This article is an informal introduction to the concept of supervenience and the role it plays in the philosophy of mind. Supervenience and the mindbody problem in depression inpp 20 th annual conference hong kong, 4 6 october, 2018. He introduced the term supervenience into contemporary philosophy of mind in the following passage. Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology. Department of philosophy, university of bucharest, roumania. In this commentary we discuss some of the problems faced by the classical mind brain identity theory and explain how the quantum dualistic interactionism proposed by sir john eccles could resolve. Supervenience and the mindbody problem in depression. We propose that establishing cases of supervenience failure represents a method for discriminating between more robustly mental as opposed to brain disorders. Psychophysical supervenience deep blue university of michigan.
Supervenience, which means literally coming or occurring as something novel, additional, or unexpected, from super, meaning on, above, or additional, and venire, meaning to come, shows occurrences in the oxford english dictionary dating back to 1844. The mindbrain relation is discussed in the light of some models. Supervenience supervenience not generally accompanied by downward causation e. Are mental properties supervenient on brain properties. Pdf what should a consciousness mindbrain theory be like. The mindbody problem today scientific research publishing. Supervenience is a central notion in analytic philosophy. According to my dissertation that i am currently writing on wordpress, subsets can be metaphysically identical to each other, or they may or may not be epistemically identical to. The supervenience relation, as seen in the world, can be. The philosophical technical term supervenience is frequently used in the philosophy of mind as a concise way of characterizing the core idea of physicalism in a manner that is neutral with. Supervenience and mind internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Special attention is given to supervenient theories of mind. The mindbrain supervenience conjecture suggests that all mental properties are derived from the physical properties of the brain. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on supervenience and mind with two sets of postscripts especially written for the book.