Interesting paper, thanks, though I lack the background for some of the science. Still, I think I get the point. But I don't understand how anything Anderson says refutes a potentially physicalist understanding of the world. He refutes reductionism very well, but my attempt to invent a "best we can do now" version of physicalism was not meant to affirm reductionism, quite the contrary. Maybe the question I should be asking is, What is there in Anderson's paper that introduces a non-physical level of construction, or implies that there's anything "beyond the physical"?

There are many, many diverse voices in that 'systems science' and biosemiosis field, and not all of them are beholden to any kind of physicalism. As you well know, there is a pretty free-wheeling form of scientific idealism associated with physics and variants of the Copenhagen interpretation, and many of them take mind to be fundamental, in an epistemological if not ontological sense. Same too with biosemiotics. Check out Søren Brier's academic homepage (and I was alerted to him by Apokrisis) - titles like 'Information and consciousness: A critique of the mechanistic concept of information', 'Bateson and Peirce on the pattern that connects and the sacred'. I also found a paper by Marcello Barbieri on the history of biosemiosis and it's very wide-ranging.

On the whole, I think physicalism is on the wane. It's real heyday was actually the late 19th century, I think the scientific justification for it was demolished by the introduction of quantum physics in 1927.

Check out Søren Brier's academic homepage (and I was alerted to him by Apokrisis) - titles like 'Information and consciousness: A critique of the mechanistic concept of information', 'Bateson and Peirce on the pattern that connects and the sacred'. I also found a paper by Marcello Barbieri on the history of biosemiosis and it's very wide-ranging. — Wayfarer

I'll take a look..

On the whole, I think physicalism is on the wane. It's real heyday was actually the late 19th century, I think the scientific justification for it was demolished by the introduction of quantum physics in 1927. — Wayfarer

:up:

As Baden was indicating, if you provide physicalism with the baggage of every phenonemon, it loses its explanatory power as to what "physical" even means.. However, a lot of the metaphysical questions belie the framework needed for physicalism. What does "perspective" even mean for a physicalist? The view from a place (somewhere/nowhere/everywhere) doesn't matter to physicalism, but it is important to us, the conscious human who knows there are perspectives. And then what does an a-perspectival philosophy entail? If it is math, forces, and energy/matter, what are we talking about without perspective really? Then we are back to things like panpsychism, object-oriented philosophy, process philosophy, and information theory.. all things that would stretch the concept of "physical" beyond what we often mean by a naive physicalism.

if you provide physicalism with the baggage of every phenonemon, it loses its explanatory power as to what "physical" even means. — schopenhauer1

Quite! The sources I've been reading and listening to of late - these include Bernardo Kastrup, Evan Thompson and John Vervaeke - are open to perspectives more often associated with religious philosophies. They're not formally religious - Thompson has a book called Why I am not a Buddhist - but they're open to considering those perspectives. And I think much of the motivation for physicalism has been based on the delineating it from anything that might be associated with such perspectives. It's like an implicit prohibition, or even a taboo (as Alan Watts said). That is one of the main points of the Thomas Nagel essay mentioned above, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, resulting, he says, in 'the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.' And that is the default for a lot of people and questioning it often results in accusations of 'supporting creationism' (one which was actually levelled at Nagel!) So that's a fault line, like a cultural tectonic plate.

But there has been a sea change in culture since the 1960's, what with the growth of ecological awareness, ideas relating to higher consciousness (mainly originating from the East) and a kind of scientically-informed idealism which you can find even in relatively hard-headed popular intellectuals like Paul Davies. Tao of Physics was another pop milestone. The times they are a'changing.

The alternative is a view of science which opens the door to the soft sciences, including theology. If the repeatability requirement is softened then interpersonal realities can be the subject of scientific study, because repeated interpersonal interactions do yield true and reliable knowledge, even though the repeatability is not as strict as that of the lab scientist who deals with a passive and subordinate substance. — Leontiskos

Quite agree. As a resident idealist, I'm often challenged to prove my claim that there can be such a thing as 'higher knowledge', beyond merely subjective conviction or faith. The argument is there is no method of inter-subjective validation for such claims, in the way there is for peer-reviewed, objective science.

