Emergence and Organization Towards a Taxonomy of Organizing Relations

Abstract

There are effectively two classes of explanations for how we come to be conscious, particularly in the sense of having a “mental world” or apprehending and comprehending phenomenal experience of both the material world in which we are present, and the worlds of our imagination. These, of course, are the physicalistic explanations in which consciousness somehow is a product of the brain’s activity in the physical world, and the mentalistic (usually dualist) explanations in which some non-physical “stuff” carries our mental worlds and phenomenal experiences. Ultimately, even if the mental stuff hypothesis is proven to be the case, we will still have to produce an explanation for how there can be a causally efficacious connection between that mental stuff and the physical world.