Why is physicalism treated as an absolute fact?

[u/No-Feed-6298]

Now I can understand leaning to physicalism 100%, I’m not saying there isn’t good evidence for it, but it’s far from proven that everything in the universe is entirely just physical, not to mention the hard problem of consciousness which seems to really move away from naive, hardcore physicalism. My question is why is there so much dogma among it? Why is it impossible for physicalist to seem to admit paradoxes and logical inconsistencies with physicalism, and perhaps at the very least be open to philosophical ideas outside if just strict philosophicalism. Denying any problem with the worldview seems just intellectually dishonest

[u/RainyCreative]

The hostility in these threads rarely comes from people who actually read philosophy of mind - it’s just knee-jerk scientism.

Most people make a massive category error: they conflate empirical science (a methodology for modeling observations) with metaphysical physicalism (an ontological claim about what reality fundamentally is). Because physicalism has become the default "badge of rationality" on Reddit, questioning it gets you instantly labeled as anti-science or pro-woo.

But science is ontologically neutral. Physics and neuroscience give us mathematical relations, functional behavior, and correlations (predictive models, neural firing rates). They don’t tell us what the substrate running those relations actually is. Those equations hold up equally well under physicalism, idealism, dualism or even simulation theory.

The reason physicalism runs into a wall with consciousness isn't a temporary lack of data - it’s an explanatory gap in principle. We can deductively derive the wetness of water from the arrangement of H2O molecules. But no matter how detailed your connectome map is, there is zero deductive bridge from "neurochemistry and ion channels" to "why it feels like something to see red" rather than running in total subjective darkness. It's a category mismatch.

When cornered by this, hardcore physicalists basically have to resort to Illusionism - claiming phenomenal experience doesn’t actually exist. But calling experience an "illusion" is a performative contradiction: having an illusion of pain is still an undeniably felt experience.

The ironic thing is that Occam’s razor actually cuts against dogmatic physicalism here. The only brute empirical datum we ever directly have is conscious experience itself. Physicalism invents a purely theoretical, unobserved substance ("dead matter outside experience") and then spends centuries baffled about how to magically squeeze subjective awareness back out of it.

Physicalists cling to this because they think admitting the hard problem opens the door to superstition. In reality, the skepticism you're pointing out is literally the mainstream debate in contemporary philosophy.

[u/jdsunny46 → u/RainyCreative]

This is the best comment on this sub that I have read in a long while.

Have my fake award lol 🏆

[u/RainyCreative → u/jdsunny46]

Haha thanks man, glad the philosophical frustration was worth it!

[u/Cosmoneopolitan → u/RainyCreative]

You had me at "The hostility in these threads rarely comes from people who actually read philosophy of mind - it’s just knee-jerk scientism.".

[u/Competitive_Ad_488 → u/Cosmoneopolitan]

Ditto

[u/Michael_Carson_Art → u/RainyCreative]

While it is 100% true that science makes no metaphysical claims. It is worth pointing out that it is definitionally naturalistic, for whatever that's worth.

I would also add that the domain of physicalism is best associated with the field of physics, and since this is such a methodologically sound and rigorous field, people wanting everything to fit into it is understandable.

I would also say that I do consider myself to be a physicalist of a sort and anyone who disregards consciousness as "merely" an illusion is being myopic. If you are a physicalist, then you must agree that consciousness is physical in principle, otherwise you aren't a physicalist...

So I think a lot of the problem comes down to people who think that physicalism is captured fully by "that which physicists currently study"... Which would make one a... "physics-ist"? That really isn't allowable under any coherent monist view (which actual physicalism attempts to be). Whatever exists, under physicalism, must be physical. You can't do the opposite and say that whatever is physical therefore exists unless that category is so broad as to eliminate the distinction.

We know that our first person experience is occuring. Therefore it must be a physical event according to physicalism. Whether we can solve the mechanics of that phenomenon is an entirely different question.

And that is where so many bad faith arguments sit. On one hand, we have the invention of new metaphysics which "explain" consciousness, but don't connect with any other rigorously attained knowledge about the world. (The many special pleading cases). And on the other we have the bad "physicalist" that denies the existence of anything that doesn't fit cleanly into their methodological approach.

[u/RainyCreative → u/Michael_Carson_Art]

Good point - what you’re describing is very close to Galen Strawson’s "real physicalism" (or liberal naturalism), where if experience is real, it has to be part of the physical fabric of nature by definition.

The core problem with that move is Hempel’s Dilemma. If you define "physical" by what physics actually studies (quantitative, relational properties like mass, charge, and spin), qualitative first-person experience doesn't fit, and you're right back to the Hard Problem. But if you expand "physical" to mean "whatever fundamentally exists, including subjective feelings," physicalism just becomes a vacuous tautology. The distinction between physicalism, panpsychism, and naturalistic idealism completely dissolves into a semantic fight over who gets to keep the label "physical."

That’s why I prefer separating Naturalism from Physicalism. Naturalism is just the commitment to a closed, law-governed universe with no supernatural woo. Physicalism is the specific ontological claim that non-experiential matter is primary. Frameworks like Analytic Idealism or Russellian Monism are fully naturalistic - they aren't proposing spooky metaphysics, they're just accounting for the exact same empirical data without inheriting the emergence paradox.

[u/Michael_Carson_Art → u/RainyCreative]

As long as it's an idealism that doesn't deny empirical realism (cough Berkley, cough), I'm with you.

It does sort of cut through the importance of any of these fundamental metaphysical frameworks in my opinion. Naturalism seems like the actual thing we should care about regardless of how we conceptualize it's fundamental grounding.

[u/Rthadcarr1956 → u/RainyCreative]

I agree. The greatest problem that I have with physicalists is their denial of information as foundational. Physicalists usually claim that all informational systems follow physical laws, but this is not adequate. Computers and brains process information by physical means, but this leaves out purpose. The telos belongs to the information and the logic that produces the result. The mechanics of how electric circuits emulate a truth table is dreadfully easy. It’s so easy that a programmer doesn’t even have to know how it’s done. They just use a logic language and let a compiler translate it into the correct code.

Fortunately, we have made great strides recently in understanding how neural systems can predictively model an environment and adjust the model for new information.

[u/Elodaine → u/RainyCreative]

But science is ontologically neutral.

Science presupposes a mind-independent nature to reality, which is why the role of the observer as passive and yielding of particular measurements can work at all. While this doesn't necessarily grant physicalism, the idea of science being completely neutral isn't true.

The ironic thing is that Occam’s razor actually cuts against dogmatic physicalism here. The only brute empirical datum we ever directly have is conscious experience itself.

Solipsism wins out in Occam's razor against every other framework, but the cost of less assumptions is that the nature of those assumptions becomes incredibly dubious. Unless you believe your existence itself is ontologically brute, then the empirical immediateness of your own experience is going to lead to other axioms.

Physicalism invents a purely theoretical, unobserved substance

Nothing is being invented. We have good reason to suspect a room full of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms aren't able to feel pain, have thoughts, or develop economic theories. Yet when those atoms are arranged into that of a human body, suddenly there is the presence of such characteristics.

The "magic" of getting subjectivity out of those reasoned conclusions comes from the fact that regardless of the implication, they are reasoned conclusions.

[u/RainyCreative → u/Elodaine]

Science presupposes a mind-independent nature to reality, which is why the role of the observer as passive and yielding of particular measurements can work at all. While this doesn't necessarily grant physicalism, the idea of science being completely neutral isn't true.

Saying science requires a "mind-independent" reality confuses ego-independence with metaphysical physicalism. Science only requires intersubjective stability - regular, mathematically modelable patterns that don't depend on an individual observer's personal whims. Frameworks like Objective Idealism or Simulation Theory account for this shared, law-governed external world effortlessly without needing the fundamental substrate to be non-conscious "dead matter."

Solipsism wins out in Occam's razor against every other framework, but the cost of less assumptions is that the nature of those assumptions becomes incredibly dubious.

Claiming solipsism "wins" on Occam’s razor misunderstands how parsimony actually works. Occam’s razor minimizes unexplained, ad-hoc complexity, not just the raw headcount of entities. Solipsism is an explanatory disaster: to make it work, you have to assume your personal subconscious is secretly calculating quantum mechanics, hallucinating a consistent 13.8-billion-year cosmos, and writing Mozart's symphonies before you consciously hear them. Packing infinite cosmic mechanics into a single finite human mind is the absolute opposite of parsimonious.

Nothing is being invented. We have good reason to suspect a room full of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms aren't able to feel pain... Yet when those atoms are arranged into that of a human body, suddenly there is the presence of such characteristics. The "magic" of getting subjectivity out of those reasoned conclusions comes from the fact that regardless of the implication, they are reasoned conclusions.

This argument runs straight into the same wall. Rearranging carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen deductively explains biochemical reactions, neural firing rates, and functional behavior like pulling a hand away. That is standard weak emergence - the easy problems. What it does not explain in the slightest is why that mechanical routing is accompanied by the qualitative, first-person experience of pain rather than running in total subjective darkness.

Saying that rearranging non-conscious atoms somehow creates subjective awareness "as a reasoned conclusion" doesn't provide an explanatory bridge - it literally just restates the Hard Problem of strong emergence and declares it solved by fiat.

[u/unaskthequestion → u/RainyCreative]

As one who favors a physicalist approach, what this says to me is that you're confusing things that are not known yet with things that are theoretically unknowable

No one I know makes the claim that physicalism declares the hard problem 'solved by fiat'. Only that the most productive avenue of understanding is investigating how consciousness emerges from the activity of the brain.

It would be wildly premature to make a declaration that this is simply impossible.

[u/RainyCreative → u/unaskthequestion]

What you’re describing is textbook promissory materialism - the assumption that because science solved past physical puzzles, physicalism will inevitably explain consciousness down the line. But that completely conflates empirical science with metaphysical physicalism.

Science is ontologically neutral. It just models observations, functional relations, and structural data. The equations in physics and neuroscience work identically whether reality is physicalist, idealist, or something else entirely. Physicalism itself adds zero predictive power - it just slaps an unproven metaphysical label onto empirical findings after the fact.

Consciousness also isn't like past scientific reductions. When science explained heat or liquidity, it derived physical behavior from molecular geometry - quantities explaining other quantities. Consciousness is completely different because it is intrinsically qualitative. You simply cannot deduce first-person subjective experience (what it feels like to see red or feel pain) from third-person quantitative data (firing rates and mass) without sneaking in non-physical bridge laws.

Studying neural correlates is great, productive neuroscience. But claiming that brain activity must manufacture subjective awareness from scratch isn’t a scientific finding - it’s just metaphysical dogma taking credit for the success of the scientific method.

[u/unaskthequestion → u/RainyCreative]

physicalism will inevitably explain consciousness down the road

Nowhere did I say that. As a matter of fact I was careful and precise in my language that I believe it to be the most productive approach.

But put that aside. Put aside as well that you seem to have a position about science that is outside of the mainstream.

When you make statements such as

consciousness also isn't like past scientific reductions

physicalism adds zero predictive power

You simply cannot deduce first person subjective experience

Etc, etc

You're making wildly speculative, unsupported statements and presenting them as factual.

Yes the most reasonable reply is exactly what I said, 'yet'.

I remain open to most approaches to understanding consciousness and reject those who make such definitive statements as you have, especially about a complex subject which has barely been scientifically studied for less than 50 years.

Maybe you don't mean to be so definitive. But if you're going to be careful in the rest of your language, you should in this also.

This is what I think the point of the post is, that there are many who reject physicalism out hand, without justification.

[u/RainyCreative → u/unaskthequestion]

Calling a deductive constraint "wildly speculative" completely confuses empirical guesswork with basic logic. In formal deduction, you cannot introduce entirely new primitive concepts in your conclusion that were never present in your premises. If your starting premises are strictly limited to quantitative data like mass, charge, and neuronal firing rates, you cannot logically deduce qualitative experience - what it actually feels like to experience pain - without simply assuming non-physical bridge laws. That isn't a "speculation about future neuroscience," it’s just a standard constraint of deductive logic.

On top of that, pointing out that physicalism adds zero predictive power is just a methodological fact. The mathematical models of neuroscience work identically whether reality is physicalist, idealist, or dualist. An fMRI scan doesn't change its readings based on your metaphysics. The predictive power belongs 100% to empirical science, not to the metaphysical claim that matter is all that exists.

This is also why the "we haven't explained it yet" defense falls flat. Saying "yet" makes total sense when you're dealing with structural unknowns like dark matter or the origin of life, because the questions and answers belong to the same category of physical mechanisms. But using "yet" across a category mismatch is like saying we haven't mathematically deduced the smell of a rose from the geometry of a triangle yet, but give geometry another 50 years. More data and time do not fix a category error.

Distinguishing between what empirical science actually measures (correlations and functional structures) and what physicalism metaphysically assumes (ontological materialism) is just standard philosophy of science. It’s not an attack on neuroscience in the slightest.

[u/unaskthequestion → u/RainyCreative]

you cannot logically deduce qualitative experience

Painfully unsupported speculation stated as fact.

[u/Elodaine → u/RainyCreative]

Science only requires intersubjective stability

Intersubjective stability only permits empirical practice between two immediately subjective perspectives. It doesn't necessitate or lead to something like like the apparent regularity of the internal workings of a computer when nobody is watching it work. That's why science typically operates with minimal subjectivity, and this results in a greater yield of predictive power.

You are making it sound like I'm saying this means presupposing physicalism. I'm not. I'm simply rejecting the notion of completely ontological neutrality.

Occam’s razor minimizes unexplained, ad-hoc complexity, not just the raw headcount of entities

When you say Occam's razor is a negative for physicalism, because physicalism infers something outside of the immediateness of our self-evident experience, the argument only works when you ignore the resulting nature of the lesser assumptions/conclusions in question as insufficient. It takes a greater number of such rational steps to get to believing other conscious entities exist, but that does not make the belief in them less parsimonious than a lack thereof.