I will often answer that there is indeed a kind of peer-review and 'quality control' method, if you like, in spiritual cultures, such as Zen Buddhism, and I'm sure there have been analogies in other cultural settings. These provide an environment where there is instruction, execution and judgement by higher authorities, in lineages that have persisted for centuries, millenia even. (The Buddhist Sangha is arguably the oldest social organisation still in existence.)

The real problem with the idea of higher knowledge is the lack of a vertical axis against which the term 'higher' is meaningful. But that is the very thing that physicalism has undermined. Physicalism has a 'flat ontology', with matter (or nowadays, matter-energy-space-time) being the sole constituent of existence. This was the point of Robert M. Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which recognised the lack of a 'metaphysics of quality' in Western culture. Another of those 'consciousness raising' books from that era.

I will often answer that there is indeed a kind of peer-review and 'quality control' method, if you like, in spiritual cultures, such as Zen Buddhism... — Wayfarer

Yep, and intersubjective validation/confirmation.

The real problem with the idea of higher knowledge is the lack of a vertical axis against which the term 'higher' is meaningful. But that is the very thing that physicalism has undermined. Physicalism has a 'flat ontology', with matter (or nowadays, matter-energy-space-time) being the sole constituent of existence. — Wayfarer

Yes, that's a good point. What's curious is that often higher knowledge is called "wisdom," and I would think that the physicalist would admit that a physicalist possesses wisdom that a non-physicalist does not possess. That is, the ability to know and understand the metaphysical basis of reality constitutes wisdom. Then enters the age-old question of how to account for reason or intellect in terms of the physical.

That is, the ability to know and understand the metaphysical basis of reality constitutes wisdom. — Leontiskos

There's a nice term you encounter in the writings of some of those who advocate for a philosophia perennis, the perennial philosophy. That is, sapiential, as distinct from (but not necessarily in opposition to) scientific. Hence, the 'sapiential traditions.' In my case, those that I know at least something about are Christian Platonism, Vedanta, and Mahāyāna Buddhism.

In all of them, there is the implicit idea of the 'philosophical ascent', and that knowledge of the real is contingent upon qualities of character - which is something different to 'scientific detachment' even if you can trace how the latter developed out of the former (James Hannam's 'God's Philosophers' is really good on that.) That what is 'higher' is also possessed of a greater reality. You find that also in the German idealists (ref).

But I think the key thing is, all of those traditions emphasise self negation and the requirement of transcending egoic consciousness ('he who looses his life for My sake'), whereas science and liberal individualism is grounded very much in the individual's self -awareness. I'm not wishing to present that as a value judgement or to dissapprove of it, but as a philosophical perspective.

But I don't understand how anything Anderson says refutes a potentially physicalist understanding of the world. He refutes reductionism very well, but my attempt to invent a "best we can do now" version of physicalism was not meant to affirm reductionism, quite the contrary. — J

I think the only way the kind of physicalism you described can be tenable is if we buy into reductionism. I can easily identify phenomena that are obviously not physical, e.g. the mind, society. The only way those can be reasonably considered physical is if you could support the claim that they are reducible to physics.

Published in 1924, Burtt's work explores how the shift to a scientific worldview in the 17th century was underpinned by (often unstated) metaphysical assumptions.

I find the metaphysics of science interesting, so I bought it. I’ve only just started reading, but it looks pretty good so far. I especially like that he has been very specific about what’s included in the metaphysics of modern pre-quantum physics as well as medieval and ancient science.

I agree, good book. Standard text in philosophy of science in years past.

