Essay About Special Functional Unity And Variety Of Particular Problems

Emotions and the Self
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EMOTIONS AND THE SELF
Much of the perplexity that motivates modern discussion of the
nature of mind derives indirectly from the striking success of
physical explanation. Not only has physics itself advanced at a
remarkable pace in the last four centuries; every hope has been
held out that, in principle, all science can be understood and
ultimately studied in terms of mechanisms proper to physics.
Seeing all natural phenomena as explicable in terms appropriate to
physics, however, makes the mental seem to be a singularity in
nature. Chemistry and biology may well be reducible to physics,
but the same seems hardly possible for the mental. The gulf
between mind and physics seems too great to bridge, and the success
of physics guarantees its standing. The place of mind in nature is
thereby rendered problematic. This line of reasoning has tempted
thinkers since Descartes to see the mind as not only independent of
other natural phenomena, but as even somehow lying outside the
natural order itself.
A variety of particular problems about how the mental fits
with the rest of nature have been widely discussed in recent years.
Less often noticed, however, is that similar problems appear to
affect our understanding of the concept of the self in relation to
the natural order. For something to be, or have, a self, two
conditions seem intuitively necessary. There must be some sort of
unity in the mental life of that being. In addition, to have or be
a self, one must be distinguishable from other beings, and in
particular from other beings of the same or of a relevantly similar
sort. Intuitively, nothing can be a self unless it functions in
some suitably unified way and unless there is a reasonably clear
contrast between it, considered as a self, and other things
distinct from it. It is perhaps plausible to see the conceptual
resources of modern physics as adequate to explain the physical
unity and individuality of the macroscopic objects around us,
including the biological integrity of living organisms such as
ourselves. But it may well seem that, however well physics can
accomplish those tasks, its conceptual resources are simply insuf-
ficient to explain the special functional unity and individuality
involved in somethings being a self.
The difficulty emerges especially vividly when we contrast
the way a common sense view of things represents the place of the
self in nature with the way this might be represented by the view
of the world suggested by physics. On the common sense view, the
world consists of macroscopic objects of various kinds, which
behave in the ways they do because of their intrinsic properties.
This sort of view leaves it open to regard those organisms which
have mental abilities as simply special sorts of organisms. There
may still be a problem in saying exactly what mental abilities are
and what properties and capacities are special to such organisms.
But the problem is not that of explaining how the mental can arise
and exist in nature, but the problem of articulating just what the
mental is and trying to determine what is special to those organ-
isms that have mental states. On a common sense view of this sort,
the special unity and individuality that characterize selves also
poses no special problem. Organisms generally exhibit a remarkable
degree of functional unity because of their biological makeup.
This functional unity results in a clear contrast between individ-
ual organisms and their surrounding environment, including other
individuals. Organisms that have more elaborate abilities and
properties will function in ways that are more distinctively
unified and more effectively resist impingement from the environ-
ment. Such organisms will therefore be selves to a greater degree
than less elaborate organisns. Various psychological and social
abilities will presumably be the culmination of such functioning.
By contrast, modern physics conceives of natural phenomena
as due to the behavior and interaction of nonmacroscopic entities
governed by mathematically formulable laws. Such laws must gener-
ate and explain the relative autonomy of biological organisms by
appeal to the nomological behavior of interacting parts, ideally at
the biochemical and biophysical levels of analysis. The emergence
of selves among the furniture of physical reality needs special
explanation,