ABSTRACT
Essentially "consciousness" or "mentalist" revolution involved a shift from long prevalent micro-determinist concepts to a new macro-determinist interpretation of consciousness and brain function in a conceptual conversion that occurred in psychology with almost explosive suddenness in the early 1970s. In the last decade or two there has appeared on the field a new set of arguments, which might seem to strike a middle ground between scientific determinism and religious or contra-causal freedom. These new arguments depend on the notions of emergence and supervenience. In philosophy of mind, supervenience takes the form of functionalism, which is essentially a replacement for the identity theory of mind and body. Supervenience as a theory of metaphysical materialism has been developed by Geoffrey Hellman and Frank Thompson, John Haugeland, Jaegwon Kim, and Paul Teller. Supervenience is important in certain philosophical contexts because it is a form of many-one relation that precludes the necessity of identifying a mental/moral state with its underlying physical state.