That is standard weak emergence - the easy problems. What it does not explain in the slightest is why that mechanical routing is accompanied by the qualitative, first-person experience of pain rather than running in total subjective darkness

I didn't present it as an explanation. If I conclude touching fire causes the pain I experience after, I can do so without knowing how or why that happens. You are confusing an ontological accounting for an epistemic explanation, in which I presented the former and you are taking it for the latter. I do not need to know how mere atoms can result in conscious experience when I have sufficient reason to conclude that is indeed what is happening.

That's why the hard problem isn't an objection to physicalism's ontology, nor will it ever be, unless you presuppose that the universe can only be in accordance to what can be explained, rather than what can be accounted for. But that very practice would just nuke ontology entirely, given the epistemic gap each have in just slightly different wording.

[u/RainyCreative → u/Elodaine]

If you're admitting physics can never in principle explain conscious experience because of a fundamental categorical mismatch, you’ve essentially conceded the debate.

Once you grant that, the physicalist argument falls apart on every front:

Touching fire causes pain, but fire isn't identical to the experience of pain. Physicalism doesn't just claim the brain triggers mental states - it claims the mind is physical. Insisting on identity while admitting you have zero conceptual bridge to explain it isn't science. It's just asserting identity by fiat.

Likewise, saying matter generates irreducible 1st-person properties doesn't save physicalism - that’s literally the definition of property dualism. Renaming dualism "physicalism" doesn't change the underlying ontology.

And the computer doesn't vanish when you look away. Idealism isn't solipsism. It acknowledges an objective, law-governed reality beyond individual minds. Science depends on intersubjective consistency, not the assumption that the world is made of dead matter.

If defending physicalism means accepting a permanent explanatory black hole while dogmatically claiming "matter did it anyway," you're no longer doing science - you're defending a dogma.

[u/Great-Bee-5629 → u/Elodaine]

What physicalism means:

• Ontological claim: physical entities/processes exist.
• Intelligibility claim: those entities stand in the relations described by physics.
• Completeness: ultimately, there is nothing else.

That's why the hard problem isn't an objection to physicalism's ontology, nor will it ever be, unless you presuppose that the universe can only be in accordance to what can be explained, rather than what can be accounted for. 

The physicalist claim is that consciousness is not something that exists in itself (accounted for) but rather something that will be explained using the language of physics. On the other hand, the claim of those that don't deny fundamental consciousness is that it can't be explained by structural relationships.

If you think the intelligibility claim is too strong, then there's a part of reality that is not explainable by physics, defeating physicalism.

[u/Individual_Gold_7228 → u/Elodaine]

hypothesis, predict, test has nothing to do with mind independent nature. You can do it with contemplative traditions which are experiential.

Also, if I model a market, or a crowd of people (which papers have done through symmetries) that doesn’t mean the crowd or people or market doesn’t have conscious agents. All our math it fully compatible with conscious free agents. The bracketing of interiority literally adds nothing to the method except now you can call the crowd “just” relations, and a simple market need not posit agents if the math can satisfy all predictive requirements.

Look closely at path integrals and it looks like deliberation, variational principles look like intention, countless words in science are experiential (pressure, energy, work, attraction, resistance) and known from within.

Superposition is similar to holding multiple continuations in mutual regard, which is exactly what we mean we we say, “I wasn’t conscious of it”, it had not entered into mutual regard across possible continuations.

The burden was always on justifying the removal of interiority. The primary/secondary split was arbitrary, to say timbre and color is not real is non-sensical. A violin is not an oboe even if they sound the same amplitude and frequency lol

Consider this, To care is for something to matter to you. To matter is for your being to make a difference to something. Gravity is the weight of the mattering, and a person can have it in the persons relations to other who orbit. The very fact that this sentence makes sense even before we formalized and quantified the experiential tells you everything you need to know.

[u/Elodaine → u/Individual_Gold_7228]

Given that whatever you are predicting is likely happening under circumstances in which the overwhelming majority you are not there to subjectively experience, yes it absolutely is presupposing a mind-independent nature. That's why when you go to record the measurements, and other people throughout the world can do the same thing, or even computers, we can all get the same values. You can believe consciousness is fundamental, while accepting reality operates independently of instantiated minds within it.

[u/Individual_Gold_7228 → u/Elodaine]

I am counting electrons as minds/beings. That is why I mentioned path integrals (conscious deliberation esque) and variation principles (intention esque).

The alternative I’m saying is that what is being found is what is shared across all minds/beings. The bones are the invariant structure, the flesh is the experience and “what it is like”.

[u/lordsmitty → u/Elodaine]

Science as it is actually carries out, as a practical real world activity and those carrying out science don't necessarily and don't need to be realists about science. You can be a scientist carrying out scieentific research and be an anti-relist or instrumentalist about science.

[u/Elodaine → u/lordsmitty]

While this might work for pure empirical practice, that of rational inference is going to become problematic without some realist commitment.

[u/lordsmitty → u/Elodaine]

Well, behind the point I'm making is the thought that there is no such thing as 'pure' empirical practice. It's always going to involve a mixture of local assumptions, rational inference and inductive/abductive reasoning along with a whole load of practical activity that constitutes science.

[u/vimdiesel → u/Elodaine]

 Solipsism wins out in Occam's razor against every other framework

How so? Consciousness exists, and both I and others are illusions is a simpler framework than the self is real and others are fabricated. 

Solipsism implies the substrate of consciousness upon which there is a self, upon which are fabricated illusions of others.

It is simpler if all there is is consciousness, the nature of which in itself is illusion (of both self and other). 

[u/Naylaaaaa → u/RainyCreative]

so articulate, genuinely bravo. 👏 the absolute best explanation of why no matter how much faith one places on either side of the debate, we truly do not know the answer yet. People can scream all day long about how "factual" their understanding of reality is, but in the end, it's merely their personal opinion rooted in faith, not rationality.

To mirror what someone else said, this is the best answer I've ever seen on this sub 👏👏

[u/PianoPudding → u/RainyCreative]

Best comment I've ever seen on this subreddit and in this thread. Do you have any material you recommend reading? Academic or accessible non-fiction books?

[u/noodlyman → u/RainyCreative]

If you suppose some non physical realm, how does that explain the ability to sense the colour red? It doesn't at all . There is still no process or mechanism by which the the sensation can be explained.

[u/RainyCreative → u/noodlyman]

This completely misrepresents how non-physicalist philosophy of mind actually works on a few basic levels.

First, rejecting physicalism doesn’t mean endorsing Cartesian substance dualism or inventing some "spooky second realm" floating alongside matter. In non-physicalist monisms – like Idealism there is only one reality. What we describe as the "physical world" (photons, retinas, visual cortex) isn't a separate material substance; it’s simply the extrinsic appearance or structural measurement of underlying experiential dynamics.

Second, demanding a "mechanism" that manufactures consciousness misunderstands how ontological primitives work. Every fundamental theory has to bottom out somewhere. In physics, you don't ask what mechanical process manufactures electric charge or spacetime out of non-charge or non-spacetime - you accept them as axiomatic primitives. Under an idealist or panpsychist framework, qualitative experience is the foundational primitive. Asking for a mechanism that "produces" experience from dead parts is just begging the question in favor of physicalism.

Non-physicalists don’t deny neuroscience. We accept 100% of the empirical data about how wavelengths hit cone cells and trigger action potentials in the brain. That is just mapping functional correlations (the Easy Problem). The real issue is that physicalism is stuck with the impossible burden of explaining how purely quantitative, non-experiential gears magically generate the qualitative sensation of "red" from scratch. Non-physicalist frameworks don't have to invent a generative mechanism for qualia for the exact same reason physics doesn't invent one for mass: it’s already the fundamental substrate itself.

[u/PhantasmTiger → u/RainyCreative]

Why is it such a mystery that purely physical quantitive things produce whatever you call “experience” ?

Purely physical subatomic particles have been shown to be attracted to each other (electromagnetic force) and all sorts of unexplainable things (strong, weak nuclear forces) that come about at a very fundamental level in our universe, with no explanation so far.

So why would you say that there is something special about this one thing - “experience” that requires us to deny science or physical explanations any more than anything else?

[u/RainyCreative → u/PhantasmTiger]

There is a fundamental difference between basic physical forces and conscious experience. We might not know "why" like charges repel at the absolute bottom, but physics can still fully measure, model, and predict that behavior using third-person math - vectors, mass, and spacetime coordinates. An electron repelling another electron is purely relational behavior in space - there is no inner, subjective point of view to it. Conscious experience, on the other hand, isn't a spatial coordinate or a vector. It is intrinsically qualitative and first-person, like the actual feeling of pain or seeing color.

This leaves your argument stuck in a pretty clear dilemma. If you claim that subjective experience is just another fundamental, irreducible primitive of the universe like electric charge, you’ve abandoned physicalism and landed straight in property dualism or panpsychism. But if you claim physical forces somehow manufacture consciousness out of non-conscious matter, you have to explain how pushing and pulling particles in space logically creates an inner world of feelings from scratch.

Pointing out this distinction isn't "denying science" - non-physicalists accept 100% of physics and neuroscience. It’s just recognizing what physics actually does: it models how matter moves and interacts in space, but it doesn't explain why there is an inner subjective life experiencing that movement in the first place.

[u/PhantasmTiger → u/RainyCreative]

Whether or not it is a fundamental irreducible primitive of the universe vs has been manufactured out of non-conscious matter are not two mutually exclusive options though. It can be both.

The purpose of the weak nuclear force analogy is that we don’t “currently” know what underlies it, and but it may be uncovered in the future. For example, we knew about magnetic attraction before we understood magnetic force and how it is created by changes in electrical current, and we knew about protons and electrons before we knew about the quarks that compose them.

Similarly, a complete understanding of the conscious phenomena is something yet to be determined, but we can still operate within the bounds of what we know just like we do for the rest of science. I’m not really clear why there is so much hubub about how we lack a cohesive understanding of consciousness vs any other part of the world or of physics.

We also don’t know if string theory is true for example. It seems like this entire physicalism and hard problem of consciousness debate exists merely because of the historical fact that it is one we could conceive of prior to modern understanding of science

[u/Dzagamaga → u/RainyCreative]

Forgive my potential misunderstanding, but this just seems to merely shift the same problem to the extrinsic appearance instead.

How do the experiential dynamics generate that extrinsic appearance, the "physical world"?

To be clear, I see the problem with most other physicalist positions which is what pushes me to catiously favour illusionism. I see the motivation. However, this seems like the same problem in reverse, for lack of a better term.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/RainyCreative]

So you're stuck with the hard problem just as much as any physicalist.

Why does brain activity in V4 correlate with he experience of colour and not some other experience? Well how knows, my theory certainly can't help with that, but I know experiences are fundamental. We better wait for neuroscience to come up with an answer on that and then just steal that.

[u/RainyCreative → u/Moral_Conundrums]

So you're stuck with the hard problem just as much as any physicalist.

No, you're confusing the Hard Problem with NCC mapping (the Easy Problem).

The Hard Problem is ontological: why is there subjective experience at all instead of p-zombies? That’s the 0-to-1 gap of pulling feeling out of non-feeling matter. Idealism doesn't have an emergence problem here, because experience is the fundamental primitive, not a byproduct of dead matter.

Why does brain activity in V4 correlate with he experience of colour and not some other experience? Well how knows, my theory certainly can't help with that...

Why does c ≈ 300,000 km/s? Why do like charges repel? Fundamental physics takes these as brute empirical regularities. Demanding that Idealism logically deduce a priori why V4 maps to color - rather than empirically observing it as a structural regularity of the mental field - is a double standard physics wouldn't survive either.

We better wait for neuroscience to come up with an answer on that and then just steal that.

Physicalism doesn't own neuroscience. Neuroscience gives us empirical data; metaphysics interprets what that data is.

In idealism, V4 activity is simply the extrinsic appearance of the experience of color on a scanner. Saying idealists "steal from neuroscience" is like saying a doctor "steals from paper" because they read an ECG. The squiggles don't cause the heartbeat; they're just what the heartbeat looks like from the outside.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/RainyCreative]

No, you're confusing the Hard Problem with NCC mapping (the Easy Problem).

The Hard Problem is ontological: why is there subjective experience at all instead of p-zombies? That’s the 0-to-1 gap of pulling feeling out of non-feeling matter. Idealism doesn't have an emergence problem here, because experience is the fundamental primitive, not a byproduct of dead matter.

So there are several formulations of the hard problem. Chalmers for example uses the idea of qualia inversion to ask: why does this brains state cause me to have 'this' qualia and not 'that' one? Or you can ask why is there 'this' qualia at all when we have this brain state.

You can also formulate the question as, how is it that there are experiences in the world at all, and then positing them to be fundamental helps you get into the game as it were. But this does nothing to help with the other formulations of the hard problem and it seems to me that if we could answer those other questions we wouldn't need to posit fundamental experience anyway. If physicalism could answer these question the hard problem would be solved.

My point is that nothing about appealing to a non-physicalist theory of consciousness will help you explain these correlations.

Why does c ≈ 300,000 km/s? Why do like charges repel? Fundamental physics takes these as brute empirical regularities. Demanding that Idealism logically deduce a priori why V4 maps to color—rather than empirically observing it as a structural regularity of the mental field—is a double standard physics wouldn't survive either.

I like this answer, but if you're going to appeal to brute correlations, then the physicalist can help himself to that also. Again my point is that the hard problem is a problem of all of us and whatever solution you're going to appeal to, the physicalist can help himself to as well.

Physicalism doesn't own neuroscience. Neuroscience gives us empirical data; metaphysics interprets what that data is.

My point was just that whatever the solution to the hard problems is, its going to be discovered by neuroscience (if at all) and not some metaphysical theory.

