Consciousness, supervenience, and reduction

The main topic of this paper is the question whether, and to what extent, the supervenience theses may help us in dealing with the problem of the consciousness and understanding the relation between mantal and physical properties. In the first two sections, the content and versions of the supervenience theses are specified and illustrated on some recent views like emergentism and Davidson's anomalious monism. The following sections deal with connections between the supervenience theses and types of reduction which are usually employed within the science. The conclusion is that the supervenience theses is not of a great avail in resolving the problem of consciossnes because it only points out to a covariance of mental and physical properties without suggesting any account why such-and-such neural mechanisms and processes give rise to specific mental properties.