Philosophers have largely abandoned the claim that the special sciences will ultimately reduce to microphysics in favour of the view that the special sciences trade in functional explanations. However, a careful examination of scientific practice reveals that the explanatory strategy of the special sciences is neither reductionist nor functionalist, but mechanistic. Mechanistic explanations...
It is commonplace for both philosophers and cognitive scientists to express their allegiance to the “unity of consciousness”. This is the claim that a subject’s phenomenal consciousness, at any one moment in time, is a single thing. This view has had a major influence on computational theories of consciousness. In particular, what we call single-track theories dominate the literature, theories...