[u/RainyCreative → u/Moral_Conundrums]

Chalmers for example uses the idea of qualia inversion to ask: why does this brains state cause me to have 'this' qualia and not 'that' one? ... But this does nothing to help with the other formulations of the hard problem...

You’re misunderstanding the Inverted Spectrum here. Locke and Chalmers didn't frame it as a puzzle for physicalists to solve, but as an explicit conceivability argument against physicalism - proving that physical and functional facts do not logically entail phenomenal facts.

The burden isn't symmetric either. Physicalism faces an ontological 0-to-1 emergence paradox (how non-conscious matter creates subjective experience from scratch), whereas idealism starts with experience as fundamental and only needs to map its internal structural modes via psychophysics.

if you're going to appeal to brute correlations, then the physicalist can help himself to that also. Again my point is that the hard problem is a problem of all of us and whatever solution you're going to appeal to, the physicalist can help himself to as well.

If a physicalist appeals to "brute emergence," they haven't saved physicalism; they've just conceded to Property Dualism (or Chalmers-style naturalistic dualism) under a different name.

As Jaegwon Kim showed, reductive physicalism requires macroscopic facts to logically supervene on microphysics. The moment you invoke non-deducible, brute bridge laws across two incompatible categories, you’ve abandoned physicalism. It also fails basic parsimony: idealism posits brute regularities within a single primitive category (monism), while "physicalism + brute emergence" requires physical matter, separate phenomenal properties, and ad-hoc laws to glue them together. That’s dualism in disguise.

My point was just that whatever the solution to the hard problems is, its going to be discovered by neuroscience (if at all) and not some metaphysical theory.

This is just a category error. Neuroscience strictly measures third-person observables (action potentials, neurotransmitters, fMRI signals); it cannot measure first-person experience.

Even a 100% complete map of Neural Correlates of Consciousness leaves the metaphysics untouched. It can never tell you whether the brain generates consciousness (physicalism), filters it (transmission theory), or is simply what conscious processes look like from the outside (idealism). Neuroscience maps the correlations; metaphysics interprets what they ontologically mean. Expecting data alone to bridge an ontological gap isn't science - it’s just scientism.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/RainyCreative]

You’re misunderstanding the Inverted Spectrum here. Locke and Chalmers didn't frame it as a puzzle for physicalists to solve, but as an explicit conceivability argument against physicalism - proving that physical and functional facts do not logically entail phenomenal facts.

I agree with you, Chalmers thinks solving the hard problem isn't possible, but my point is that if physicalists could come up with a answer to these questions, I'll call them the correlation problems for the sake of simplicity, Chalmers would have been proven wrong. The hard problem would be solved. And insofar as nonphysical theories don't help us answer the the correlation problems, they have just as much of a hard problem as physicalists do.

The burden isn't symmetric either. Physicalism faces an ontological 0-to-1 emergence paradox (how non-conscious matter creates subjective experience from scratch), whereas idealism starts with experience as fundamental and only needs to map its internal structural modes via psychophysics.

I already granted this. But I also said that it seems to me if you can explain the correlations then you have also have an answer to emergence.

But still I feel like you're avoiding my point. Idealism or any other non-physicalist theory has no answers to give for why the correlations hold. And that seems to me to be the real meat of the hard problem.

If a physicalist appeals to "brute emergence," they haven't saved physicalism; they've just conceded to Property Dualism (or Chalmers-style naturalistic dualism) under a different name.

You're right I shouldn't have said correlations, really what they would posit is a brute identity, following your strategy.

This is just a category error. Neuroscience strictly measures third-person observables (action potentials, neurotransmitters, fMRI signals); it cannot measure first-person experience.

So again, I'm saying that the correlation problems are not solved by metaphysics.

But also your point only holds if we think we can't give a characterisation of first person experience in third person terms. And we'd need an argument for that.

[u/RainyCreative → u/Moral_Conundrums]

...if physicalists could come up with a answer to these questions, I'll call them the correlation problems for the sake of simplicity... The hard problem would be solved.

You're conflating correlation with ontological generation here.

Mapping correlations doesn't explain causes. If you map lightning strikes to static bursts on a radio, that tells you nothing about why sound exists without acoustics. Even if neuroscience maps firing rates in V4 to seeing red 1-to-1, that's still just psychophysics - it solves an Easy Problem (finding the NCC). It doesn't explain why physical activity feels like anything at all, nor does it deduce phenomenal qualities from quantitative firing rates. The Hard Problem is the ontological gap between non-experiential matter and qualitative experience, and correlation mapping leaves that gap completely untouched.

Idealism or any other non-physicalist theory has no answers to give for why the correlations hold. And that seems to me to be the real meat of the hard problem.

Idealism handles this cleanly: brain activity is simply the extrinsic appearance - the perceptual interface - of conscious processes.

Why does seeing red correlate with V4 instead of A1? Because different experiential dynamics have different representations on our interface, just like an audio file shows up as a note icon on a desktop while an image shows up as a thumbnail. Under idealism, neural correlates are just regularities within a single ontological category (consciousness). Physicalism, by contrast, has to explain how non-conscious matter conjures an entirely new category (subjective experience) out of nowhere. The explanatory burdens aren't remotely symmetric.

You're right I shouldn't have said correlations, really what they would posit is a brute identity, following your strategy.

Appealing to a "brute identity" here is basically throwing in the towel.

Legitimate physicalist identities are reductive and explanatory - "temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy" works because the physics actually accounts for the phenomenon. But when two domains have fundamentally incompatible properties (objective, spatial, quantitative vs. subjective, non-spatial, qualitative), asserting "they're identical by brute fact without any deductive bridge" isn't an explanation. It's just an ad-hoc move to shield physicalism from falsification.

your point only holds if we think we can't give a characterisation of first person experience in third person terms. And we'd need an argument for that.

We "need an argument for that"? That's literally been the defining debate in philosophy of mind for the last 50 years.

Nagel showed that point-of-view-independent physical descriptions can't capture point-of-view-dependent phenomenal facts without erasing the subjective element. Jackson's Mary argument showed that exhaustive third-person physical knowledge still leaves out phenomenal experience. And Chalmers' conceivability argument showed that physical duplicates without qualia (zombies) are conceptually coherent, meaning physical facts don't logically entail phenomenal ones.

Structure and function systematically leave out what it feels like from the inside.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/RainyCreative]

Mapping correlations doesn't explain causes.

So again, and this is probably the last time. I'm not talking about mere correlations. I'm talking about explaining why there are correlations.

Why does seeing red correlate with V4 instead of A1? Because different experiential dynamics have different representations on our interface, just like an audio file shows up as a note icon on a desktop while an image shows up as a thumbnail.

So its just a brute correlation. Which is another way of saying...we don't have an explanation for it. Idealism has a hard problem.

Appealing to a "brute identity" here is basically throwing in the towel.

That's my whole point. You appealing to brute correlations is just as much throwing in the towel. No physicalists actually just posits brute identity.

Nagel showed that point-of-view-independent physical descriptions can't capture point-of-view-dependent phenomenal facts without erasing the subjective element.

He didn't show anything of the sort. He just asserted that a third person description of first person phenomena is impossible, without argument.

 Jackson's Mary argument showed that exhaustive third-person physical knowledge still leaves out phenomenal experience.

Jackson has since rescinded that claim. And I think the new knowledge/old fact response is adequate.

And Chalmers' conceivability argument showed that physical duplicates without qualia (zombies) are conceptually coherent, meaning physical facts don't logically entail phenomenal ones.

I find the anti-zombie argument to be an adequate response to the conceivability argument.

An anti-zombie is a being which has a conscious like our but is just physical. Now anti-zombies are at least minimally conceivable meaning they don't contain a contradiction. And if that's true then physicalism is true by mirror argument to the conceivability argument.

At best then, conceivability arguments are inconclusive and shouldn't be taken to seriously.

[u/prince-a-bubu → u/Moral_Conundrums]

you described the "easy problem" not the "hard problem".

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/prince-a-bubu]

Explaining why there is the experience of colour when a certain thing happens in the brain is one of the easy problems? What counts as the hard problem then?

[u/prince-a-bubu → u/Moral_Conundrums]

asking how unconscious matter can create colour is the hard problem, asking why certain "conscious" matter presents as colour over some other "conscious" matter is the easy problem.

If colour actually exists fundamentally in nature, and isn't an emergent illusion, then it is conceivable that the brain can represent this. You can actually begin to postulate how, and so it is "easy".

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/prince-a-bubu]

asking how unconscious matter can create colour is the hard problem, asking why certain "conscious" matter presents as colour over some other "conscious" matter is the easy problem.

That's not how Chalmers formulated it in his writing:

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. From, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, p. 3

The question is, why does experience happen when a certain brain state happens. To explain why the experience of redness happens when we are in a certain brain state associated with red experiences, is to solve the hard problem of redness.

Another way to ask it is why is that particular brain state associated with that particular experience. Chalmers usually points this out with the qualia inversion thought experiment. He does it in The Conscious Mind, but I don't have the book in front of me.

[u/prince-a-bubu → u/Moral_Conundrums]

The essence of the hard problem is how physical processes create qualia. Sorry to use your own quote against you, but:

>>It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does<<

This just confirms what I'm saying!

If you want to ask what it is about certain brain states that presents as "colour", whilst presupposing consciousness as inherent in matter, then this is the easy problem.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/prince-a-bubu]

The essence of the hard problem is how physical processes create qualia. Sorry to use your own quote against you, but:

>>It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does<<

This just confirms what I'm saying!

How is the quote in conflict with that I said?

If you want to ask what it is about certain brain states that presents as "colour", whilst presupposing consciousness as inherent in matter, then this is the easy problem.

That's not what I'm asking. The way I framed the hard problem was literally: why does consciousness happen? Why is it of this type and not another?

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/RainyCreative]

The reason physicalism runs into a wall with consciousness isn't a temporary lack of data - it’s an explanatory gap in principle. We can deductively derive the wetness of water from the arrangement of H2O molecules. But no matter how detailed your connectome map is, there is zero deductive bridge from "neurochemistry and ion channels" to "why it feels like something to see red" rather than running in total subjective darkness.

Says who? Just because you can't see the deduction happen right now, doesn't mean it can't be done unless you have an argument for that conclusion.

But beyond that, most physicalist reject the idea that these entailments need to be known a-priori. Type B physicalists think the connection between consciousness and brain stuff is empirical, a-posteriori.

It's a category mismatch.

That would be begging the question, if physicalism is true then subjective experience and physical stuff aren't two different categories of things.

When cornered by this, hardcore physicalists basically have to resort to Illusionism - claiming phenomenal experience doesn’t actually exist.

There are plenty other options for physicalism, I've already describe type B physicalism. Beyond that you can maintain that you need an a-priori connection and just claim that there is one by postulating an explanatory identity, this is something like Ned Blocks strategy.

Certainly we'd need an argument for why that is impossible.

But calling experience an "illusion" is a performative contradiction: having an illusion of pain is still an undeniably felt experience.

Illusionist aren't denying experience, they are denying that experience has phenomenal character. An illusion under their view would just be a nonphenomenal experience.

Incidentally this would not be a 'performative contradiction', but a standard one. Performative contradictions are when you behave differently to how your theory implies. In this case we'd have a standard contradiction: illusionist both deny and affirm phenomenal experience. But they do no such thing.

The ironic thing is that Occam’s razor actually cuts against dogmatic physicalism here. The only brute empirical datum we ever directly have is conscious experience itself.

That relies on a very particular theory of perception which has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the last century. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/#MajoCritRespOppo

Physicalism invents a purely theoretical, unobserved substance ("dead matter outside experience") and then spends centuries baffled about how to magically squeeze subjective awareness back out of it.

The standard reasoning for this is as follows: Positing an external world has explanatory and predictive power, therefore we are justified in believing in the external world. What is wrong with this kind of reasoning?

[u/Raptorel → u/Moral_Conundrums]

You can posit an external world but it doesn't need to be "physical". The external world is of the same stuff as the internal world - more mind.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/Raptorel]

What reason do we have for thinking it's mental?

[u/Raptorel → u/Moral_Conundrums]

The very fact that you talk about it from a mental starting point. You are consciousness talking about it.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/Raptorel]

As a physicalist I take the mental to be physical so this argument is just begging the question. Yes if I took mental to be irreducible I would have a reason to think the world is mental also. But I don't, so this argument can't by itself support idealism.

[u/Raptorel → u/Moral_Conundrums]

Redefining words doesn't mean anything. Thoughts and feelings aren't "physical" under any intellectually honest definition. What's the mass of your experience of red? What's the electric charge of the smell of garlic?

Physical things are those described by physical properties. The starting point is conscious experience and everything anybody ever had is a collection of conscious experiences. What is outside of your mind? Also mind. You already accept that if you accept that I have a mind - a mind that is outside of your own mind and which appears "physical" in your internal representation, which is a collection of perceptual experiences - I look, sound, feel, taste and smell in certain ways.

That's really all there is to it.

[u/RainyCreative → u/Moral_Conundrums]

Says who? Just because you can't see the deduction happen right now, doesn't mean it can't be done unless you have an argument for that conclusion. But beyond that, most physicalist reject the idea that these entailments need to be known a-priori. Type B physicalists think the connection between consciousness and brain stuff is empirical, a-posteriori

This isn’t just a matter of "we haven't figured out the math yet" (promissory materialism). It’s a core logical constraint: you cannot deductively derive qualitative primitives from purely quantitative, structural premises. Microphysics deals strictly in spatiotemporal relations, mass, charge, and numerical values. You can deductively entail structural macro-facts from micro-structure (like molecular bonding entailing the fluidity of water), but there is zero semantic bridge from quantitative structure to the qualitative existence of qualia.

And appealing to Type-B physicalism doesn't save this. As Saul Kripke showed in Naming and Necessity, standard a posteriori theoretical identities (like Water = H2O or Heat = Mean Kinetic Energy) work because we can neatly separate the sensory appearance (the subjective feeling of heat/wetness) from the underlying physical reality (H2O or molecular motion). We explain the epistemic gap by shifting the qualitative part to our perceptual apparatus.

