Dieter Wandschneider

My argument is that Chalmers’ Zombie fiction and his rigid-designator-argument going back on Kripke seems to come down to a petitio principii. Rather, at the core it appears to be more related to the essential ‘privacy’ of the phenomenal internal perspective. In return for Chalmers I argue that the ‘principle of self-preservation’ of living organisms necessarily implies subjectivity and the emergence of meaning. The comparison with a robot proves instructive. The mode of ‘mere physical’ being is transcended if, in the form of phenomenal perception, meaning appears on the stage of higher animals – a transition explained here as an emergence phenomenon based on the systemic co-operation of perception, evaluation and action (‘percept-eval-act-system’). Some fundamental considerations are added: Those consequences implied by the principle of self-preservation reveal the natural-biological origin of the organism – primarily seeming a more insignificant circumstance – as a momentous fundamental difference (end-in-itself-character, subjectivity, constitution of meaning) compared to technical artefacts (robot). And the emergentist approach indicates the – maybe paradoxical – possibility of a dualism of physical and psychical phenomena in an overall physical system, that is not dualistic at the same time.

The well-known empiricist apories of the lawfulness of nature prevent an adequate philosophical interpretation of empirical science until this day. Clarification can only be expected through an immanent refutation of the empiricist point of view. My argument is that Hume’s claim, paradigmatic for modern empiricism, is not just inconsequent, but simply contradictory: Empiricism denies that a lawlike character of nature can be substantiated. But, as is shown, anyone who claimes experience to be the basis of knowledge (as the empiricist naturally does), has, in fact, always already presupposed the lawfullness of nature, i.e. has assumed the ontology of a nature lawful in itself. If lawfulness is, more closely, understood as dependency on conditions, then the functional character of the laws of nature is involved with the consequence that verification is not to be taken as a mere repetition of measurements but as clarification of the conditional structure of the physical process. Furthermore the functionality of the laws of nature also includes a statement on their invariance (relative to certain transformations) and so their lawlikeness. This throws a new light on the problem of induction. Seen in this way it is hardly surprising that the notorious neglect of the functional aspect in empiricism has led to fundamental problems with the concept of the law of nature.