The Vagueness Argument Against Physicalism

When did consciousness first evolve? Was there a very first creature who broke the pattern of insentience, feeling sensations and seeing light for the first time in evolutionary history? Or did our capacity to experience the world evolve gradually, like everything else? Phenomenal consciousness shouldn’t be unique. We’d expect it to have evolved gradually, just …

The Argument from Psychophysical Harmony

I was recently joined by Dr. Dustin Crummett to discuss a new argument from consciousness for theism. (Though psychophysical harmony is evidence for theism, it may be equally good evidence for non-theistic hypotheses that I find interesting, like axiarchism and natural teleology.) This is from the introduction of the paper: This paper develops a new …

No brain, no mind?

In a piece for Aeon entitled The Empty Brain, psychologist Robert Epstein writes, “The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. . . . But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of …

What is Naturalism?

Naturalists, according to David Papinau, author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on naturalism, believe “that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’.” Naturalism “has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy” beyond this, along with an emphasis on science as a means to understand the natural world. Naturalism is the view that …

A few reasons the combination problem doesn’t bother me much

“Why should you adopt panpsychism when it sticks you with the same problem it set out to solve?” We take this counterintuitive step by placing experience at fundamental reality, and so avoid the hard problem, but now there’s a new emergence problem: how do we go from a host of conscious particles to a new …

David Chalmers on the Vitalism Objection

“Every reductionist has his favorite analogy . . . It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain.”Thomas Nagel, What is it like to be a bat? We’ve talked about this before, but given the frequency with which this objection is …

Can physicalism explain phenomenal consciousness?

There are a few ideas that, taken together, have led me away from physicalism. These points could factor into an argument against physicalism; namely, that ordinary physicalism doesn’t provide us with tools adequate to explain what we know about our world. The first and most important of these ideas that have led me away (or …

Panpsychism in 7 1/2 Minutes

Here’s a very short overview of my version of panpsychism. Please keep in mind that this contains some technical language and assumes some background knowledge in philosophy of mind. Any elaborated form of naturalism will hold that some features of the natural world are primitive, meaning they are not susceptible to further explanation. Matter is …

All Materialism Collapses Into Illusionism

If you’re a materialist, you think fundamental reality is essentially non-experiential. And you think consciousness, or the illusion of consciousness, emerged from this non-experiential stuff. Some materialists think consciousness emerges “weakly,” in the same sense that biology and tables and whirlpools emerge. Biology emerges out of chemistry. Liquidity emerges from molecules which are not liquid. …

some Objections to Panpsychism

Introduction My imagined audience has so far been those who think of themselves as physicalists and naturalists. If you believe there’s an undetectable ghost in your brain that pushes atoms around in ways that violate the laws of physics — in other words, if you’re a substance dualist — then what I have to say …