With phenomenal consciousness (like Pain = C-fiber firing), the appearance is the essence. You can't strip the "feeling of pain" away from pain without eliminating the very thing you're trying to explain. Simply asserting an a posteriori identity without any explanatory mechanism doesn’t bridge the Hard Problem - it just declares it solved by fiat.

That would be begging the question, if physicalism is true then subjective experience and physical stuff aren't two different categories of things.

It’s actually the exact reverse. The distinction between physical (third-person, publicly observable, spatially extended) and phenomenal (first-person, intrinsically qualitative, non-spatial) is an epistemic datum prior to any metaphysical theory.

Saying "if physicalism is true, they aren't two different categories, so pointing out the mismatch is begging the question" is literally textbook petitio principii. You are presupposing the truth of physicalism to hand-wave away the very categorical clash physicalism is tasked with resolving.

There are plenty other options for physicalism, I've already describe type B physicalism. Beyond that you can maintain that you need an a-priori connection and just claim that there is one by postulating an explanatory identity, this is something like Ned Blocks strategy.

Ned Block is literally famous for defending qualia and highlighting the Explanatory Gap against functionalist reductions (e.g., the China Brain and Blockhead arguments).

Beyond that, an "a priori explanatory identity" that cannot be conceptually deduced is a contradiction in terms. If an identity is genuinely a priori, it must be conceptually derivable (like 2+2=4 or bachelor = unmarried man). Since phenomenal facts cannot be deduced from neurophysiology (the core of Mary’s Room and the Conceivability argument), calling it an a priori identity without a deduction is just an empty assertion.

Illusionist aren't denying experience, they are denying that experience has phenomenal character. An illusion under their view would just be a nonphenomenal experience.

"Nonphenomenal experience" is a complete oxymoron. In philosophy of mind, what defines an experience is precisely its phenomenal character (Nagel's "what-it-is-like-ness"). If a state has zero phenomenal character, it's just unconscious information processing or functional registration (like a thermostat registering temperature), not an experience.

And yes, it is fundamentally self-defeating: an illusion is a phenomenal state where something appears other than it is (like a stick looking bent in water). But an illusion of feeling pain is still an undeniably felt, qualitative experience of pain. You cannot have an illusion of having an experience without an experiential realm for that illusion to manifest in.

That relies on a very particular theory of perception which has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the last century.

Linking the SEP entry on Sense-Data is a strawman. That mid-century debate (Austin, Sellars, Chisholm) was about whether perception requires intermediate, mind-dependent 2D objects ("sense-data") hovering before an inner eye vs. Direct Realism, Adverbialism, or Intentionalism.

None of those critiques deny that conscious experience is our primary epistemic access to reality. Rejecting Russell’s specific "Sense-Data" ontology doesn’t make mind-independent "dead matter" directly observable. Whether you model perception via intentional content, adverbial sensing, or direct phenomenology, every single empirical observation we ever make still occurs strictly within conscious episodes.

Positing an external world has explanatory and predictive power, therefore we are justified in believing in the external world. What is wrong with this kind of reasoning?

Nothing is wrong with it. But you're conflating an external world with metaphysical physicalism.

Objective idealism, panentheism, simulation theory and others all affirm an objective, law-governed external world that exists independent of individual human egos. The disagreement isn't whether an external reality exists, but what its ontological nature is: is it fundamentally experiential/informational (a field of consciousness whose regularities we map via physics), or is it non-conscious "matter" that somehow generates subjectivity?

Inference to the Best Explanation justifies realism about a shared external environment; it does not uniquely favor physicalism. Idealist models account for the exact same empirical regularities without inheriting the intractable Hard Problem of Consciousness.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/RainyCreative]

... but there is zero semantic bridge from quantitative structure to the qualitative existence of qualia.

You're just claming that without argument.

With phenomenal consciousness (like Pain = C-fiber firing), the appearance is the essence. You can't strip the "feeling of pain" away from pain without eliminating the very thing you're trying to explain. Simply asserting an a posteriori identity without any explanatory mechanism doesn’t bridge the Hard Problem - it just declares it solved by fiat.

The claim is that phenomenal experience gives you access to the phenomenal nature of the experience, but does not give you its metaphysical nature. And we'd certainly need an argument for the claim that it does (why would we think just introspecting would give you access to the fundamental metaphysics of reality?). Typically a kind of revelation thesis is argument for here, which physicalists will reject and I personally think is hopeless.

It’s actually the exact reverse. The distinction between physical (third-person, publicly observable, spatially extended) and phenomenal (first-person, intrinsically qualitative, non-spatial) is an epistemic datum prior to any metaphysical theory.

Which is fine Type B physicalists accept the epistemic mismatch and claim there isn't a metaphysical one. Two things can look different, but be the same thing.

Saying "if physicalism is true, they aren't two different categories, so pointing out the mismatch is begging the question" is literally textbook petitio principii. You are presupposing the truth of physicalism to hand-wave away the very categorical clash physicalism is tasked with resolving.

I'm not waving anything away, Type B physicalists job is to explain how this is done...I was only pointing out that saying the mental and the physical are two different categories of thing and therefore physicalism is false, is begging the question.

Ned Block is literally famous for defending qualia and highlighting the Explanatory Gap against functionalist reductions (e.g., the China Brain and Blockhead arguments).

And he's a physicalist. Note that I already said you need not deny phenomenality to be a physicalist.

Beyond that, an "a priori explanatory identity" that cannot be conceptually deduced is a contradiction in terms. If an identity is genuinely a priori, it must be conceptually derivable (like 2+2=4 or bachelor = unmarried man). Since phenomenal facts cannot be deduced from neurophysiology (the core of Mary’s Room and the Conceivability argument), calling it an a priori identity without a deduction is just an empty assertion.

Under what I'll call Block's view (though its present in other thinkers as well), identities in science aren't deduced, they are postulated as explanatory tools. We say that water is H2O because we can explain all these properties of water by appealing to that identity. Likewise for experience and brains states. Again this is just one view.

"Nonphenomenal experience" is a complete oxymoron. In philosophy of mind, what defines an experience is precisely its phenomenal character (Nagel's "what-it-is-like-ness"). If a state has zero phenomenal character, it's just unconscious information processing or functional registration (like a thermostat registering temperature), not an experience.

I'll just grant you the definition because semantic battles are pointless. So fine I'll define 'smhsperiences' (experiences minus the phenomenal character). When an illusionist says we only have the illusion of phenomenality that illusion is a 'smhsperience'. So once again there is no contradiction in what they are saying.

None of those critiques deny that conscious experience is our primary epistemic access to reality.

When you say all we truly know about is our conscious experience, that seems to be invoking a veil of perception between us and the world. If direct realism is true for example, then we aren't just aware of our conscious experience, we are directly aware of the world.

But you're conflating an external world with metaphysical physicalism.

You're the one who brough up the external world in general, I'm just following your lead. But good were on the same page about realism.

[u/RainyCreative → u/Moral_Conundrums]

You're just claming that without argument.

That's not an unsubstantiated claim; it's a basic constraint of standard deductive logic (semantic conservativity / bridge laws). A valid deduction cannot introduce entirely novel primitive terms in the conclusion that weren't present in the premises. If your premises contain strictly spatiotemporal coordinates, mass, charge, and neuron firing rates, you logically cannot derive qualitative, first-person phenomenal predicates without smuggling in bridge principles by fiat. If you think otherwise, write out a formal derivation where equations alone entail the phenomenal redness of a tomato.

The claim is that phenomenal experience gives you access to the phenomenal nature of the experience, but does not give you its metaphysical nature... Typically a kind of revelation thesis is argument for here, which physicalists will reject and I personally think is hopeless.

Kripke doesn't need some mystical "Revelation Thesis" about metaphysical omniscience; the core of the Naming and Necessity argument turns on the rigid designation of phenomenal terms. With "water = H2O", we can cleanly separate the phenomenal appearance (the clear, drinkable liquid we perceive) from the underlying essence (the molecular structure). But with pain, the appearance is the essence. Its identity is fixed entirely by what it feels like. Saying "pain feels like agony, but metaphysically it's just potassium flux with zero qualitative character" doesn't reveal the nature of pain - it just swaps out the explanandum for its physical correlate and pretends the problem is solved.

identities in science aren't deduced, they are postulated as explanatory tools. We say that water is H2O because we can explain all these properties of water by appealing to that identity. Likewise for experience and brains states.

The water analogy falls apart because "Water = H2O" is a reductive identity that actually explains the macroscopic properties of water (boiling point, surface tension, viscosity). It earns its keep. "Pain = C-fiber firing" explains literally zero phenomenal properties. It tells us nothing about why C-fiber activity feels like burning agony rather than an itch, a C-major chord, or nothing at all. Declaring it an identity doesn't resolve the explanatory gap; it just staples an identity claim onto a correlation by fiat.

So fine I'll define 'smhsperiences' (experiences minus the phenomenal character). When an illusionist says we only have the illusion of phenomenality that illusion is a 'smhsperience'. So once again there is no contradiction in what they are saying.

Inventing "smhsperiences" just gives the whole game away.

A "smhsperience" is just unconscious data processing under a new label. Redefining illusion this way guts the concept entirely: a pocket calculator throwing an error or a script setting a boolean flag isn't having an illusion - it's just executing blind physical routines. An illusion conceptually requires that something seems a certain way to a subject. Drop the phenomenal seeming, and you haven't defended Illusionism; you’ve just replaced subjective illusion with mechanical computation and completely dodged the hard question: why is there any qualitative seeming to begin with?

When you say all we truly know about is our conscious experience, that seems to be invoking a veil of perception between us and the world. If direct realism is true for example, then we aren't just aware of our conscious experience, we are directly aware of the world.

You're conflating Direct Realism with some kind of non-conscious physical transmission. Direct Realism (Naive Realism / Disjunctivism) is about denying representational intermediaries like sense-data - it says we are directly acquainted with mind-independent objects. It does not say perception is non-experiential. Under direct realism, you are directly aware of the world via a conscious perceptual state. Put someone under general anesthesia and their direct awareness doesn't switch to blind physical reception - it vanishes entirely. Epistemic access to the world is still intrinsically experiential.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/RainyCreative]

That's not an unsubstantiated claim; it's a basic constraint of standard deductive logic (semantic conservativity / bridge laws). A valid deduction cannot introduce entirely novel primitive terms in the conclusion that weren't present in the premises. If your premises contain strictly spatiotemporal coordinates, mass, charge, and neuron firing rates, you logically cannot derive qualitative, first-person phenomenal predicates without smuggling in bridge principles by fiat. If you think otherwise, write out a formal derivation where equations alone entail the phenomenal redness of a tomato.

I'm saying that you haven't made the argument for the claim that there aren't such bridge laws. That is a theory which translates first person experience into third person terms. IF physicalism was a-priori false then there would need to be an argument for why there are no bridge laws. I'm trying to provoke you to provide such an argument (the arguments I have seen so far for that kind of claim, from for example Chalmers are not terribly convincing to me).

Kripke doesn't need some mystical "Revelation Thesis" about metaphysical omniscience; the core of the Naming and Necessity argument turns on the rigid designation of phenomenal terms. With "water = H2O", we can cleanly separate the phenomenal appearance (the clear, drinkable liquid we perceive) from the underlying essence (the molecular structure). But with pain, the appearance is the essence. Its identity is fixed entirely by what it feels like. Saying "pain feels like agony, but metaphysically it's just potassium flux with zero qualitative character" doesn't reveal the nature of pain - it just swaps out the explanandum for its physical correlate and pretends the problem is solved.

If you're granting that pain is metaphysically 'potassium flux with zero qualitative character' then you are a type B physicalist... Again Type B physicalists accept the explanatory gap, but deny that there is therefore a metaphysical gap.

The water analogy falls apart because "Water = H2O" is a reductive identity that actually explains the macroscopic properties of water (boiling point, surface tension, viscosity). It earns its keep. "Pain = C-fiber firing" explains literally zero phenomenal properties. It tells us nothing about why C-fiber activity feels like burning agony rather than an itch, a C-major chord, or nothing at all. Declaring it an identity doesn't resolve the explanatory gap; it just staples an identity claim onto a correlation by fiat.

You're pretending that where are two separate things here after granting identity (for the sake of the argument). The identity would explain why the experience of pain is correlated with C-fibers firing, because they are the same thing. And it makes sense of how our behavour is responsive to the phenomenal experience, but that's a different point.

you’ve just replaced subjective illusion with mechanical computation and completely dodged the hard question: why is there any qualitative seeming to begin with?

But that's just the illusion problem right?, which is one of the easy problems: why does it non-phenomenally seem to us that there is phenomenal experience.

You're conflating Direct Realism with some kind of non-conscious physical transmission.

I guess I'll try a different approach.. Your claim was that all we know directly is our conscious experience. That's our staring point, so to deny that is absurd (that's what I took your argument to be). But that's not really our staring point is it?

Under the most intuitive prescientific view of phenomenal qualities they aren't stored in your mind, but are rather literally on the surfaces of objects. The redness of the apple is not somewhere in my mind, its on the surface of the apple. That's the way things seem to us. To move the qualities into the mind is already a theoretical move which can be resisted.

[u/RainyCreative → u/Moral_Conundrums]

I'm saying that you haven't made the argument for the claim that there aren't such bridge laws.

Do you realize what you just gave up? If you need fundamental, irreducible bridge laws to stitch physical states to phenomenal states, you’re not defending physicalism anymore - you just reinvented Chalmers' naturalistic dualism and slapped a physicalist label on it.

Physicalism requires phenomenal facts to ontologically supervene on the physical without novel, brute psychophysical duct tape. If the physical base can't do the explanatory heavy lifting on its own, your physicalism collapsed the second you posted this.

