Mind instantiation

One of the most extraordinary, important, and potent features of the brain-mind is the construct of the self. As yet we cannot give an adequate account of how a brain comes to instantiate a self, but this still obscure integration process clearly involves memory and emotion, the two modules of the brain-mind that have always been of greatest interest to psychodynamic psychology. Now that we know how memory and emotion are altered in a state-dependent way, we can use that information to generate new approaches to their access, interpretation, and manipulation in the interest of personal satisfaction and social success. 

The second assumption that leads to the exclusion problem is the idea that any physicalist view is committed to some sort of notion of mind-body supervenience. There are many different notions of supervenience, but at minimum, a physicalist must hold that every mental property has some sort of physical base which instantiates it. The mental depends, for its existence, on some sort of underlying physical state and does not constitute its own ontologically independent domain (Kim 1998 41). Thus, if we take any mental property M, it will have some underlying set of physical properties P on which it supervenes. ... 

Kim formulates what he takes mind-body supervenience to entail as follows Mind-body supervenience Mental properties supervene on physical properties in the sense that if something instantiates any mental property M at t, there is a physical base property P such that the thing has P at t, and necessarily anything with P at a time has M at that time (1998 39). ... 

Now if we hold on to the idea of mind-body supervenience, Kim argues, we know that M occurs because its supervenience base P occurs, and as long as P occurs, M must occur no matter what other events preceded this instance of M - in particular, regardless of whether or not an instance of M preceded it (1998 42). Thus, because of mind-body supervenience, whatever physical base P instantiates M, it will be sufficient for M s... 

Kim (1992, 1998b) advocates a reductive physicalist approach to the mind that in effect rejects the metaphysical physicalist point of view. He takes mental properties to be merely nominal properties - indeed, hardly properties at all if ones criterion of reality for properties is causal efficacy. The idea is that the similarities among pain-feeling creatures that grounds their being in pain is not anything deep, but merely that they all instantiate a functional or even behavioral concept. The most fimdamental grounding is superficial. He says ... 

There is a use of the term Teduction we have not commented upon yet that clearly matches the goal of extension first approaches When philosophers speak of asynchronous reduction, they have in mind a specific kind of theory-change. This concept captures a temporal relation that involves theories (or stages of one theory) at different times. In contrast, one may tentatively describe the notion of reduction we are interested in here as synchronous, or, in a more Platonist spirit, as atemporal It is a relation that does not require its relata to instantiate a certain temporal relation, such as the relation of occurring later than. 

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