I think this is a good line of argument. I had thought of physicalism, also metaphorically, as kind of a snake pit where whenever one snake pops its head up and you cut it off, another one simply reappears in its place, reflecting the adaptive ability of physicalism to proliferate new versions of itself in response to new objections. This overall amorphism seems highly suspect in the context of scientifc endeavour. But then the question arises, as you and others have pointed out, is it really realistic to presume you can entirely rid yourself of that type of problem and "just do" science under the guidance of methodological naturalism or some other supposedly more neutral framework? Aren't there snakes everywhere? Aren't there metaphysical commitments inherent in making your job philosophically coherent as an enterprise?

I think to an extent there are. And an associated problem is even finding generally accepted definitions of the concepts in question, so that hard lines can be drawn. Perhaps the scientific method, methodological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism (including physicalism) can be placed on a kind of spectrum of increased commitment and perhaps even that modest enterprise has its complications. — Baden

Yes, good. First I want to say that every metaphysics is going to be a little bit like a regenerating hydra by definition. This is because the metaphysics provides a scientific paradigm, and to falsify a paradigm is more difficult than to falsify a theory. Paradigm shifts are unwieldy. Nevertheless, if a paradigm shift is made impossible by the ambiguity of the metaphysics then there is something wrong with the metaphysics. A metaphysics should be durable but not invincible.

Second, there is a significant difference between an explicit metaphysics and an implicit metaphysics. In some ways those on my side of the aisle want to say that the methodological naturalist should get explicit about his implicit metaphysics. I think this is clearly right, at least to the very limited extent that the methodological naturalist needs to explicitly admit that he has an implicit metaphysics. Does he need to go further and "make it explicit"? Not necessarily. That may not be the job of the scientist, and it may be imprudent for him to try if he is not up to the task. If his metaphysics is a fuzzy background to his theories, then it may be better to leave it fuzzy rather than try to explicate what is not clear. I want to say that the scientist only needs to muster his metaphysics when he is challenged on that front, but that for the most part he should leave it alone.

But I still think its useful to try to get out Occam's razor and try to do what we can, especially when one finds oneself defending science against ideological and metaphysical encroachment in general. — Baden

Sure, but if science is the grass and metaphysics is the soil then I would want to talk about the kind of soil/metaphysics required, namely rich or fertile soil. If that is the right analogy, then we would never talk about soil encroachment in general.

I was just told about a new book in this area: Spencer Klavan's, "Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science through Faith." Apparently he makes a case that the (religious) metaphysics of the West birthed science.

But qualitative studies do play a part in science and the soft sciences are absolutely drenched in philosophical commitments, particularly structuralist ones. Though, again, there is some kind of division envisioned between methodologies and metaphysics, it's very hard to see where that line really is. That's probably a conversation that's too broad for the scope of this thread, though I won't deny its relevancy. — Baden

:up:

Well, it seems like disavowals of reductionism are increasingly common. However, if the schema is not replaced by anything positive, it seems to leave a vacuum that sucks nominally "anti-reductionists," back into things like referring to people as "brains," defining the human good in terms of "dopamine," and attempting to explore the proper ordering of modern society in terms various hormone and neurotransmitter levels.:roll:

And this has crossed over into the "political right" as well. Jordan Peterson opens up his self-help book aimed at young men by defining the human good in terms of research on lobsters. From the first chapter, the human good is the cultivation of "feel good chemicals," the acquisition of resources, and access to sexual partners.

To be clear, I certainly wouldn't want to say that the human good has nothing to do with these things, or that studying them isn't relevant. Quite the opposite. However, it's seems to me that it's the residue of reductionism that sends authors like Sam Harris off looking for the explanation of societal and individual good in terms of hormone and neurotransmitter levels. To me, this seems a lot like trying to figure out how to build a plane, or how some animals fly, in terms of the chemistry at work in the organelles of flying animals' wings. No doubt, the animals need wings to fly and the wings are composed of cells, but this completely missed the idea of generating principles or unification as set over (or at least as a balance to) reduction.

I guess part of the problem is that unifications are often misunderstood as reductions in popular science.