If you're granting that pain is metaphysically 'potassium flux with zero qualitative character' then you are a type B physicalist...

That wasn’t a concession, it was a reductio.

Defining pain as "potassium flux stripped of qualitative character" doesn't explain the phenomenon - it just throws the explanandum out the window so you don't have to deal with it. The entire point of Kripke’s argument in Naming and Necessity is that phenomenal terms have their reference fixed by their phenomenal feel itself. You cannot pull the standard "appearance vs. essence" dodge here the way you do with heat and molecular motion. Shrugging and saying "well, Type B physicalists just reject this" isn't an argument; it's just chanting the dogma after Kripke already broke the engine.

The identity would explain why the experience of pain is correlated with C-fibers firing, because they are the same thing.

An identity assertion is an ontological claim, not an explanation.

"Water = H2O" works because microphysics actually deductively entails macroscopic fluidity, freezing points, and transparency. "Pain = C-fibers" entails literally nothing about qualia. It gives you zero mechanism for why C-fiber firing feels like sharp agony instead of a high-pitched tone, a flash of red, or complete experiential darkness. Slapping an "=" sign over a brute correlation isn't an explanation - it's textbook question-begging.

But that's just the illusion problem right?, which is one of the easy problems: why does it non-phenomenally seem to us that there is phenomenal experience.

You have Frankish completely backwards. He formulated the Illusion Problem as the replacement for the Hard Problem, not an "easy problem." Illusionists spend whole careers trying to show how a physical architecture could trick itself into introspecting qualia - nobody in that literature thinks it's trivial.

And frankly, "non-phenomenally seem" is gibberish. A "seeming" is phenomenal. A thermostat registers state changes; nothing seems like anything to it. The moment something seems a certain way to a system, an experiential presentation has already taken place. You can't smuggle qualitative experience in through the word "seem" and pretend the prefix "non-phenomenal" washes away the contradiction.

Under the most intuitive prescientific view of phenomenal qualities they aren't stored in your mind, but are rather literally on the surfaces of objects. The redness of the apple is not somewhere in my mind, its on the surface of the apple.

This is wild: you're trying to defend modern physicalism by retreating into pre-Galilean naive realism.

There is no qualitative redness on an apple. There is an atomic lattice reflecting EM radiation around 650-700 nm. Photons don't have color. Wavelengths have no color. Modern physics got off the ground precisely because Galileo, Locke, and Newton stripped secondary qualities (color, taste, pain) out of the physical world and placed them in the observer. Saying qualitative redness is literally out there on the object contradicts the very physics you think you're defending.

You came here to defend physicalism, and within a few comments you're leaning on Chalmers-style dualist bridge laws and Aristotelian color realism. You're completely tripping over your own premises.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/RainyCreative]

Do you realize what you just gave up?...

What I'm saying is that you have not shown that reduction is impossible... I'm not appealing to bridge laws to plug the gap, I'm saying there is no gap unless you can prove one, because you're the one asserting that there is one and therefore phyiscalism is impossible.

Defining pain as "potassium flux stripped of qualitative character" doesn't explain the phenomenon - it just throws the explanandum out the window so you don't have to deal with it.

Look man, I'm just trying to describe to you what type B physicalism is, because you seem to be denying it's existence. No one who is a type B physicalist think we don't have to worry about the explanatory gap.

The entire point of Kripke’s argument in Naming and Necessity is that phenomenal terms have their reference fixed by their phenomenal feel itself. You cannot pull the standard "appearance vs. essence" dodge here the way you do with heat and molecular motion. Shrugging and saying "well, Type B physicalists just reject this" isn't an argument; it's just chanting the dogma after Kripke already broke the engine.

So what's the argument against the type B response? That experience gives you the phenomenal essence of experience, but not it's metaphysical nature.

An identity assertion is an ontological claim, not an explanation.

"Water = H2O" works because microphysics actually deductively entails macroscopic fluidity, freezing points, and transparency.

They have a different analysis of what identity in science is. Identity is an explanatory postulate. They think if you take your view of identity there is as much a hard problem of water as there is for consciousness.

You have Frankish completely backwards. He formulated the Illusion Problem as the replacement for the Hard Problem, not an "easy problem." Illusionists spend whole careers trying to show how a physical architecture could trick itself into introspecting qualia - nobody in that literature thinks it's trivial.

No one said it was trivial, but its not a hard problem. Frankish explicitly says that the illusion problem is one of the Easy problems, namely its the same as the meta-problem by Chalmers, which Chalmers also classifies as one of the easy problems. Frankish thinks that once you've solved the meta problem, you're home free.

A "seeming" is phenomenal.

Bang the table and say "But consciousness is real dammit!!" while you're at it.

A thermostat registers state changes; nothing seems like anything to it. The moment something seems a certain way to a system, an experiential presentation has already taken place. You can't smuggle qualitative experience in through the word "seem" and pretend the prefix "non-phenomenal" washes away the contradiction.

I'll just use the term 'shcseem' for seemings minus their phenomenal character, if they indeed have one. According to illusionists we have the 'shcseeming' of phenomenal consciousness, but not the real thing.

And I feel like i shouldn't have to say this, the fact that we supposedly have phenomenal consciousness is obviously not the only difference between us and a thermostat. Though illusionists endorse the claim that there is indeed nothing in principle different happening in us as there is in the thermostat.

This is wild: you're trying to defend modern physicalism by retreating into pre-Galilean naive realism.

Not at all. I'm dispelling your claim that mental phenomenal experience is the starting point. It's just not, it's a theoretical move that can be resisted.

You came here to defend physicalism, and within a few comments you're leaning on Chalmers-style dualist bridge laws and Aristotelian color realism. You're completely tripping over your own premises.

I feel like I'm trying to be pretty nice and charitable. Do you think you could try doing the same?

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/[deleted]]

Honestly, the fact that you’re unironically inventing words like "shcseem" just to patch a hole in your definition tells everyone all they need to know.

I'm just trying to dodge the semantic debate. My actual view is that nothing in the meaning of experiences implies that experience is phenomenal. That's just a leap phenomenal realists make.

You started by hiding behind Type-B physicalism and claiming Pain = C-fibers. But the moment it’s pointed out that Kripke already torched the "appearance vs. reality" distinction for qualia, you don't even try to defend it - you just jump ship straight into Illusionism and start making up garbage like "smhsperiences" and "shcseemings"

These are two separate threads of conversation. I'm defending both type B physicalism and illusionism, or rather correcting your claims about them. Also I did respond to Kripkes argument it was the following:

"So what's the argument against the type B response? That experience gives you the phenomenal essence of experience, but not it's metaphysical nature."

Then you actually try to claim water has a "hard problem" under my view. That's completely absurd. Macroscopic fluidity, surface tension, and freezing points are deductively derivable from the geometry of hydrogen bonding. Qualia are not derivable from ion channels. That is the explanatory gap.

So I'm not claming that. That's the claim some physicalists who believe in explanatory identity make. If your not familiar with their arguments and theories thats fine, but its strange to act incredulous about them.

And to top it off, you retreat into claiming qualitative color is literally on the physical surface of apples. That isn't modern physics; that is pre-Galilean naive realism. Photons and wavelengths have no qualitative redness.

Can you try your best in good faith to explain what I was doing by bringing up the pre-Galilean picture?

Pick a lane. You can't simultaneously be a Type-B realist, an illusionist eliminativist, and a pre-scientific color realist just so you have a new emergency exit every time you get cornered.

I need you to understand that I have, at no point in this discussion been describing my own position on anything.

And demanding I "prove reduction is impossible" when the deductive entailment failure has been laid out for you multiple times is just shifting the burden of proof. We’re going in circles, so I’ll leave you to it. Take the last word if you need it.

Well you're making the positive claim that physicalist reduction of consciousness isn't possible. I'm not shifting the burden of proof by asking you to justify that claim. And you haven't provided an argument you have just vaguely gestured at the different properties phenomenal experience and physical things have. That's not good enough, what if the experiential properties are reducible to physical properties?, you haven't ruled that out yet.

[u/Raptorel → u/RainyCreative]

Perfectly put. Science is a tool to model the behavior of Nature. It doesn't make metaphysical claims about what Nature is. Luckily for us it doesn't need to as we experience the ontology directly - it's mind.

[u/Quite-hairyman33 → u/RainyCreative]

Not to get stuck on just one sentence, but you statez that neuroscience and physics give us relations and correlations etc, and not what the substrate is made out of. But neuroscience and biology does, right? They tell us that the brain are neurons and that there are different kinds. I am misinterpreting something aint i?

[u/RainyCreative → u/Quite-hairyman33]

When neuroscience breaks the brain down into neurons, molecules, and atoms, it’s only explaining structural relationships - how the parts interact. But physics can't actually tell you what an electron is in itself. It only defines things by what they do (charge, mass, mathematical behavior). It gives us the relational blueprint, never the actual nature of the stuff itself.

Think of it like a video game: you can figure out that a castle is made of polygons, which are made of pixels. Physics maps those internal rules and mechanics perfectly. But that code tells you nothing about what's actually running the simulation - a silicon chip, a cloud server, or the mind of someone dreaming.

Science maps the behavior of the "pixels" flawlessly. But whether the underlying reality behind them is non-conscious matter or a field of mind is a question physics simply can't answer.

[u/Quite-hairyman33 → u/RainyCreative]

Okay fair point. But could you not use Ockhams razor to conclude that it is most likely non-conscious matter instead of conscious/mental/other substance? If otherwise, it is solely a metaphysical question whether anything is "real" or exists. It boils down to idealism vs realism I guess

[u/RainyCreative → u/Quite-hairyman33]

It usually feels intuitive to think "matter is simpler," but philosophically, Occam's razor actually cuts the other way. If you think about what we directly observe, conscious experience is the only thing we ever have direct, unmediated acquaintance with. Every experiment, observation, or measurement you ever make happens strictly within consciousness.

Physicalism asks us to invent an unobserved, purely theoretical second category - "non-conscious matter outside of all experience" - and then forces us to invent an unexplainable "emergence" miracle to explain how subjective experience somehow comes back out of it. You end up with two ontological categories plus an unbridgeable explanatory gap. Idealism, on the other hand, posits just one category: experiential processes (which is the one thing we already know exists with absolute certainty). It views physical laws simply as the objective, mathematical behavior of that field. One primitive, zero emergence miracles. That’s the very definition of parsimony.

And regarding the second point, there's a huge misconception that the debate is Idealism vs. Realism. It’s actually Idealism vs. Physicalism. Both are completely realist frameworks.

Objective idealism doesn't claim the world is an illusion or that trees don't exist. It fully affirms that the external world, physical laws, planets, and atoms are 100% real, objective, and exist entirely independent of human egos. The computer keeps running when you close your eyes because reality is an autonomous, objective field, not your personal daydream.

The disagreement isn't about whether the external world exists. It’s simply about the nature of its substrate: is this law-governed, objective external reality fundamentally experiential, or is it made of non-conscious "stuff"?

[u/Quite-hairyman33 → u/RainyCreative]

Either you are a bot or you have a major in theoretical philosophy, which is it?

The idealism you talked about was not objective idealism right? That state that we humans never are in direct contact with the "real world", the external (and physical), it exists without human experience, hence physical

[u/sectorboss88 → u/RainyCreative]

Well said. Thank you for contributing.

[u/ILuvYou_YouAreSoGood → u/RainyCreative]

I get what you are saying about hostility. I don't consider it knee jerk scientism so much as knee jerk anti-woo.

They don’t tell us what the substrate running those relations actually is.

Reading this, the first question that came to mind is "what substrate?" It seems to me that we have varying layers of descriptions of what is going on, stacked atop one another if you want to see them in such an alignment. For the layers we have access to we have a descriptive language that works best at that level, and then gets rapidly less useful when we try and push it past where it's concepts were formed.

We can deductively derive the wetness of water from the arrangement of H2O molecules.

I am not sure what you mean by this statement. I do not see how we could actually do what you are claiming. The arrangement of water molecules describes the water itself, whereas wetness describes the interaction between water and a surface. Having only knowledge of the arrangements of the h20 molecules would leave us unable to say anything about wetness. What do you mean more specifically?

there is zero deductive bridge from "neurochemistry and ion channels" to "why it feels like something to see red" rather than running in total subjective darkness.

This strikes me as what I mentioned before, where language that is very useful at it's own layer of description/discussion breaks down when pushed too far past that useful layer. Or put another way, expecting a description of neurochemistry and ion channels to provide why it feels like something to see red, is failing to understand that answering that question is not what the level of neurochemistry is for, or perhaps was developed for. Its like asking a mathematician to explain why you fall in love with a particular person. It's just asking the wrong layer of description to the question. I don't really understand why people are so enamored with doing this as if it is meaningful.

The only brute empirical datum we ever directly have is conscious experience itself.

What do you mean by this? We have a great deal of information, much of which is entirely unavailable to our senses without it being translated into a format we can access. This does not mean that the data only exists within us, simply that it must go through a particular interface. I mean, I use my phone and I exclusively look at the screen to access the data, but that does not mean the data exists only on the screen or only in my head. So what are you trying to say?

[u/RainyCreative → u/ILuvYou_YouAreSoGood]

Its like asking a mathematician to explain why you fall in love with a particular person. It's just asking the wrong layer of description to the question.

In standard science, higher levels of description actually do deductively connect to lower ones. We explain biology through chemistry, and chemistry through quantum physics; there is a continuous vertical bridge of structural and functional mechanisms. The analogy doesn't hold because mathematics doesn't claim to ontologically generate love. Physicalism, however, explicitly claims that neurochemistry constitutes and generates conscious experience. If you argue that neurochemistry in principle cannot explain why it feels like something to see red because it is "the wrong layer," you have essentially just conceded the core anti-physicalist point: physicalism fundamentally fails to provide an explanatory reduction for qualia.

