To say that a car is presently going 60mph is usually to say a counterfactual: one who says this means that if it did travel for an hour (even though it hasn't yet done so), then it would have traversed 60 miles. And this counterfactual goes beyond what has been experienced. For the measured speed in question is really the disposition to go 60 miles in an hour. But a disposition as such is beyond the reach of an empiricist. We simply don't sense "60mph": rather, we interpret something as having a disposition to traverse a certain distance. This interpretation, in going beyond experience, is just as metaphysical as causality, for like causality, disposition goes beyond experience in interpreting it.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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