Abstract Dick Swaab presented in his recent book a claim that we are our brains.Obviously,the claim is a kind of expression on the mind body problem.The claim of ''We Are Our Brains'' gives a definite and correct recognition of the embodiment of consciousness,but it covers the fact of experiential reality of consciousness,so it is a single track which will cause unnecessary misunderstanding.A robust metaphysics of consciousness is a coherent system of ideas which should give a unified and self consistent account of the three basic facts about the phenomena of consciousness,that is,physical reality,experiential reality and reality of the corresponding unity of the two.Since the beginning of the modern times,in face of the three facts,scientific materialism and dualism have encountered their own insuperable dilemmas.Materialism can properly explain the physical aspect of the phenomena of consciousness but at the expense of the experiential aspect of the phenomena|on the other hand,dualism gives legal force to both aspects of the physical and the experiential but at the expense of the unity of the phenomena of consciousness.In order to avoid the dilemmas of the two,a reasonable resulting solution has to be a dual aspect monism or a panpsychism.Furthermore,a panexperientialism has to be developed so as to solve some problems in the traditional panpsychism.The core contributions of panexperientialism to the metaphysics of consciousness are as follows: (1) It has speculatively demonstrated that an actual entity has an aspect as epistemological object (physical aspect) as well as an aspect as ontological subject (experiential aspect).(2) There is an evolutionary developmental spectrum in the physical aspect of an actual entity,that is,its physical system will grow increasingly complicated|similarly,there is an evolutionary developmental spectrum in the experiential aspect,whose manifestation is an increasingly enriched mind.(3) There is a corresponding relation between the two spectrums of an actual entity.Panexperientialism has preliminarily solved the dilemma in materialism and dualism in a sense of speculative schema.If,however,we intend to give a further account of why there are necessarily two aspects in an actual entity and why there has to be a corresponding relation between the two aspects,we think it is more proper to call panexperientialism a dual-perspective monism.The reason of an actual entity (aE1) as a subject is that it is ontologically an agent of its own goings-on (its acts and reactions) and the undertaking of the agent is the first-person prehending of the subject.On the other hand,being relative to the other actual entity (aE2),the aE1 comes to be a ''perceived'' object,so it becomes an observed object from the first-person perspective of the aE2.As a result,the two categories of mind and body which human beings have utilized to describe the phenomena of consciousness are just respective appearances of dual perspectives of an actual entity,namely the first person perspective as experiential subject and the third-person perspective as observed object.And the relation of the physical aspect to the experiential one is a naturally-such correspondence rather than a generating/generated relation.It is inappropriate to characterize the relation of neural activities to conscious experiences with causal concepts|rather,the physical aspect of the world is causally closed,and consciousness itself is non-causal.
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