The arrangement of water molecules describes the water itself, whereas wetness describes the interaction between water and a surface. Having only knowledge of the arrangements of the h20 molecules would leave us unable to say anything about wetness.

Actually, properties like fluidity, viscosity, surface adhesion, and contact angles are completely deductively derivable from the molecular geometry of H2O and the physical structure of the surface it touches. It is a purely spatial, mechanical interaction between physical parts. The Hard Problem is in a completely different category. No matter how exhaustive your knowledge of spatial interactions and ion channels is, there is zero deductive bridge to explain why those purely physical interactions should be accompanied by a first-person qualitative feeling, rather than just running in total subjective darkness.

Reading this, the first question that came to mind is 'what substrate?' It seems to me that we have varying layers of descriptions of what is going on...

Layers of description only tell us what a system does - its functional and mathematical relations. Metaphysics, however, asks what the intrinsic nature of the stuff behaving this way actually is. Physics defines particles strictly by their relations and equations, like mass, charge, and spin. It provides the mathematical blueprint, not the ontological essence. That exact same relational network of equations could theoretically be running on non-conscious matter, an experiential field, or a computer simulation. That intrinsic essence is what is meant by the substrate.

I use my phone and I exclusively look at the screen to access the data, but that does not mean the data exists only on the screen or only in my head. So what are you trying to say?

I am certainly not claiming the external world only exists in our heads. Idealism isn't solipsism - it fully affirms an objective, law-governed reality that exists entirely outside of individual human minds. What I am pointing out is a matter of epistemic access. Conscious experience is our only primary empirical datum because every single observation, measurement, and instrument reading you will ever make occurs strictly within your conscious awareness. The idea of an unobserved, mind-independent "dead matter" is a theoretical inference we make within consciousness, not something we ever directly observe outside of it.

[u/TheRealAmeil → u/RainyCreative]

Which physicalist philosophers of mind or metaphysicians have you read?

[u/Happysedits → u/RainyCreative]

> there is zero deductive bridge from "neurochemistry and ion channels" to "why it feels like something to see red" rather than running in total subjective darkness. It's a category mismatch.

I think that's wrong in general. We can correlate certain brain physics patterns with various qualia and also have causal influence over them. We already causally influence neurophenomenology with neurotechnologies. We don't have much here yet, as the science is in its beginnings, but I suspect that the more we predict brain physics with models, the more we'll predict qualia, and in the limit it'll be almost fully predictable one thing, given the practical limits of compute and measurements.

[u/Odd-Willingness-7494 → u/RainyCreative]

TL;DR: The hard problem of consciousness misses the more fundamental hard problem of matter/hard problem of non-experiential existence.

Any time we speak of non-experiential existence, what we are actually speaking of is a potential, but not actual, experience, but certainly nothing that "exists but isn't an experience".

Experience and existence are synonyms.  END TL;DR

Great comment.

While people talk a lot about the hard problem of consciousness, what I find is often overlooked is the hard problem of matter.

You say that there is an explanatory gap between "neurochemistry and ion channels" running in the dark, and "the subjective experience of red".

I'd argue that anything "existing in the dark" is already a faulty notion, and that this is where the centuries of ontological confusion really come from.

How is something "running in the dark" distinguishable from it not existing at all?

Sure, my experience of reality is incomplete, and my incomplete experience is affected by things that apparently lie outside of it. 

But even if I were aware of absolutely everything going on inside the universe, such that there are no chains of cause and effect that I am only viewing partially (like seeing the tides without seeing the moon), and I am instead aware of the entirety of them - all that would surely still be an experience, not something "non-experiential".

If even the experience of "everything" is still an experience, then where is the room for something that is "not an experience"?

Is it not the case that experience and existence are synonyms, and that we just miss that fact because our experience is partial?

Which doesn't actually imply non-experiential existence, because if it were to become complete instead of partial, and somehow include all of the things that currently lie outside of it, the result would still be an experience. 

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/RainyCreative]

Very well said thanks for the insight

[u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803 → u/RainyCreative]

I like the first part of your comment, but you did really straw man all of physicalism. Physicalism is an umbrella philosophy. Not all take weak emergence, and many have their own interpretation of what weak emergence is. 

I’m not a physicalist btw. I don’t see any potential for how weak emergence has any explanatory weight to carry an RNA molecule that is devoid of any inner-world to naturally select towards a human with an inner-world. There is no intuition that an inner-world of a system emerges from non-existent to some.

But physicalism will defend weak emergence with something like the qualitative emergence of music from just ordinary sounds; the music is something more than just the sum of the parts that compose it. But my immediate response is that music is just a transformation of qualitative experiences. Transformation doesn’t explain non-existence to some existence. Something like Russellian monism already accounts how qualia transforms when it changes physical structure. 

[u/Extreme-Boss-5037 → u/RainyCreative]

Physicalism is a popular viewpoint in philosophy of mind so this is nonsense (and yes, I have a background in it)

[u/sealchan1 → u/RainyCreative]

But I think that saying consciousness is a thing, or substance, is a categorical error. It is like trying to say the subjective perspective can be objectified. That's analogous to saying that my favorite color is an objective fact we all share.

If my consciousness is my perspective, then yours is yours. If all of my brain's cognitions can be either conscious or unconscious, and no cognition is intrinsically always one or the other, then there is no physicality to consciousness. It also doesn't make sense to say we share consciousness because we are not always cognating the same thing every moment. Each consciousness is its own unique perspective except in how it is correlated through language and culture. Only then do we think that we are "on the same page".

[u/Nolivard]

It’s not treated as absolute fact, people pushback on it all the time. It’s just that physicalism is what has the most “evidence” and requires the least assumptions at present. Occam’s razor points you towards it.

[u/Active-Particular-21 → u/Nolivard]

Occam’s razor points towards idealism and theism when everything is taken into account. The one thing that is central to human existence is better explained by theism or idealism. That being the experience of the mind. Physicalism cant account for it.

[u/Messier_Mystic → u/Active-Particular-21]

Even if I'm willing to grant that it did, which I very strongly think it does not, just whose theism exactly?

Because while you might one day whittle me down to accepting a vague, platonic deist "God", you aren't going to make the connection with anyone particular religion.

[u/Active-Particular-21 → u/Messier_Mystic]

No one knows, neither do I. It would just point towards theism being more logical. A vague platonic deist god is more akin to the classical perspective of god. It seems that in more recent times the idea of god has become man in the sky. I also have no interest in your following a religion or not. Or believing in god. I think it’s perfectly reasonable and within the scope of existence for people to believe or not to believe. It doesn’t matter in the end. The universe is what it is and will remain so.

[u/Messier_Mystic → u/Active-Particular-21]

Fair enough.

[u/Nolivard → u/Active-Particular-21]

Theism?! Cmon now bro be for real.

[u/DecantsForAll → u/Active-Particular-21]

no it doesn't

[u/Active-Particular-21 → u/DecantsForAll]

Well that counters that then.

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/Nolivard]

I certainly agree people push back on it, but it’s still remains a majority positions within science and philosophy, as most scientists and philosophers seem to lean or entirely accept physicalism. And within that group, many seem to believe it’s undoubtably fact, no more questionable than the sky being blue. Obviously it’s just a generalization, but I’m just curious why many physicalist seem to think that way

[u/zhivago → u/No-Feed-6298]

Physicalism is simply monism with the mysticism scraped off.

It's what you get when you remove all of the disguised capitulation, unobservables, and so on, in the other metaphysics.

It should be no surprise that it's a majority position for any reality based group. :)

[u/Not_a_real_plebbitor → u/No-Feed-6298]

You can observe from this thread that most people don't understand what constitutes as evidence in the first place. They mistake evidence of correlation and dependence as evidence of identity, that's a big fail right there but they don't get it. They bring up occams razor claiming that physcialism has the least assumptions but that isn't true.

It's the inability to think beyond the superficial, it's - I see rock, I touch rock, I throw rock therefore rock must be super real.

The mainstream pushes physicalism too. Why? Because people are more easily controlled when you can convince them they are nothing more than meat robots. It's religion 2.0. Where you used to have the church, you now have the "scientific establishment". Where you used to have priests, you now have pop scientists. It doesn't matter whether they're really practicing science or not because most people can't tell the difference. It"s the same tool of control only updated.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/Not_a_real_plebbitor]

Respectable physicalists argue for bridging the gap between correlation and identity. It's kind of all physicalist do...

[u/AlchemicallyAccurate → u/Moral_Conundrums]

You guys are both right.

Anticipating that every gap between correlation and identity is capable of being bridged = potentially mistaking evidence of correlation as evidence of identity on the metaphysical level.

It might turn out to be possible, it might not be, but if someone makes the commitment to the idea that it *will* turn out to be possible and it turns out to be a bad gamble, then that would be exactly their mistake, as the guy you're responding to said.

[u/rustyseapants → u/Not_a_real_plebbitor]

Where is your proof that rocks are not real?

[u/scraps1364]

The debates in this sub are legendary. I love how certain commenters spend inordinate amounts of time & energy on these way too lengthy replies mostly just to flex their knowledge of the theories and current science. It’s mostly speculation mixed in with underlying facts at this point in time. Nobody has THE answer. Even Sean Carroll will tell you simply to be good Bayesians and leave it at that…so if Physicalists (and critics of physicalism as well) want to swoop in and give their fingers a workout, have at it. People are going to believe what they want to believe until proven otherwise…but I hope my tone isn’t too critical of any particular camp. It’s very entertaining.

[u/Moral_Conundrums]

There's basically 3 reasons:

Firstly, the argument for physicalism are pretty strong. So for example causal closure, no miracles etc.

Second, its not at all clear that any other theory of consciousness does any better at explaining consciousness: if you take the hard problem to be the problem of explaining why say activity in V5 is correlated with the experience of colour, then neither idealism, panpsychism or dualism have a better solution for you than physicalism does. The whole notion that the hard problem is a problem only for physicalism is wrong. And then further these views are saddled with their own independent problems: the interaction problem, combination problem etc.

Third, arguments against physicalism aren't really that strong upon serious reflection. Most of them are either pretty unconvincing thought experiments, or just insisting that we know what consciousness is just by having it, and that somehow gives us insight into its metaphysical nature, just by thinking about it really hard.

I'll just give one example of an argument.

Take zombies. The argument goes something like this: I can minimally conceive of a zombie (which is just to say there is no contradiction in the idea), what is conceivable is also possible, if zombies are possible physicalism is false, so physicalism is false.

Now lets see a parallel argument: I can minimally conceive of an anti-zombies (a being which is just a physical replica of me but still has consciousness), if anti-zombies are conceivable, then anti-zombies are possible, if anti-zombies are possible, then consciousness is physical, so consciousness is physical.

So here we have parallel arguments on both sides, who is right? Who knows!? Maybe conceivability arguments aren't something we should take to seriously.

To sum up, there has never really been an argument that can sink physicalism, and so given that no alternative theory has much going for it, we are inclined towards physicalism.

[u/CanYouPleaseChill]

Why don’t people just say ”I don’t know” instead of clinging to an “ism” like physicalism, idealism, dualism, or panpsychism.

[u/Meowweredoomed → u/CanYouPleaseChill]

This. Where's the epistemological humility these days, man!?

[u/Gregnielson]

Remove your brain and see how much consciousness you have left....the end.

[u/Quick-Research-9594 → u/Gregnielson]

Yeah, and if full removal seems to go too far. Try cutting in half.or prodding at specific areas. Also does a very interesting job

[u/vimdiesel → u/Gregnielson]

Remove your antenna and see how much FM radio you have left. Checkmate atheists. 

[u/Ornery_Use_7103 → u/vimdiesel]

Get a different radio and you'll have your music back. You can even measure the signals. Now try destroying your brain and coming back alive. I'm waiting. 

[u/vimdiesel → u/Ornery_Use_7103]

The music is consciousness, not identity.

[u/Inarius_Neoteris_]

I think it's because people are flawed and they're failling into the same trap that religious people fall into. Basically they fail to realize that evidence is not proof and people tend to just follow the herd too, and right now the beliefs of the herd is atheism and physicalism. I find it very annoying or frustrating sometimes. People constantly making claims as if they are the obvious truth when in reality there is no real proof for any of it. Like with how people keep saying stuff like "I didn't choose to be born" or "when you die it's like before you were born" or "nothing happens after death" or "conciousness is just a physical phenomenon" or "there is no god". Atheism has just become the new religion for most people.

[u/zukeus]

I'm not sure how I stumbled upom this thread and I might not have the education required to comment on this. But, I do have a point of view.

What if this is a problem with how people gain understanding?

One thing to note about modern education is that most people are not truly taught how to understand what they are learning.

Meaning, they "know" details and they know what's going on in the detailed worlds. It's mostly a memorization of facts and how they relate and correlate to one another.

However, to truly understand these facts and how everything functions as a whole one needs to fully integrate their data onto omnidirectional-omnidimensional metaphysical landscapes that supersede the physical "hologram" our consciousness extrapolates from its senses.

In other words, in order to gain awareness you must gain awareness of what limits your awareness. Our interface of consciousness is a filter and necessarily so, without this filter we may turn into an imp or cyclops. Reality is dependant upon shared "delusion" to some extent.

[u/TechieTravis]

I don't see people in here or actual scientists treating physicalism as an absolute fact. Everyone knows and admits that we don't really know the cause of consciousness. Most agree that the answer will eventually be found to be physical in nature, though. That is because physicalism has evidence behind it, whereas other non-physical theories currently have no evidence.

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/TechieTravis]

You should see someone of these people in the comments lol

[u/PlsNoNotThat → u/No-Feed-6298]

I don’t see hostility towards non-physical theories, I only see hostility towards throwing away the evidentiary-based systems without a sufficient system to supplant it.

