Philosopher C.B.Martin died last year and left us a great book.  In it, he summarizes his philosophy and its applications to mind, causality and more.   Martin proposes an ontology featuring dispositions (sometimes referred to as powers).  Notably for him, dispositions are inherently qualitative, and are also capable of producing myriad manifestations depending on the context.An attraction of starting with dispositions is their potential to support a theory of real causality and of intentionality - topics mainstream analytic philosophy has trouble with IMO.  Martin adds the twist that we should consider dispositions to also be qualities, which helps solve an aspect of the mind/body problem.  I found the biggest key to Martin's ontology to be his proposal that dispositions don't just point to one kind of manifestation, they are prolific.  The fundamental units of nature have dispositions to potentially an infinite number of different manifestations depending on context.  This allows the ontology to support the rich features of the world, without the notions of multiple levels of reality (or "possible worlds" modal structure).With regard to mind, Martin stresses that dispositions (which are inherently directional) give you intentionality at level below what we think of as "mental".  He also gives an account of how a natural system utilizing representation comes into being; he is inspired by results in neurobiology which he takes to show that "vegetative" (i.e. unconscious) systems of the brain effectively utilize representations already.  So intentionality and representation, along with qualities, are already part of nature before we get to the human mind.So what does distinguish the mental?  Here Martin builds a detailed model which says the difference between mental and non-mental lies in the kind of qualitative material used in a representation.  If the material of use is appropriately sensory, we get consciousness. This book was not an easy read for this layperson, but I found it very rewarding.

The Mind in Nature PDF

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