IB Philosophy 6.2 Science and the Self Key Definitions

the libertarian view of self-originating causal power, holding that rational agents can initiate causal chains not fully determined by prior events or laws of nature. Unlike mere event causation, where one event mechanically produces another, agent causation holds that persons are genuine originating causes of their actions.

Biochemical reductionism holds that all biological phenomena, including consciousness, emotion, and selfhood, can be fully explained as chemical interactions between molecules. On this account, the self is nothing more than the product of neurotransmitter activity, hormonal regulation, and genetic expression.

Biosemiotics is an interdisciplinary framework proposing that the defining feature of life is sign activity, the capacity of organisms to interpret, produce, and respond to signs in their environment. On this view, the self is a semiotic process of ongoing meaning-making rather than a substance or a bundle of biochemical reactions.

Causal determinism is the thesis that the state of the universe at any given moment, together with the laws of nature, uniquely determines every subsequent state. In its Laplacean form, if a hypothetical intelligence knew every particle's position and momentum, it could predict the entire future of the universe, including every human decision.

Causality is the relation between events in which one event (the cause) brings about or necessitates another (the effect), a concept fundamental to scientific explanation, moral responsibility, and everyday reasoning.

Compatibilism is the philosophical position that determinism and free will are compatible. Free will, on this view, requires not the ability to have done otherwise in a strict causal sense, but the ability to act in accordance with one's own reasons and rational deliberation, unimpeded by external constraint.

Consciousness: the state of subjective awareness in which an individual experiences thoughts, sensations, and perceptions with a first-person, qualitative character: the 'what it is like' quality of mental life.

In Hume's philosophy, constant conjunction refers to the regular succession of two types of events where one is always followed by the other. In his regularity theory, this repeated pattern of observed co-occurrence is all that causation amounts to, with no deeper necessary connection between cause and effect.

the view, associated with Patricia Churchland, that folk-psychological concepts such as belief, desire, and the self are radically false and will ultimately be replaced by more precise neuroscientific vocabulary, much as the concept of phlogiston was eliminated by modern chemistry. If eliminative materialism is correct, the hard problem of consciousness may dissolve rather than be solved.

Emergence is the position that higher-level properties such as consciousness and selfhood arise from the complex organisation of simpler parts but cannot be predicted or explained solely from knowledge of those parts. Emergentists accept a physical basis for the self while denying that it reduces to lower-level chemistry.

Functionalism is a theory of mind holding that mental states are defined by their causal roles rather than by the physical substrate that realises them. According to this theory, what makes something a mental state is the functional role it performs in mediating inputs, outputs, and other mental states, not whether it occurs in neurons or silicon.

The hard problem of consciousness is David Chalmers' term for the question of why physical brain processes give rise to subjective experience at all, as distinct from the easier problems of explaining how the brain processes information and controls behaviour.

the pre-reflective, immediate sense of being a subject of experience, including the sense of ownership (this body is mine) and sense of agency (I am acting). Identified by Shaun Gallagher, the minimal self is present before any conscious self-reflection and is more basic than the narrative self.

Moral responsibility is the status of being worthy of praise or blame for one's actions, typically requiring that the agent acted freely, with knowledge of what they were doing, and with the capacity to have done otherwise.

the richer, autobiographical layer of personal identity formed by weaving memories, intentions, and social roles into a coherent life story. Daniel Dennett describes it as a "centre of narrative gravity": not a real entity inside the brain but an abstract point around which our self-stories converge, raising the question of whether the narrative self is a genuine feature of reality or a useful fiction.

Qualia are the subjective, felt qualities of conscious experience, such as the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. These qualities resist objective scientific description because they can only be known from the inside, making them central to the hard problem of consciousness.

Reductive explanations attempt to account for complex phenomena by breaking them down into simpler, more fundamental components, as when mental states are explained in terms of neural processes or biological traits in terms of chemical reactions. While reductionism has been enormously productive in the natural sciences, critics argue that some properties, particularly consciousness and meaning, resist reduction and require explanations at their own level of description.

an explanation that accounts for phenomena in terms of their purpose, goal, or function rather than their physical components. Rooted in Aristotle's doctrine of final causes (telos), teleological explanations understand a thing by grasping what it is for, not merely what it is made of.

a concept introduced by Jakob von Uexkull describing each organism's subjective, species-specific life-world constituted by the signs it can perceive and act upon. Different species occupy radically different Umwelten even when sharing the same physical space.