I guess part of the problem is that unifications are often misunderstood as reductions in popular science. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This of course brings up metaphysical notions of emergence. This is taken for granted in naive physicalism / scientism.

But the metaphysical naturalism of the physicalist posits that as the universe must behave in a law-like manner, i.e. in a way which is replicable and predictive (in principle if not in practice), anything we encounter in the universe that does not seem to behave so, must despite appearances, ultimately do so by virtue of its very existence. — Baden

Is it not thereby falsifiable, or at least made progressively more unlikely? At some point we might encounter a phenomenon whose behavior we despair of ever fitting a law like framework around. For instance, suppose beings seen in supernatural horror movies became commonly observed. Their seeming ability to bend reality to their will would pose a stark challenge to physicalism. Of course science would attempt to meet that challenge, and some movies will introduce an ersatz set of laws into their world, explaining their ghosts in a way that is supposed to satisfy our physicalist intuitions (but seldom successfully). But, science may simply fail to do so, especially if, as a matter of fact, no such laws existed.

Physicalism is the conviction that empirical phenomenon are determined(not necessarily deterministically) by physical laws (what that means is not clear, granted). This may not be the case.

Physicalism is the conviction that empirical phenomenon are determined(not necessarily deterministically) by physical laws (what that means is not clear, granted). This may not be the case.

Well, I think many physicalists have abandoned the idea that phenomena are extrinsically "determined by" natural laws. Rather, natural laws are our descriptions (or approximations, e.g. Cartwright's work) of how "the world works." On the intrinsic view, law-like descriptions are possible because of what things are, which determines how they interact.

This is interesting in that it proposes a return of natures to naturalism. The earlier view you describe (which certainly still has many adherents and is probably the dominant view in the popular imagination to this day) has essentially disposed of natures, making naturalism more a thesis about the primacy of mechanism and efficient cause (Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age," does a good job showing how this grows out of Reformation Era theology; often missed is the fact that the "new science" didn't actually lead to rapid economic or technological advancement until centuries later, so we can't just explain this all in terms of "usefulness.")

The problem, IMO, is that the return of natures hasn't necessarily come with a move away from smallism, so what exactly constitutes ordered wholes remains an unresolved issue. The most common answers in popular physics tend to be "the cosmos as a whole," or "the very smallest things, which are fundemental precisely because they are smallest." I say "problem" because I think a middle ground that finds relatively unified ordered wholes at other levels would be beneficial, particularly in reunifying the study of nature with that of ethics and the social sciences.

Physicalism in relation to methodological naturalism seems to me like an empty suitcase taken on a plane. The scientific method (the plane) gets you somewhere but the metaphysical baggage of physicalism appears to be an unnecessary and unhelpful accoutrement.

I suppose physicalism draws much of its respectability from its ostensible position as the most central philosophical framework for scientific inquiry, and I’m not denying it is. But I think that can be problematised by pointing out that while physicalism does provide a background context that is inviting towards scientific inquiry, none of the successes of science required physicalism– the scientific method and its accompanying tools being enough to do the job. — Baden

Interesting OP!

As I see it methodological naturalism is the counterpart to the phenomenological epoché. It is simply a methodologically driven bracketing of what is irrelevant to or not within the ambit of enquiry.

Physicalism as a metaphysical standpoint consists in the idea that all that is real is the physical. What is the physical? That which can be observed and/ or whose effects can be observed. That which can be measured and modeled and/or whose effects can be measured and modeled.

Success in science does not require scientists to be metaphysical naturalists but it is arguable that the latter is the most plausible metaphysic. Is there even a coherent alternative?

Another question this enquiry seems to raise is as to what could possibly be at stake in the argument between physicalism and idealism. It seems that for at least some folk what is at stake is that they take physicalism to preclude the possibility that this life is for each of us not all that there is. However implausible we might consider the idea of an afterlife to be I don't see that physicalism necessarily precludes the possibility.

Can you think of anything else that could be at stake?

