Explanation

Different styles of explanation employ different patterns. In narrative explanation, people tell a story concerning how events come about. Explanation by elimination occurs when a phenomenon is explained away as being nonexistent. Explanation by deduction is powerful in mathematical fields such as physics, but is rarely possible in more qualitative fields such as biology, psychology, and sociology. In these fields, the most useful approach is mechanistic, where events are explained by showing how they causally result from regular changes in systems of connected and interacting parts. Like explanation, causality cannot be captured by a simple analysis in terms of universal regularities, manipulations, probabilities, or causal networks. Rather, a three-analysis marks all of these as typical features of causal relations, on top of familiar exemplars such as pushes and pulls.

Justice

The crucial bridge between observations and values in the study of justice is vital needs, which must be satisfied if people are going to function as human beings. A just society meets both the biological needs of all its members for water, food, shelter, and health care and the psychological needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Justice does not require complete equality of wealth, income, or preference satisfaction, as long as people are equal in having their vital needs satisfied. The needs-sufficiency view of social justice has strong implications for establishing political and legal justice, including taking into account the needs of future generations. To contribute to social justice, the political system in a country needs to support the population’s vital needs. Democracy is the best available system for accomplishing this support.

Reality

Following a naturalistic approach to metaphysics, this chapter argues that materialism and scientific realism are much more plausible than their major alternatives: idealism and social constructivism. The appropriate philosophical method is to use inference to the best explanation of evidence rather than thought experiments and a priori speculation. Natural philosophy legitimately accepts the existence of objects, properties, relations, changes, events, processes, mechanisms, groups, space, and time. All of these concepts and hypotheses are subject to revision as science and philosophy generate more evidence and alternatives. However, skepticism is appropriate concerning the existence of other entities such as souls, gods, spirits, facts, and group minds. If evidence and inference to the best explanation support the existence of an entity, then we are justified in concluding that it exists.

Knowledge

For the semantic pointer theory of mind, the bearers of knowledge are not abstract propositions but rather patterns of neural firing that constitute mental representations, including concepts, beliefs, nonverbal rules, images, and emotions. This neurocognitive perspective suggests new answers for questions about the generation of candidates for knowledge and their relations to the world via sensory-motor interactions. Semantic pointers support knowledge that beliefs are true or false, how to do things using multimodal rules, and of things via sensory-motor experience. The Semantic Pointer Architecture meshes well with coherence-based justification that abandons foundational certainty for fallible attempts to fit diverse elements of knowledge into the best overall explanation. Knowledge has important social dimensions.

Future Philosophy

Philosophy hangs together by coherence relations tied to scientific evidence. Multilevel materialism in the philosophy of mind fits well bidirectionally with reliable coherentism in epistemology. Understanding the brain as operating with neural mechanisms of parallel constraint satisfaction supports and is supported by the view that knowledge is based on reliable coherence. Both of these views fit with scientific realism as the most plausible approach to metaphysics. There are internally coherent alternatives to my system of social cognitivism, such as religious philosophies that espouse faith and supernaturalism, but these are incompatible with centuries of accumulated evidence. This concluding chapter addresses three important philosophical questions that remain unresolved despite relevant advances in cognitive science: the existence of free will, the nature of mathematical knowledge, and the mental capacities of machines and nonhuman animals.

Meaning

Philosophical problems about the meaning of language and the meaning of life turn out to have interesting commonalities. Neither has plausible solutions that draw on supernatural entities such as abstract meanings, possible worlds, and divine plans. Rather, both can be approached by looking at mechanisms at four different levels: molecular, neural, mental, and social. Meaning is not a thing but a process that depends on interactions of parts occurring at multiple levels, resulting in multilevel emergence. The Semantic Pointer Architecture illuminates the neural mechanisms that operate in languages and valuable lives. Words are meaningful because their mental representations as concepts are brain processes that combine sensory-motor interactions with the world and interactions with other concepts. The meaning of life is also three-dimensional, requiring people to interact with language, the world, and other people.

Morality

Ethical judgments depend on values, understood as processes of neural firing produced by binding concepts with emotional attitudes, which in turn result from binding of physiological states and cognitive appraisals. As semantic pointers that integrate cognition and emotion, values contribute to thought and action biologically, in contrast to values as abstract entities whose mental impact is inexplicable. Because emotions include a crucial appraisal dimension, they can be judged to be rational or irrational, so that values can be objective or subjective. The key to translating human nature into morality lies in needs, not just as instrumental wants but as basic requirements for living as a human being. Full human functioning requires satisfaction of psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence.

Mind

Multilevel materialism contends that all mental processes are brain processes while allowing the importance of molecular, mental, and social mechanisms that complement neural ones. The Semantic Pointer Architecture provides a good candidate for explaining how the brain has thoughts and conscious feeling. Representation by patterns of firing in groups of neurons, binding of representations into more complex ones by convolution, and competition among semantic pointers serve to produce perception, inference, and consciousness. The conceivability of minds without brains and of mental processes without semantic pointers is of no relevance to how minds actually operate in this world. Because of their sensory-motor operations, semantic pointers naturally incorporate important aspects of embodiment and action embedded in the world, while also enabling minds to transcend the body in order to engage in abstract thought.

Philosophy Matters

Philosophy is the attempt to answer general questions about the nature of knowledge, reality, and values. Natural philosophy draws heavily on neuroscience and psychology to develop interconnected theories of knowledge, reality, morality, justice, meaning, and the arts. It uses a procedure that identifies the most important philosophical issues as questions, considers a range of available answers to these questions, evaluates these answers based on coherence with scientific knowledge and other defensible philosophical doctrines, and reaches philosophical conclusions by accepting some answers and rejecting others based on explanatory coherence with evidence and on emotional coherence with human goals. Philosophy differs from science in being more general, ranging across all of the sciences, and in being more normative, concerned with how the world can be made better.

Beauty and Beyond

The main mental and social functions of art are the expression and transmission of emotions, in relationships among creative artists and their appreciators. Artistic emotions are semantic pointers in brains that integrate sensory representations with combinations of physiological changes and cognitive appraisals. The central emotional response to art is beauty, resulting from pleasurable emotional coherence through unity in diversity of sensory representations. Art generates other important emotional responses, including interest, shock, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. Art is good or bad depending on the intensity and quality of the emotions that it generates. Art can offer valuable contributions to the needs-related emotions of its producers and appreciators. Art occurs at the social intersection of mind and world when creators and appreciators use their brains to generate and perceive works that stimulate emotions.