意识理解的多元进路与解释鸿沟

Pluralist Approaches to Understand Consciousness and Explanatory Gap

意识问题是哲学和科学共同面对的问题。虽然关于意识存在诸多神经科学理论,但如何理解意识仍是哲学中最为核心的工作。20世纪五六十年代,物理主义者认为意识过程同一于大脑过程。在面临多重可实现的反驳之后,物理主义者转向了随附性:心附于物,须臾不可离也。但这种关系仍然具有明显的缺陷:不能捕捉到物理事物在本体论上比心理事物更基本的直觉。20世纪90年代以来,形而上学领域兴起的奠基(grounding)等概念刻画了物理比心理更为基本的物理主义直觉,用奠基来表述物理主义因此成为一种更为合理的立场。聚焦解释鸿沟有三种意识解释路径:形而上学解释、神经科学解释、日常经验解释。通过比较三种解释进路,可阐明奠基解释、量化解释的价值与局限,进而为重新认识乃至弥合解释鸿沟提供一种新的可能性。

The problem of consciousness is a dificult problem faced by philosophy and science.Although there are many neuroscientific theories of consciousness,how to understand consciousness is still the most central work in philosophy of mind.In the 1950s and 1960s,physicalists believed that the processes of consciousness were the same as those of the brain.Faced with multiple realizedobjection,physicalists turned to supervenience framework:the mental depend on physical but not reduce to the physical.But this characterization still has a glaring flaw:it fails to capture the intuition that physical things are ontologically more fundamental than mental things.Concepts such as grounding,which have emerged in the field of metaphysics since the 2000,characterize the physicalist intuition that physical is more fundamental than psychology,and expressing physicalism in terms of grounding has thus become a more reasonable position.This paper focuses on the explanatory gap and introduces three approaches:metaphysical,neuroscientific,and ordinary explanation.By comparing the three approaches,the value and limitations of the grounding concept are clarified,and a new possibility is provided for re-understanding and even bridging the explanatory gap.