The question is whether "ridding ourselves of physicalism" has any actual meaningful consequences for physicalists. I think what gives physicalists meaning and contrasts them to others like idealists is not just the weight they put onto scientific rigor and perhaps consensus, but the story that science seems to tell you about the centrality of physics compared to other ontologies. Maybe not always in a practical or epistemic sense but it seems hard to contradict the picture that things kind of all sit on top of physics which describes reality at the finest granularity and prescribes the most general descriptions of how our sensory world changes, when we strip away all the redundant complexity. I think many physicalists would then contrast themselves with idealists and others in the sense that idealists don't believe in this kind of centrality, which usually means subscribing to or being open to scientifically unsubstantiated ideas like the afterlife or Kastruppian dissociative alters or psycho-physical laws. I think a lot of these metaphysical debates like physicalism vs idealism can be boiled down to whether you entertain certain hypotheses about nature. Other than that, any underlying fundamental metaphysical notions seem for all practical purposes indistinguishable, unfalsifiable, uninstantiable. Similarly, the idea of a "scientific method" comes up with similar problems. So what are you left with but contending these hypotheses about the afterlife or alters or psycho-physical laws. Anything else isn't substantially different from physical metaphysics which itself is vague and unfalsifiable and insubstantial.

The question is whether "ridding ourselves of physicalism" has any actual meaning consequences for physicalists. — Apustimelogist

:100: :up:

Contrary to the OP:

Physicalism seems like a vacuous piece of extra metaphysical naturalist baggage in that context. — Baden

"Physicalism" is a handy word for conveying my perspective on minds succinctly, but it is 'weightless baggage' in that for me it is simply a word pointing towards a working hypothesis.

Working hypotheses are things we can't help but carry around. It happens effortlessly and automatically. Attempt to throw a reliable working hypothesis away, and unless a better working hypothesis comes along, the old reliable one will come back.

A life spent in scientific pursuits has made it routine for me to attempt to throw away reliable hypotheses, only to have them come back to mind as the well supported and unfalsified working hypotheses that they are. I suspect the same is true of many who use the word "physicalism" to convey their perspectives.

The metaphor of the empty suitcase aptly characterizes common criticisms of physicalism and materialism: they tend to load these terms with whatever baggage their authors consider to be vulnerable to attack.

Like saddling physicalism with a commitment to determinism, for example. (OK, that's not quite fair, because this is not central to your criticism, and besides, this is so blatantly false as to be hardly worth focusing on.)

The whole point of physicalism being "unscientific" (i.e., not being entailed by science) misses the mark. If physicalism is a metaphysical position, as you (and most everyone else) characterize it, then its only obligation to science is to be consistent with it and to not give it a priori constraints.

Anyway, I am not here to defend physicalism: I am not attached to such vague labels. I prefer discussing more specific positions. If I ever identify as a physicalist, it is for sociological reasons: often enough, I find myself attracted to positions held by thinkers who identify as, or are identified as physicalists.

@Count Timothy von Icarus @T Clark @wonderer1 @Apustimelogist @Janus @J @schopenhauer1 @Leontiskos @Wayfarer @Relativist

(I hope I got everyone).

Answering this post might be a useful segue into dealing with, or at least acknowledging, the other contributions here since I last posted, some of which have been excellent (I have been reading comments, but struggling to find useful additional things to say).

Like saddling physicalism with a commitment to determinism, for example. (OK, that's not quite fair, because this is not central to your criticism, and besides, this is so blatantly false as to be hardly worth focusing on.) — SophistiCat

What I said about determinism as written and qualified isn’t blatantly false or false at all. However, it may ironically be an empty suitcase for the OP because if determinism cannot be applied to modern versions of physicalism in general as many other metaphysical commitments cannot (e.g. the reductionism of physicalism has been criticised in the thread, but there are “non-reductive” forms of physicalism too—the snake pit survives even if individual snakes don’t) then why mention it at all? So, there’s value to that criticism.

