Vitalists, Emergentists, Dualists, and Causal Closure
- Vitalists Wanted A Non-Physical Force Acting On The Physical World
- Emergentists Wanted New Laws Not Reducible To Lower Level Laws
- Dualists Want A Substance or Property Not Reducible To Physics
- But Jaegwon Kim Denies Non-Reductive Physicalism
- Any additional "mental cause" should be excluded as redundant (overdetermination) beyond physical causes. The world is "causally closed," he says
what options are there if we set aside the physicalist picture?
Leaving physicalism behind is to abandon ontological physicalism, the view that bits of matter and their aggregates in space-time exhaust the contents of the world. This means that one
would be embracing an ontology that posits entities other than
material substances — that is, immaterial minds, or souls, outside
physical space, with immaterial, nonphysical properties.
(Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, p. 71)
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