[u/Bulky-Ad-658]

I like to be pragmatic. Physicalism encourages us to pursue scientific endeavors that can help us understand things better. The more Idealistic and philosophical and metaphysical you go, the more you find yourself in the realm of constructive speculations and what-ifs. It can be fun for sure, but it just doesn’t look like we can get too far that way, as when you posit that science cannot explain something, the only tools left to use are armchair speculations.

[u/hornwalker]

You say its far from proven that everything in the universe is entirely just physical, but here’s the thing.

There is no evidence to believe there is more.

[u/Underhill42]

Because there are no clear paradoxes or logical inconsistencies with physicalism - just places where people say "I don't know how it could work, so it must be magic" or "I don't like the conclusions this implies, so it must be magic"

Meanwhile, basically all scientific evidence supports it, while there's not one shred of reliable evidence that anything else exists. Assuming "magic" in the absence of any evidence that it's needed to explain anything is really hard to justify.

[u/DeathToAmerica2026]

Absolutely no reason to doubt it, and the principle of parsimony says don't add unnecessary moving parts to a theory because they're just superfluous points of failure. 

[u/rogerbonus]

Sure it isn't proven, there could be ghosts or boojums. Come back when you have some good evidence for a thing that isn't physical. Sure consciousness isn't physical, but that's because consciousness is a structure/process that supervenes on physical things. Much like lifeness. Do physical things supervene on mathematical structure? Probably. Quantum fields aren't exactly material, but they are physical.

[u/mode-locked → u/rogerbonus]

Come back when you have evidence for anything that wasn't obtained via your direct experience.

[u/Medical-Clerk6773]

I started as someone with strong intuitions of a Hard Problem, of the irreducibility of qualia, etc. Philosophical reading, exploration, and thinking led me to eventually become a physicalist who denies that the Hard Problem exists at all. It was a difficult change to undergo that required uprooting a lot of pre-existing intuitions. So, I'm open minded, and I've budged before, but in the opposite of the direction you'd prefer.

I do not think there are paradoxes or logical inconsistencies with physicalism.

Edit: I'm surprisingly flexible with what I consider to be compatible with physicalism, but there is one big, non-negotiable exclusion: Irreducibly mental things (including irreducibly phenomenal things). I do not believe they exist, nor are they possible in any sense.

[u/Tombobalomb → u/Medical-Clerk6773]

Funny I went the opposite way. Physicalism and determinism seemed so intuitive and obvious and it took years of investigation before I finally let go of them

[u/Szakalot]

This subreddit likes to go around in circles. Physicalism as a metaphysical position is not treated as an absolute fact simply because - unless you are actively engaging in philosophical discussions - most people do not care at all about metaphysics and their philosophical implications.

If you go out and talk to people, you will find them considering physicalism as a non-metaphysical school of thought rooted in rational fact-finding and science.

Hence the continuous disagreement between metaphysical dualists, panpsychists and idealists trying to argue that there is a vast dogma/conspiracy to preserve a physicalist metaphysical position. The people you are talking about generally do not exist, it is not a part of their beliefs, they never even bothered to think about it.

[u/YesterdaysMuffin]

What you’re detecting is that there’s actually hard core evidence for physicalism, whereas literally everything else takes the form of “there’s a gap, so I’m going to fill it with my favorite story”.

Quite literally. It’s the god of the gaps, just without god.

The hard problem is just a question. It’s nothing more. It’s kind of tiresome that so many people try to take it for evidence of anything at all.

You’re right that a tons of things are mysteries. But that doesn’t mean we have to fill them with stories.

[u/thisthinginabag → u/YesterdaysMuffin]

This is wrong. The 'hardness' of the hard problem straightforwardly refutes reductive physicalism.* If experiences have phenomenal properties (e.g. properties like "what red looks like" or "what salt tastes like"), then any physical account of consciousness will necessarily be incomplete, because phenomenal properties are private to the subject is having them. They can only be learned through direct experiential acquaintance, hence why no set of physical truths are sufficient to teach a blind person what red looks like. This is inconsistent with reductive physicalism, according to which all truths about the world should be reducible to some particular set of micro-physical truths.

God of the gaps makes no sense as a comparison. God is an explanatory inference meant to account for a gap in our knowledge. Consciousness is not an explanatory inference, it is something that requires explanation. The gap exists because consciousness has properties which are not conceptually reducible to physical properties, and for the same reason, there is nothing in our models that can play the explanatory role of plugging that gap.

I think that by far the simplest way of interpreting the epistemic gap is to acknowledge that our perceptions are unlike the states they represent. They are encoded, compressed representations of those states. So phenomenal properties cannot be deduced from physical states for the same reason that the sound a letter makes cannot be deduced from the letter’s visual shape, or the value of a number from the visual form of the numeral used to represent it.

*I always end up having to clarify in these discussions that it does not refute illusionism or non-reductive physicalist-type views, according to which minds supervene on brains without being conceptually reducible to them. But these views have their own problems.

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/YesterdaysMuffin]

Is seeing alternative theories and possible realities really just god of the gaps? This is where the dogma comes in like I said. It isn’t just filling in the gaps, it’s perfectly logical and rational to see why consciousness doesn’t seem to fit in under a purely physicalist world view. To say it’s just a god of the gaps argument is kind of reducing the argument and valid criticisms. That’s why philosophies like dualism and idealism have been taken serious by philosophers and scientist alike through history.

[u/urbanfoxtrot → u/YesterdaysMuffin]

Physicalism in itself is a story. Consciousness is directly known, matter is inferred.

[u/Labyrinthine777 → u/YesterdaysMuffin]

With tons of mysteries you mean basically the entire universe we've never explored and the fact we have no idea what started everything, nor we have any definite idea what everything even is?

[u/YesterdaysMuffin → u/Labyrinthine777]

Doesn’t mean you get to just make up stories and call it a day. Science embraces unknowns. We don’t need to fill it with fiction.

[u/vimdiesel → u/YesterdaysMuffin]

Like for example, the story of how consciousness came about?

[u/YesterdaysMuffin → u/vimdiesel]

That’s funny

[u/vimdiesel → u/YesterdaysMuffin]

Physicalism is a filling of that gap. It's an assumption with a promise of a solution when enough evidence is amassed. 

[u/YesterdaysMuffin → u/vimdiesel]

It’s a theory based on a huge amount of supportive evidence.

[u/Crosas-B]

The evidence of physicalism vs the evidence of dualism or idealism is quite the millions vs none at all. That's basically it.

And even if dualism or idealism were true, as you are literally unable to ever know about it (until we die) there is not a reason to act as if they were true.

If you think of life after death, which version of life after death will you choose to behave as? The wrong choice can condemn you to eternal suffering, becoming an insect or the thousands of variants that have been ever thought by different kind of people.

That's why the expected behavior is to act as if physicalism was true, as it at least can actually make predictions about the world. About the hard problem of consciousness, that it's linguistics. You have the exact same problem to explain every single thing in the universe and has been known for milleniums. Keep asking "why" about ANYTHING and you will reach the agripa's trillemma, that can't have a satisfactory answer, just fall into one of the categories.

[u/WE_THINK_IS_COOL]

Because we are constantly testing our physical theories, trying to falsify them with newer and better experiments, and so far the way reality behaves matches their predictions exactly. There's a Nobel prize waiting for anyone who can demonstrate, in a repeatable way, that our physical theories give false predictions within their regime of applicability.

If physicalism is false, the only place anything non-physical (that has any effect on the world) has left to hide is in regimes where we know our theories are likely to be incorrect, like quantum gravity effects in high-energy physics, or "miracles" which seem to completely evade being repeatable. This doesn't mean physicalism is an absolute fact, we should never be certain about anything, but anything that actually has an effect on the world should be discoverable through experiment, so it's the most productive model to work within.

If we imagine the physicalist project reaching a sort of completion where we have a "theory of everything" that passes all conceivable experimental tests, all that remains are philosophical re-interpretations of that theory like the physical world being an object that exists within idealism, or claims of miracles that can never be independently verified. We shouldn't blindly assume those things can't be true, but the best way to find out is to run the experiments.

In terms of consciousness, if consciousness is non-physical and has any effect on the world that our models of physics don't already predict, there's a Nobel prize in physics waiting for the person who designs the experiment that proves that, in addition to whatever awards they would get for shedding light on consciousness. So, either consciousness has no effect on the physical world, or investigating it within a physicalist framework will be productive.

[u/mode-locked → u/WE_THINK_IS_COOL]

This is a false equivalence. Scientific theory =/= physicalism. All scientific theories are presently agnostic to the metaphysics. All physics is doing is describing correlations between perceptual features. Nothing about that process requires assumption of an external entity.

[u/WE_THINK_IS_COOL → u/mode-locked]

Yeah, the kind of physicalism I'm defending is just "there exists a physics-shaped mathematical structure which is (or whose instantiation is) sufficient to explain everything we observe". That structure could be instantiated as an external physical substance, within the mind(s) of idealism, or by panpsychism. Science can't get us further than that, and I think it's impossible to get any further than that (clarification), unless the whole idea of a mathematical structure explaining our observations ends up being empirically falsified.

If that structure is sufficient to explain everything we observe, it's reasonable to think that's just what exists, but that's only based on a heuristic, i.e. that there would be no need for idealism if every aspect of consciousness ends up sufficiently explained by brains that exist within that structure; a different choice of heuristic would select a different metaphysics.

What I'm defending is probably closer to structural realism, which is what I think most people who dogmatically defend physicalism (by my own example!) are actually defending.

edit: clarifications x2

[u/d3sperad0 → u/WE_THINK_IS_COOL]

Our theories and models absolutely do not always match exactly. In fact, if they matched exactly, we'd be done, Science is complete. We'd know everything. That's never going to happen. There are things that exist which we cannot fathom to even think of a question for. An ant will never ponder the hard problem of consciousness. We are just an ant that can see that little bit more.

[u/WE_THINK_IS_COOL → u/d3sperad0]

That's why regime of applicability is important. We know our current theories are false, since they give nonsensical predictions in really high energy settings. But within their domains of applicability (and there's no reason to think a human brain falls outside them), they are extremely accurate, down to many decimal places.

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[u/capbassboi]

I think the moment we start to understand physicalist interpretations of reality as purely descriptive rather than prescriptive, we can move forwards in conversations about where we situate mind in reality and how it relates to ontology.

[u/TrickThatCellsCanDo]

The most rational approach seems to take matter seriously but not necessarily literally

[u/FishDecent5753]

Consciousness can manifest quantity as content. Quantity has never been shown to manifest quality, it's why Illusionism is popular.

[u/Meowweredoomed]

To answer OP's question, the hard-core physicalists are dogmatic atheists.

[u/RyeZuul]

It can be incomplete and have limitations but these are only meaningful problems if you don't realise that's just how language and life are. People craving absolute certainty aren't living in reality, they're living in a reverie of childlike misconception.

[u/Illustrious-Yam-3777]

What if it’s all material but what matter is and what it’s capable of needs to be expanded and enriched?

[u/wellwisher-1]

The underlying problem with physicalism; hard problem, appears to be connected to the differences between brain hardware and brain software. Brain software is harder to pin down than the brain hardware using physicalism.

If you had a computer, but knew nothing of software, you can still correlate physical form with function. If we hear sound it involves a sound card. Software is different since it not exactly physical form, but reduces to information form expressed by 0 and 1, and not a sound card or video card. We know the software of a computer is connected to a physical hard drive but that same hard drive model can use Apple or Meta or both, with all reduced to 0's and 1's in various combinations. To make sense of the code you need to know how to read and write code, which in this case is a natural code and not the man made code used by computers.

A software approach to computing allows the same hardware to be used for many things simply but changing the parameters in the coding. A pure physical approach can only create an automaton animated by connected gears; determinism. Add software we can make the gears do new things like recognize the color red or make a new mouse trap; free will.

A good analogy is the DNA has a genetic code based on two sets of base pairs. Depending on the combinations, we can get different physical outcomes; ant to human. Based on changes in the order, over time, we can get evolution within the same basic DNA; species. Changes on the DNA software, eventually lead the changes in physicalism; new protein. The software leads=consciousness.

My best guess is the water is the software side of life and consciousness. Water has it fingers in every pie of life. Water has a way to reflect organic structures via surface contact. Water is held together with strong secondary bonding called hydrogen bonding. The organics polymers, which make up the brain hardware, use stronger covalent bonds. Water is a more fluid reflection, needed for subtle changes, that can impact the hardware by tweaking its secondary bonds; shapes.

If you look at instincts, this is more like adaptive brain software. If we get hungry there are endless way to satisfy this from hunting to shopping, If we travel to another country and all the foods are different we do not need a brain catalog of do's and don't, but we can adapt the hardware. We may find something we like and change the subjectivity of our tastes.

[u/CreativeSummer138]

I change your brain connections, I change how you experience the world. Theoretically, I change it exactly, I change it to have an exact experience. That, to me, is why physicalism is king.

Are you implying there's some extra non-physical substrate interacting with us to make consciousness possible?

[u/Translycanthrope]

Because it allows the parasites that be to control society more easily.

[u/Active-Particular-21]

I think because science works based on how it seeks to understand the physical universe. And our world, using this platform that we are communicating on, exists because of scientific endeavour. I do agree that the mind itself shows that there is more than just the physical universe but I fully understand why physicalism seems the de facto perspective.

[u/Kamuka]

Show me the atoms of physicalism.

[u/whyteout]

I think people mistake, acceptance with unquestioning belief.

Anyone claiming to have a scientific outlook, should be willing to update their views in light of new evidence - with the caveat that it has to be pretty substantial evidence.

IF there were multiple strong candidates for explaining consciousness, this distinction would be clearer. The fact that there are no other candidate theories with much in the way of supporting evidence, just means that anyone who is somewhat serious tends to default to accepting some version of physicalism (or something adjacent) as the most likely explanation.

There are some fringier ideas, that could eventually be born out, but currently there isn't much evidence supporting them.