I am not attached to such vague labels. I prefer discussing more specific positions. If I ever identify as a physicalist, it is for sociological reasons: — SophistiCat

This ties well into one of my explanations for the empty suitcase: The badge of honour. It generally sounds good for those working in scientific fields to call themselves physicalists. There’s potential social capital there. And it's often not really taken for a metaphysical commitment, but something more akin to common scientific sense.

What are we to say of it then? The suitcase serves a function but often in an indirect way. Maybe many know it's empty or don’t know what’s in the suitcase, but just so long as you have a suitcase! But then, to avoid hypocrisy, the door should be open to alternative metaphysical commitments that don’t have any direct bearing on the conducting of the scientific method, no? Except those who take that route seem to get a much harder time of it---socially.

I suppose I am advocating for a kind of radical agnosticism as to the ultimate nature of things because I think language won’t take us anywhere near there and we end up creating word games that unnecessarily divide and polarise. But then that too might be criticized as a metaphysical commitment. Maybe just opening our mouths about these issues creates empty suitcases, wallets, handbags and other accessories, the only difference between them being a matter of taste. But I'll stick to my position until and unless it's shown to be as shaky as I see the others.

I'm a physicalist, of sorts. Especially in regards to the mind. I don't see any reason not to be. We know physical stuff exists, we know physically affecting the brain changes mental function, and the closest we've ever come to constructing an artificial mind (LLMs can pass turing tests now) was by constructing a physical machine and implementing software in it (which is implemented physically) which in a simplified way mimicks the physical processes of the neuronal structures of our brain.

There's no non-physical model, period. No model at all. Just the english sentence, "the mind can't be physical" - that's what nonphysicalism has, but no model. So it's not like I'm accepting physicalism and rejecting other models - there simply aren't other models. Nobody's made one. No non-physicalist in the entire history of the world has made a compelling nonphysicalist model of a mind, of how a mind might work.

Maybe physicalism is wrong, I'm not 100% sure it has to be right, but I'm okay believing some things which have some tiny probability of being wrong.

Keep this in mind though: this universe is turing complete, which means that if minds are possible to implement in any way, they're almost certainly possible to implement here, out of physical stuff. The turing completeness of the universe makes non-physical ideas of the mind kind of obsolete - however you could implement them non-physically, you could just do that physically too. That's how I see it. We know we have physical stuff right here, we know it's turing complete, and we know when we mess with our physical brains we're messing with the functions of our minds. I don't see any reason to even entertain the model-less world of nonphysical minds. I imagine my reasoning above has a lot in common with why physicalism is the status quo among scientists.

What are we to say of it then? The suitcase serves a function but often in an indirect way. Maybe many know it's empty or don’t know what’s in the suitcase, but just so long as you have a suitcase! But then, to avoid hypocrisy, the door should be open to alternative metaphysical commitments that don’t have any direct bearing on the conducting of the scientific method, no? Except those who take that route seem to get a much harder time of it---socially.

I suppose I am advocating for a kind of radical agnosticism as to the ultimate nature of things because I think language won’t take us anywhere near there and we end up creating word games that unnecessarily divide and polarise. — Baden

Being open-minded is a virtue, and most reasonable people, whether physicalists or otherwise, would say that they are - in principle - open to alternative metaphysical commitments. Open-mindedness is not the same as agnosticism, though. One can have strong opinions, yet be open to changing them.

The main issue with physicalism, as with many other broad philosophical and ideological categorizations, is that it is hard to define and articulate with any precision and consistency, while avoiding circularity. I think the best we can do with it is to treat it ethnographically, characterizing it by the sort of philosophical views that self-identified physicalists tend to hold in common. You will generally find a preference for empirical epistemology and scientific method, and non-mentalist ontology.

If physicalism is a metaphysical position, as you (and most everyone else) characterize it, then its only obligation to science is to be consistent with it and to not give it a priori constraints. — SophistiCat

I don't think the OP is ultimately about physicalism's obligation to science. I think it is about physicalism's claim to be a better (metaphysical) explanation, or at least a better scientific metaphysics.

