepts of circular causality and trans-scale slaving. Taken to their logical extremes such concepts provide a powerful framework for the systematic and rigorous study of emergent phenomena.
The aim of this talk is to provide a brief, but comprehensive, overview of these concepts and how they might provide the foundations for a new physics and a more epistemically driven understanding in the social sciences. A large proportion of the talk will be devoted to how such concepts have their natural explication in the brain sciences. Brains represent the boundary between the phenomenal and positivistic worlds and in a crude sense represent a nexus between activity occurring over scales of many orders of magnitude.