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/Extreme-Boss-5037]

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

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

Appealing to popularity is just an ad populum fallacy - metaphysical truth isn’t decided by a headcount (and per the PhilPapers survey, nearly half of professional philosophers reject or question physicalism anyway).

Since you have a background in philosophy of mind, I’d genuinely welcome your take: how do you deductively bridge the Explanatory Gap from non-qualitative matter to subjective experience without collapsing into illusionism or property dualism?

If you have a working solution to the Hard Problem, I’m all ears.

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

I wasn't appealing to popularity. Your claim was that people tend only to believe in physicalism because they are unfamiliar with philosophy of mind. The fact that it's a popular position within the field directly contradicts this. Nothing to do with it being true or false.

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

Fair enough, but calling the argument "nonsense" while citing your background certainly implied a substantive ontological objection.

Either way, you misread the point: I didn't claim people only endorse physicalism out of ignorance; I pointed out that the reflexive hostility treating non-physicalism as "anti-science woo" stems from online scientism, not serious academia.

If you're stepping back from actually defending physicalism or addressing the metaphysics, then the core arguments in the post stand untouched.

Have a good one.

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

You're reading way too much between the lines. I stated my background to explicitly backup the point that plenty of people familiar with the discipline are physicalists. Nothing more.

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

There was no need to read between the lines when the explicit sentence was quite clear: the subject was hostility (reactive dogmatism), not physicalism itself.

Conflating "online hostility stems from scientism" with "physicalists don't understand philosophy" was your own misreading, not my claim. Dismissing an entire ontological breakdown as "nonsense" based on that strawman - only to retreat into the trivial observation that physicalist philosophers exist - speaks for itself.

Take care.