I suppose your probably right, although rigid atomism and causal closure have the benefit of being a very clear thesis about what being is. And I wouldn't undersell how popular this conception remains.

In his the book he made from his lectures on medieval and renaissance literature (The Discarded Image), C.S. Lewis speaks of the "medieval model," a synchretic fusion of ancient philosophy and literature, and how it acted as a "backcloth" for all speculation about the world in that period (including literature).

It has occured to me that atomistic, reductive materialism remains a strong "backcloth" for our own era. One doesn't seem it so much in popular physics anymore, but it remains a sort of background assumption in the special sciences and particularly in popular science/philosophy (especially the blending of the two). Sam Harris seems like a fine example here. I didn't get through too much of Sapolsky's book because it seemed repetitive and I saw a number of poor reviews of it, but that seems to operate on similar background assumptions.

It has occured to me before if there might not even be a quasi-religious element here, in that this view does seem to make life quite absurd, and so if one embraces an existentialist philosophy of overcoming absurdity and freedom from essence it's an important set of background assumptions.

One way to look at it might be to ask, "was Artistotle a physicalist?" By many measures, we might say yes, given his focus on immanence and thinghood (substance). And yet I tend to agree with Paul Ricoeur that Artistotle's philosophy of nature is primarily a philosophy of quiddity. For him, the chief questions are:

-From whence intelligibility? Why are things what they are?

Whereas physicalism seems to me to generally focus primarily on questions of "how." We have observable phenomena, but how do they come to be and how are they best predicted and forecast? (Dawkins for instance defines "reality" in terms of prediction). The "physical" is just that which is required for this "how" explanation. But the physical itself is often said to lack any "why." It simply is, a brute fact. Intelligibility is a "construct" of minds and need not be sought in nature or the physical, or might even be said to be mere appearance (and quiddity/phenoenology is usually demoted to mere appearance as set over and against objective physical reality).

Ricoeur traces the focus on efficient beginnings and the cascade of efficient causes to the Old Testament, and this is no doubt partly an explanation, but it seems to me like this is a distinctly modern move.

turing complete

Is this adequate for generating a mind? Lots of extremely simple things are Turing complete: Conway's Game of Life, Rule 110, etc. Part of the open questions in the philosophy of information is how to define computation in physical systems because it seems possible the argue that practically everything is a computer (a not unpopular position in physics). But obviously this completely explodes the explanatory power of computational theories of mind, which is why you need something like IIT instead.

At any rate, I don't think physicalism re philosophy of mind has all that much to do with physicalism as an ontology. It seems perfectly possible to accept the former while rejecting the latter.

Panpsychism and participatory universe conceptions of quantum mechanics, or the Wigner-Von Neumann interpretation don't seem necessarily at odds with physicalism, but they do seem to stretch pretty far from what is normally intended by the term, and there are certainly models for these. There are models for dualism too, I just am not particularly familiar with them. They tend to posit the body as something like a "radio receiver." Whether they are convincing is another matter (technically Descartes has a model, it just bottoms out unconvincingly in the pineal gland).

Whereas physicalism seems to me to generally focus primarily on questions of "how." We have observable phenomena, but how do they come to be and how are they best predicted and forecast? (Dawkins for instance defines "reality" in terms of prediction). The "physical" is just that which is required for this "how" explanation. But the physical itself is often said to lack any "why." It simply is, a brute fact. Intelligibility is a "construct" of minds and need not be sought in nature or the physical, or might even be said to be mere appearance (and quiddity/phenoenology is usually demoted to mere appearance as set over and against objective physical reality). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting points, which I'd like to respond to.

Physicalism focuses on both what exists and how things happen (i.e. causation). Everything that exists is physical (this is axiomatic, but it can be defended epistemically), and causation is accounted for through laws of nature - and this explains how things come to be. It does depend on the physical world existing by brute fact (a metaphysically necessary brute fact), but AFAIK, every metaphysical theory depends on some metaphysically necessary brute fact.