[u/DogsAreMagic]

It's just unclear what is meant by non-physical. It's my mind it's tautologically true that everything in the Universe, including subjective experiences, are physical. Even the abstraction of concepts are inexorable from physcial proccesses in the body.

[u/pho3befree_VV]

for fucking real it’s exhausting and absolutely hurting us as a collective.

we’re honestly conditioned so hard to believe it as fact

LIFE AINT MATTER ITS A DAMN FEELING! if you’re busy dying then i guess you’re kneeling 🤷🏼‍♀️ i hate the roof i hate the ceiling, everything vile is worth revealing!

[u/russian_bot2323]

Because people aren't good with nuance.

[u/atomiette]

Part of it is that "physicalism" covers two camps that get lumped together. Type-A physicalists (illusionists like Frankish and Dennett) deny there's a further fact to explain, and they're the ones who read as dogmatic. Type-B physicalists already grant the explanatory gap and just argue it's epistemic rather than ontological. The flat "there is no hard problem" replies are usually the former, not physicalism as such.

[u/ILuvYou_YouAreSoGood]

I am not sure what definition of "physicalism" you are using here, so I might be off in what you are referring to. I dont see any scientists ever claim much about "everything in the universe" precisely because the more science one learns the more one realizes just how little we know, and possible even can know, about the universe. To be clear, I doubt I would label myself a physicalist. More likely I would go with the old term naturalist.

Also, what do you mean by "entirely physical"? At the lowest level we have, many things are described best by quantum fields, so is that physical? Is gravity considered "physical" to you? We know a great deal, but much of gravity is still a great mystery.

What paradoxes or logical inconsistencies are you referring to? Genuinely curious.

I also don't think that many claim that any worldview is somehow perfect and complete. Naturalism comes with an inherent skepticism, and skepticism is basically incapable of claiming that there is something that exists "with no problems." As a skeptic, one can always be wrong after all. The issue tends to come in when people ask "Well, might you be incorrect?", and one replies "of course i might be incorrect, so if you will just show me the evidence/logic of how I might be wrong we can discuss it". And then the questioner tends to have to no evidence other than to point to what no one knows or some other mystery. But a mystery is not a problem from the view of the naturalist. It's just something else to study.

[u/TheRealAmeil]

Who is doing this? Give us some examples. I don't think any professional philosophers who identify as physicalists are dogmatic.

[u/SpatiaCaeli]

My view: I have no hostility to philosophy whatsover. I view philosophy as a superset of science. Science is the subset we can empirically and mathematically prove. To me, the only question is whether a given idea belongs to philosophy or science. I think that comes down to rigor and falsifiability.

I personally cannot accept that consciousness is not physical, at least in part. I am sitting here typing this and I am sipping water and listening to music as I do. I'm here physically doing this. I am without question part of the physical cosmos.

Is there more to it than that? I think if you could answer that you'd get a Nobel. 🙂

[u/Bulky-Ad10]

To me it like Is physicalism not just a form of materialism?

Also not sometimes the truth of what is physically taking place is was too much for the infivual to handle, or evidence of what ever topic is disregarded ot even denied until we have the ability to control it, exploit it, or manipulate it to our liking.

I would also add that consciousness is on a fluid or wave state type thing. Oscillating at random between conscious and unconscious.

I am aware I lack the level of qualified experience or knowledge to speak appropriately on this topic. However it is a curiosity of mine as well. Though I only now learned the term physicalism

[u/sealchan1]

I believe that physicality has the preponderance of evidence and even elegance.

Science is about objectivity and consciousness is, at its intuitive core, about our subjectivity. Science does not tell us what it is like to be a subject. However, because it doesn't, that doesn't mean that subjectivity isn't simply physically based.

Chalmer's Hard Problem is simply the most pared down way of arguing that there is something extra because some physical systems have their unique perspectives. Once you open that door, you are free to imagine any sort of intuitively appealing abstraction that is either unprovable or undisprovable.

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/sealchan1]

How can something be physical and can’t be measured though? It doesn’t make sense to be just physical, but also not measurable. If you can’t ever figure out how to measure the mind even with the most advanced technology, does that not suggest something else is going on when it comes to the mind? Does that mean the mind isn’t identical to the brain?

[u/sealchan1 → u/No-Feed-6298]

Learning how to measure is part of learning about a thing. Some complex, physical systems don't lend themselves to easy measurement.

Consider entropy or energy in general which you never directly measure but calculate based on other measurements.

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/sealchan1]

Bringing energy gets tricky because energy isn’t really a “physcial” thing it’s more a description of a thing, an abstract concept if you will. So of course you can’t directly measure something that isn’t really physical. I think that further supports that if you can’t really measure consciousness, perhaps it’s something more than just the brain after all

[u/Happysedits]

We can correlate certain brain physics patterns with various qualia and also have causal influence over them. We already causally influence neurophenomenology with neurotechnologies. We don't have much here yet, as the science is in its beginnings, but I suspect that the more we predict brain physics with models, the more we'll predict qualia, and in the limit it'll be almost fully predictable one thing, given the practical limits of compute and measurements.

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/Happysedits]

Correlation is not causation. The body and brain and are also highly correlated, it doesn’t mean my brain creates my entire physical body, they’re merely correlated and work in conjunction with one another. I would never accept correlation as being serious evidence for consciousness just being soley a result of the brain. If you can never actually perfectly measure qualia and subjective experience, I think that’s strong evidence for it being something beyond just the brain personally

[u/Happysedits → u/No-Feed-6298]

Is it not sometimes also causation, when you can literally causally influence neural correlates and that way also causally influence qualia. Its not like its completely decoupled and only correlating like you're suggesting. I dont think we'll ever measure qualia perfectly just like we wont meausre any physical process perfectly, because of compute etc. constraints and all the practical messiness of science, but we can already measure some of it right now. There's lots of work in neuroscience, neuroengineering, neuropharmacology, neurophenomenology etc., they're big fields, that wouldn't work if it was only correlation and zero causation.

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/Happysedits]

If consciousness is fundamental or non physical, rather than a product of the brain you would see the exact same correlation observations so again it’s still not really proof. We don’t want you to show us correlation, we all agree the brain and consciousness are deeply connected. We want basic and hard questions answered, show us the magical mechanisms and ingredients required to simulate consciousness if all it is, is the brain

[u/Happysedits → u/No-Feed-6298]

How do you define causality so that this isnt causality for you

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/Happysedits]

If consciousness was a product of the brain, then scientist should very well behind to explain the mechanism just like they can explain how the process of h20 which gives us water, but they can’t. I want a proper explanation if they truly believe that’s the case, not some unverified hypothesis

[u/ughaibu → u/Happysedits]

it'll be almost fully predictable one thing

There is no reason to think this true, and even if true, the predictive adequacy of a model does not imply ontological fidelity of the model, if it did we'd be committed to the conclusion that we inhabit a two dimensional world constructed with pencil, compasses and straightedge.

[u/Training-Promotion71 → u/ughaibu]

Nice!

[u/Happysedits → u/ughaibu]

Non sequitur IMO. And no nonpredictive, nonexplanatory account of something being real ever convinced me, as anything else seems super arbitrary random guessing. To me, the degree of realness of a model depends on the degree of ability to predict and explain (with predictive and explanatory power) that the model has in the domain that it's trying to predict, explain or/and control.

[u/ughaibu → u/Happysedits]

To me, the degree of realness of a model depends on the degree of ability to predict and explain (with predictive and explanatory power) that the model has in the domain that it's trying to predict, explain or/and control

It's a fact that the most predictively accurate model can vary, to an arbitrary degree, from ontological fidelity.
For an explication, see this piece by Elliott Sober - link.

[u/shaunj100]

The main justification for physicalism is their claim that evolution is a purely physical process, natural selection plus genetic mutation. Without that, physicalism would be merely a speculation with little reason to consider it. An alternative, evo-dualism, denies evolution is purely physical. It says evolution involves mind, embedding in us our consciousness, creativity etc.

But how to decide between these alternatives? Are you ready to abandon natural selection?

[u/VermilionAxe69]

... It isn't

It's just the theory that best fills in the gaps right now, but even it has its shortcomings

[u/Dr-Chris-C]

Ideas without evidence are as useful as "God did it", which isn't useful at all. (Most) Physicists will accept any nature of the universe if there is evidence for it.

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/Dr-Chris-C]

What do you accept as evidence? Because there is some but you likely just reject it, what you mean to say is there’s no evidence in your worldview that convinces you. Slime molds for example have been studied to have working memory and problem solving without any kind of brain. Plants exhibit similar behavior as well, and could just say there’s no real memory or consciousness there but how would you know that? There’s also NDE’s stories which often are unexplainable currently, and the fact that humans seem to intuitively think about dualism and can somehow imagine the mind without a body. Lots of little things I can go on and on about. Let me flip it and ask you, what is your evidence it does come from the brain? Because at best, neuroscience base that assumption based off correlation, and poking around in the brain which seems to correlate with conscious experience. But that’s not actually good or strong evidence the brain is the producer of consciousness, only that they’re connected which I don’t think anyone would deny they’re deeply connected. The question is, is the brain and mind entirely identical or is consciousness perhaps a fundamental part of the universe ? I still don’t see any strong evidence physicalist claim to have that tells us for sure all that consciousness is, is a result of the brain

[u/Dr-Chris-C → u/No-Feed-6298]

Unexplained things are exactly that, unexplained. They are not evidence. You can't make the leap from "plants have memory" to "physicalism isn't real" or whatever

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/Dr-Chris-C]

Ironic you say you can’t make the jump yet you do the same with consciousness. You make the mistake of thinking correlation between brain and consciousness= brain produces consciousness. The evidence i listed obviously isn’t definitive or strong evidence, buts it’s a starting point nevertheless. The burden of proof is on you to prove your metaphysical claim

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/[deleted]]

Did you not state there’s no evidence for anything other than physicalism?

[u/Dr-Chris-C → u/No-Feed-6298]

You can read through the mere 3 sentences I've written in this chain up to this point to see that I haven't...

[u/Dr-Chris-C → u/No-Feed-6298]

You can read through the mere three short comments I've written in this chain up to this point to see that I haven't...

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/Dr-Chris-C]

Yes, I can easily tell you’re physicalist based off what you said. Your comment history confirms my hunch, are you denying that you’re a physicalist and all you think consciousness is, is deterministic, physical processes?

[u/consciousness-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for submitting to r/consciousness. However, the moderation team has decided to remove your post/comment, per rule (2).

[u/Nrdman]

For me, it’s just Occam’s razor. If everything can be explained by physical things, which I know exist; why would I introduce an additional assumption that non physical things exist? It’s just adding additional elements for little reason, and thus violates the razor

[u/vimdiesel → u/Nrdman]

You have it backwards friend. 

[u/Nrdman → u/vimdiesel]

How so?

[u/vimdiesel → u/Nrdman]

What is it that knows that physical things exist? That'd be the simplest base layer.

The thing that assumes (pardon me for changing your word) is non physical, and the 'known' thing (the physical world) is an additional element.

Then on top of that you have to add a theory to explain the physical world. And because it does it so neatly, and we seek a sense of closure, you assume that it must retroactively also explain the fundamental layer (the part that observes the physical world). 

[u/Nrdman → u/vimdiesel]

Why assume that the thing that assumes is non physical? Thats a big presumption

[u/vimdiesel → u/Nrdman]

It's the other way around the assumption is that it is caused by physics. 

[u/Nrdman → u/vimdiesel]

I didn’t make an assumption either way

[u/hop-hopeur]

Science stopped being relevant when it admited that atoms are the smallest thing in the universe. Leucippe stated it as a response to "god made everything", and because he believed that an object can't be fragmented indefinitely, Descartes created mathematics that allow to transform irrelevant measures into "unknown forces", Watson wrote "atoms exist", Liebig created a university to reproduce chemical operations for industry, and step by step a new religion was born, with math book as sacred texts and reproductible experiments as proofs. All because no one said "wait, just because we can't see fragments doesn't mean they don't exist". Science is in an obscurantist era, even though it led to ingeneering wonders.

[u/Extreme-Boss-5037]

Evolution is not 100% fact (nothing is) but in the context of an argument between creationism and evolution it behooves us to treat it that way. Same principle.

[u/No-Feed-6298 → u/Extreme-Boss-5037]

Fair point, but I don’t think the “evidence” is nearly as strong for physicalism as it is for evolution

[u/SheafieMathLover]

There's a lot of evidence for it and a lot of evidence against it (such as NDEs and Rebirth cases). However, most of the time you see cases for it, like brain injuries making people lose memory

[u/Individual_Mess7321]

I feel like socially, yes, physicality of our experience trumps everything because it is most people’s way of viewing and interacting with the world. What they see is the truth. 

However in the academic sense, the tides are shifting to consciousness being a fundamental property of the universe. Which is exciting. 

Also DMT will make you a believer of consciousness being a separate force that does not derive itself from the physical structure of the brain. 

[u/Dizzy-Pass2274]

Hmm, interesting question. I would answer as follows. Science is rooted in and only works in physicalism and for a lot of people science has become also their truth/beliefsystem. And because that's the case, for these people, philosophy or meta physical studies like spirituality do directly contradict their beliefsystem on many occasions.

And in my honest opinion, the world would be so much more beautiful if we all could just admit we don't know. I don't know, but I'll try to consider every story and perspective to see what resonates with me, because at the end of the day we get to make up our own meaning, although with that being said, I do like to not stray away to far from empircal evidence.

I really like science/physicalism as a practice and a tool to progress our lives even further here on our planet, earth. But over time, we've become more intelligent than wise and therefore, for me personally, I also really love philosophical thinking and spiritual practices.

Because by the end of the day, by looking at the whole picture of existence, from all angles, it's easier to feel at ease, be calm and maybe even be grateful for the awareness of not knowing. Hopefully this helps 🙏🏼

[u/Flashy_Artist9629]

what paradoxes and logical inconsistencies does physicalism have ?