Guest article by Dr. Wolfgang Stegemann: Emergence of Consciousness
This Medium story serves as an introduction to a guest article by Dr. Stegemann on the blog Philosophies.
To read the full piece, please refer to this link.
Note: To read the article in a language other than German, please use your browser’s auto-translate feature or click the orange Google Translate button to select your preferred language.
The essay published here is by my highly esteemed colleague in epistemology, Wolfgang Stegemann, Dr. phil., with whom I have had the pleasure of exchanging some very inspiring and insightful discussions in real life and in my comments section. This resulted, for example, in a successful joint venture on the origin of life, evolutionary theories from a structural realist and systems theory perspective.
I therefore also share Wolfgang’s preference for topics relating to the theory of knowledge and science. However, what also separates us a little are our different approaches and concepts for describing the phenomenon of “consciousness”. In my view, Wolfgang always wants to link consciousness with the special cognitive abilities of the human brain and locate everything there. He therefore rejected my somewhat more basal interpretation of the phenomenon as a simple structural coupling of brains (nervous systems) with their bodies and the environment, which does not require an “inner representation”.
For this reason, I was not surprised that Wolfgang now comes up with the “old hat magic trick” of “emergence” (please forgive my flippancy ;-)), which he now tries to interpret physiologically. For the above reasons, you can perhaps understand why I am not an outspoken fan of “emergence theories”, as in my opinion they still fail to explain the change in the properties of the state and continue the “body-consciousness dualism” in a new guise.
But this is not a “concert of wishes” and since the philosophy and science blog “philosophies” stands for a plurality and liberality of opinions and concepts, I would prefer to leave the evaluation of Wolfgang’s essays to the inclined readership. In any case, I am delighted with Wolfgang’s very well-researched guest article and also with the numerous comments and discussions on his theses.
But for now, he has the floor.
