1. `
For Thursday, Dec. 2, read (and write about) Michael Tye, “New Troubles for the Qualia Freak” (chapter 17).

2. What Is a Self?
Bundle theory: The self is nothing more than the instantiation of various psychological properties (perhaps organized in a certain way, or present in a continuous region of space-time). Substratum theory: The self is composed of a substance that is affected by mental properties or in which the mental properties inhere.

3. Corresponding Views about Consciousness
The conscious mind is nothing more than a bundle of instantiations of consciousness-related properties. OR There is a conscious individual that can be the subject of consciousness-related properties (that can have conscious experiences).

4. Ontological Emergence
General idea: When physical properties or structures are arranged a certain way, something fundamentally new comes into existence. Nida-Rumelin combines this view with nomological supervenience and the claim that psychophysical laws are fundamental laws of nature.

5. Two Emergentist Theses (Nida-Rumelin, p. 270)
Claim 1: Certain physical conditions nomologically necessitate the coming into existence of a new individual, a subject of experience Claim 2: Consciousness properties nomologically supervene on physical properties.

6. More about Claim 1
The subject of experience is not a different kind of “stuff,” but it is more than a bundle of phenomenal or consciousness properties. Anything that is capable of conscious experience is a self that has a body.

7. Libertarianism and Agent Causation
The person (agent, soul, immaterial mind) causes her actions, and the person’s doing so is not caused by anything else. Puzzle: But aren’t our decisions caused by our thought processes, by who we are or what we have thought and experienced in the past?

8. Agent Causation and Mental Causation
Nida-Rumelin claims that the self is motivated by mental states, including perceptions and consciously held propositional attitudes, but the self is not caused to do anything by these states.

9. Subject Causation
Once a body has an owner, it is no longer a deterministic system. The subject causes changes in the neural substrate, constantly intervening in neural processes, thereby causing, via supervenience-relations, mental states as well (at least in some cases). Nida-Rumelin calls this ‘subject’, rather than ‘agent’, causation.

10. Claim 5: Causation by Consciousness Properties
Consciousness properties “often (but not always) owe their causal powers to subject causation or to the underlying physiological process” (p. 280). In the attached note, Nida-Rumelin says she’s convinced by Kim’s exclusion argument. How, then, do we make sense of the qualification “but not always”?