Anomalous
Broad’s Emergent Mind and Psychic/Psi Factors
Consciousness as Strongly Emergent, Perhaps With a Psychic Factor
C. D. Broad argued that phenomenal qualities are real and cannot be deduced from even complete physical knowledge of the brain, so consciousness is a strongly emergent property of organized matter linked to it by irreducible ‘trans-ordinal’ laws. On ordinary evidence he favored this Emergent Materialism, but he held that well-established psychical phenomena would support a Compound Theory, in which mind emerges from a brain combined with a further ‘psychic factor’ that might outlast the body.
C. D. Broad
What consciousness is
Consciousness is a genuinely novel characteristic that emerges, by lawful but non-deducible trans-ordinal laws, from suitably organized material systems, possibly in compound with a non-observable psychic factor.
Mind and body
Mental properties depend lawfully on brain organization yet cannot be reduced to or predicted from physical properties. In the Compound Theory, the conscious mind belongs to the organized combination of brain and psychic factor, not to either one alone.
Mechanism
Trans-ordinal laws: the link between a level of organization and the properties that emerge at it is a basic law of nature, found only by observing the emergent property after it appears.
Core claims
- Broad mapped exactly seventeen possible mind-matter theories by asking whether mentality and materiality are each fundamental, emergent, reducible, or delusive, then eliminated them by argument.
- Any theory that calls mentality an illusion refutes itself, since an illusion is already a mental seeming.
- Psychical phenomena such as telepathy and precognition would violate ‘basic limiting principles’, including the privacy of minds and their dependence on living brains, so psi is the main empirical test of those assumptions.
- A Ψ-component might carry part of a person’s dispositional structure after death without itself being a person or having experiences, which may still require a living organism.
Criticisms
Broad leaned heavily on Soal’s experiments, which Betty Markwick later showed involved data manipulation. He dismissed psychokinesis and physical mediumship on thin grounds, and Chalmers notes that the archangel argument ignores the option of an epistemic gap without an ontological one.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Uncertain
- Since mentality emerges by trans-ordinal laws that can only be found by observation, whether an artificial organization would produce experience cannot be deduced in advance.
- Survival beyond death: Possible
- Broad held that a psychic factor carrying some dispositions might persist after death if psychical evidence is genuine, but he did not claim this established, and such persistence would fall short of personal survival.
Related theories
- Emergence (Overlap)
- Jackson's Representationalism and the Knowledge Argument (Influence)
- Huxley’s Mind-At-Large Filter Theory (Influence)
- Bunge's Emergent Materialism (Overlap)
Sources
- The Mind and Its Place in Nature, C. D. Broad (1925)
- The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy, C. D. Broad (1949)
- Lectures on Psychical Research, C. D. Broad (1962)
- Human Personality and the Possibility of Its Survival, C. D. Broad (1955)
- Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research: Selected Essays, C. D. Broad (1953)
- Perception, Physics and Reality, C. D. Broad (1914)
- Scientific Thought, C. D. Broad (1923)
- Some Elementary Reflexions on Sense-Perception, C. D. Broad (1952)
- The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism, B. P. McLaughlin (1992)
- The Soal-Goldney Experiments with Basil Shackleton: New Evidence of Data Manipulation, B. Markwick (1978)
- C. D. Broad (A Companion to Analytic Philosophy), J. Van Cleve (2001)
- Emergent Consciousness: Themes in C. D. Broad’s Philosophy of Mind, K. Gustavsson (2002)
- The Varieties of Monism: C. D. Broad, A. Dewalque (2024)