Search Results

This chapter revisits the sliding tile puzzle metaphor that the author presented in the first part of this book. Through the challenges and regressive moves he made, the author was able to defend a group of ideas that are at odds with the physicalist orthodoxy within science and the philosophy of mind. He was also able to link consciousness and causation through various presentations on the need to treat them together. Also, through the Theory of Natural Individuals, he was able to provide a new perspective from which to understand nature and open questions on the possibility for an actual empirical and philosophical research program.

The knowledge argument aims to refute physicalism — the view that the world is entirely physical. The argument first establishes the existence of facts (or truths or information) about consciousness that are not a priori deducible from the complete physical truth, and then infers the falsity of physicalism from this lack of deducibility. Frank Jackson gave the argument its classic formulation, but has since rejected the argument claiming that it relies on a false conception of sensory experience, which should be replaced with representationalism (also known as intentionalism) — the view that phenomenal states are just representational states. This chapter argues that Jackson's representationalist response to the knowledge argument fails. Physicalists face a representationalist version of the knowledge argument that inherits the force of the original. Reformulating the challenge in representationalist terms does little to help physicalists answer it.

Defending a non-value-based and therefore purely empirical conception of overall freedom must involve showing how available actions can, at least in theory, be individuated and counted. The problems encountered here include the fact that actions can have an indefinite number of descriptions, that they can be subjected to indefinite spatio-temporal division, and that they give rise to indefinitely long causal chains of events. Solutions to these problems can be found through an application of Donald Davidson’s notion of actions as particulars, and by thinking of act-tokens as located in particular units within a space-time grid. Once possible actions have been adequately individuated, a formula for the measurement of freedom can be constructed, adapting a formula originally proposed by Hillel Steiner and taking into account the compossibility of particular actions and the probability of their being unconstrained. Careful attention to the structure of sets of available actions helps to mitigate some of the supposed counterintuitive implications of this analysis. Furthermore, subscribing to this empirical approach to the measurement of overall freedom does not necessarily imply subscribing to an empiricist or physicalist conception of action.

This chapter defends Saul Kripke's argument. The basic principle underlying the argument is that if a sentence contains only terms that pick out their referents essentially then, if the sentence expresses a necessary truth, it is impossible for people in our epistemic situation to be mistaken in asserting the sentence. It seems clear that people in our epistemic situation might be mistaken in asserting the sentences that materialists assert as necessary truths. The option available to materialists is to claim that physicalist terms do not pick out their referents essentially. But that leads to an implausible view of physical reality akin to idealism.

The argument against physicalism is an argument against the claim that the physical facts entail the facts about phenomenal consciousness. To be able to explain why orthodox physicalist's approaches are unsatisfying, the author first presents the kinds of responses a physicalist may claim and categorizes them into three: appeals to a posteriori necessity, appeals to holism, and warnings about a greater absurdity. In this chapter, each of these strategies for responding to the anti-physicalist arguments is examined. Subsequently, the author outlines various reasons why he considers these responses inadequate.

This chapter contends that a Kantian perspective on the nature of introspective representation inspires a defense of a physicalist understanding of phenomenal states in the face of the most prominent arguments against it. Immanuel Kant claims that introspective representations (those of inner sense) are entities caused by the states they represent and are distinct from them, and that they mediate the representational relationship between the subject and the introspected psychological states. As a result, the subject may not represent these states as they are in themselves. It is argued that Kant's position yields a significant challenge to Frank Jackson's knowledge argument, and that it provides a response to those — like Joseph Levine and Robert Adams — who maintain that there is an explanatory gap between the physical and the phenomenal that the physicalist will have difficulty closing.

Only matter has causal powers. The underlying metaphysical intuition is perhaps clear enough to be getting on with: whatever enters into causal interactions is constituted of the sort of stuff that basic physics is about. Call that the ‘physicalist’ thesis (PT). This chapter argues that PT functions as an a priori methodological constraint on scientific practice; ‘a priori’ in the sense that any theory that fails to conform to PT to that extent counts as disconfirmed. This applies to intentional psychology inter alia: only matter can think. It also discusses what philosophers call the ‘naturalization’ of intentional psychology.

This chapter discusses a set of ideas associated with the phrase ‘the explanatory gap’ and their methodological implications. The ‘explanatory gap’ refers to the lack of any conceptual tie between physical descriptions and claims about consciousness. It is understood by most people as expressing the dualist intuition that the conscious mind is separate from the brain. Given this terminology, type-A and type-B physicalists can be distinguished by their differing attitudes to this ‘explanatory gap’. Type-A physicalists will insist that there is no ‘explanatory gap’ and that, despite appearances to the contrary, claims about consciousness can after all be shown to follow a priori from the physical facts. Type-B physicalists, by contrast, accept the ‘explanatory gap’, but maintain that no ontological conclusions about the immateriality of consciousness follow.

This chapter analyses various types of causal relationships and argues for the legitimacy of causal claims at higher levels. First, it formulates the physicalist doctrine and discusses the architecture of instrumental control at different levels which this physicalism allows. It also examines how far this architecture of control is mirrored in the architecture of causality: how far causality, like control, can be found at higher levels.