Functionalist Emergentist Materialism: A Pragmatic Framework for Consciousness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is often challenging to fully justify why it is preferable to think and conduct research about consciousness following a particular theory as opposed to another. This may be especially true in disciplines within Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience which may be pressured to follow radical reductionism to physics or chemistry. The present approach was developed through teaching a cohort of approximately 2000 undergraduate and graduate students for over fifteen years. It involves a pragmatic tutorial of the major traditions in philosophical thinking, dissecting the explanatory power of each theory and logically resolving their differences in a unitary novel framework called functionalist emergentist materialism (FEM). This proposed epistemic approach dissolves many theoretical issues. Notably, it becomes possible to make sense of the “hard problem” as an evolutionary solution. We apply and integrate this approach with one of the most comprehensive neuroscientific theories, Damasio's tripartite of consciousness, and extract a pragmatic test for recognizing conditions in which an organism is conscious. FEM aligns with contemporary evolutionary thinking and current scientific standards.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".