Intelligibility and quiddity strikes me as related to theories of mind and of truth. Something is "intelligible" if it is understood (i.e. it is describable by propositions that are known). Quiddity seems a subset of intelligibility. A complete metaphysical theory (whether physicalist or anything else) is a description of the way things actually are objectively (not merely what we perceive), albeit that we learn about the world phenomenologically.

I don't think physicalism re philosophy of mind has all that much to do with physicalism as an ontology. It seems perfectly possible to accept the former while rejecting the latter. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with your latter statement, but I'll state the obvious: a committed physicalist will necessarily believe in a physicalist theory of mind.

The main issue with physicalism, as with many other broad philosophical and ideological categorizations, is that it is hard to define and articulate with any precision and consistency, while avoiding circularity. — SophistiCat

How's this (as a start):
Naturalism is a metaphysical system that assumes the totality of reality is natural. The "natural" is anything that exists* that is causally connected to the actual physical world through laws of nature.
Physicalism=a form of naturalism that adds the assumption that every existing object is physical.

Help me understand what is imprecise or circular.

Well, for one thing, you have "physical" all over the place. That's no clearer than "physicalism."

Intelligibility and quiddity strikes me as related to theories of mind and of truth. Something is "intelligible" if it is understood (i.e. it is describable by propositions that are known). Quiddity seems a subset of intelligibility. A complete metaphysical theory (whether physicalist or anything else) is a description of the way things actually are objectively (not merely what we perceive), albeit that we learn about the world phenomenologically.

This just strikes me as mapping the common presuppositions of physicalism onto "what a complete metaphysical theory should be." It seems to presuppose the subject - object dualism that a great deal of 20th and 21st century explicitly targets as the cardinal sin of early modern philosophy. That quiddity and truth have to do primarily with philosophy of mind would be another point of contention (e.g. the supposition that things are intelligible because of "what they are). So too would the framing that suggests representationalism (i.e. we know our ideas or mental representations, not the world). Likewise for the assertion that metaphysics deals with a knowledge of the "objective" as set over and against the subjective, as opposed say to the absolute (which covers both reality and appearances, since all appearances are really appearances.)

Such a definition surely defines subjective idealism out of contention from the get-go, no? But it seems like the assumptions in the definition would also knock out most pre-modern philosophy (and their various modernizations) and a good deal of contemporary Continental metaphysics, Hegelianism, neo-Thomism, etc.

But of course, probably the number one critique of (mainstream representationalist) physicalism is precisely that it axiomatically assumes an unresolvable dualism that makes skepticism insurmountable.

The "natural" is anything that exists* that is causally connected to the actual physical world through laws of nature. — Relativist

Are laws of nature natural? They’re never actually observed, only their effects can be discerned by measurement and observation. But the question why nature is lawful or what natural laws comprise, is not itself a question that naturalism has answers for. Naturalism assumes an order in nature, but it doesn’t explain it, nor does it need to explain it. That, I suppose, is what you’re getting at by saying that the existence of the world is ‘brute fact’ - which effectively forecloses any attempt to understand why things are the way they are, whether they are as they seem, and so on.

Another argument is that what exists according to natural science, does not include the observing subject who stipulates the axioms upon which it rests. That is the topic of the innumerable and interminable discussions about the hard problem of consciousness. It is also the major topic of both phenomenology and existentialism, which will probably not be cowed with threats of ‘brute fact’. :wink:

Another argument is that what exists according to natural science, does not include the observing subject who stipulates the axioms upon which it rests. That is the topic of the innumerable and interminable discussions about the hard problem of consciousness. It is also the major topic of both phenomenology and existentialism, which will probably not be cowed with threats of ‘brute fact’. :wink: — Wayfarer

Ha! Isn't 'the observing subject who stipulates the axioms upon which it rests' another brute fact? :wink: