Questions tagged [physicalism]
The physicalism tag has no usage guidance.
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Physics and the question of context or environment
This is a reality check type of question. I am interested in whether it's a valid distinction and whether it's been considered by others.
It occured to me the other day that the issue of 'context' or '...
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The ultimate absurdity: if consciousness is an illusion, how can anything we know be real?
Epiphenomenalism holds that conscious experience is an ineffectual by-product of brain activities. Eliminationists go further and add that this by-product is an illusion. I was wondering whether ...
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Can god be physical? [closed]
If god is completely non physical without any physical embodiment, it is hard to imagine how he can cause a physical effect. The only notions of non physical causes is our human consciousness arguably....
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Do non physical causes exist?
When we decide to move an arm, some argue that it is an example of a mental event causing a physical effect. But doesn’t recent science show that free will may be illusory and from a time perspective, ...
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How do modern platonists explain the objective, specific connections between the physical and abstract?
There seems to be an entirely objective, human-independent way in which specific physical objects relate/correspond to specific abstract objects.
Example, we don't think the abstract inverse cube law ...
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Problems with saying that our universe is physically closed (reformulating Kant's antinomies)
Initial caveat: some misapprehension seems to have arisen over my reference to physical sets. But in this, I am trying to follow the language of modern topology, which seems to be applied everywhere ...
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What do professional philosophers mean by physicalism or "everything is physical"
What do professional philosophers mean by "physicalism" ?
The definition I use is that physicalism is the worldview that the entities that actually exist in the world are those used for ...
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Fatalism vs Determinism vs Free-Will
To my understanding, physical causal Determinism means that if E is a physical event, then there is a physical event C such that C causes E. Fatalism means that if some event C happens, then any event ...
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Successfully mapping qualia to the physical?
So physicalists seem to often try to map qualia to something physical but then run into the problem:
Leibniz’s argument seems to be this: the visitor of the machine, upon
entering it, would observe ...
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How does representationalism respond to the "Mary's room argument"?
So here's Frank Jackson himself responding to his own argument using "representationalism":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPT0BE1WAHk
So as I'm understanding Frank's newer view... when ...
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Objections to token-token identity theory in philosophy of mind
There are well known objections to type-type identity (IEP) such as multiple realization and Kripke's argument, but I don't know any objections acceptable (by the majority of philosophers) to this ...
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Freud and (German) idealism
The French wikipedia article on German romanticism mentions a very strong tie between Freud psychoanalysis and German romanticism.
German romantism is also said to have strong link with German ...
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What is the definition of a physical thing?
Physicalism is the view that only the physical exists. But that raises the question, what is the definition of a physical thing or object? Has any philosopher defined physicality? I would like some ...
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The symbol grounding problem, physicalism and 2nd law of thermodynamics?
How does a physicalist resolve this dilemma (and what is it known as)?
Consider a physicalist who wants to solve the symbol grounding problem. He postulates that a particular brain configuration ...
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The mechanistic view, information and thermodynamics?
Consider the following fictional dialogue between a someone A, who holds the view the universe is mechanistic and someone B, who doesn't.
A: Everything that exists in the world is purely physical.
B: ...
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Is physicalism ultimately essentialist?
Classical Greek atomism arose basically as a response to the Eleatic criticism of the concept of change. The Eleatic argument was basically that if X=Y, then all properties of X must also be ...
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On the connection between science and reality
My question is basically targetting various sciences that we use to understnad the real world and how we form laws in them.
For example, in physics, we first see sometthing in the real world. Let it ...
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Experience as an initial value problem?
Question
The argument seems to say just as I have a physical initial value problem and with the laws of physics tell the time evolution, similarly, I can have an initial value problem of experience ...
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Scrutiny on the definition of the Turing Machine?
Wiki states:
A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an
abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according
to a table of rules.
Has this intuitive ...
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PhilPapers Survey 2020, Why do so many physicalists deny consciousness of future AI systems?
According to PhilPapers Survey from 2020 there are 239 philosophers who identify as accepting or leaning towards Physicalism and yet reject consciousness of future AI.
To me this seems very puzzling, ...
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Non-random indeterminism in physicalist reductionism?
In lectures on free will, often a dichotomy between determinism and random is alluded. This dichotomy always is not a true dichotomy, there are some known and even trivial examples of non-random ...
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Which arguments support Dualism as the best view of the human person?
If you had to choose between Dualism, Physicalism, and Hylomorphism, which one do you think is more likely to be accurate and why?
I think Dualism is the most plausible, but that might be because I am ...
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Physicalism + book recommendations
I'm 17 years old and I'm starting out in philosophy on my own. To get started I would like to get to know myself more and the way I think since according to what I have researched, I could define ...
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Emergence and status of the wave function, do any philosophers define physics and physicalism in 21st Century?
Emergence not as the antithesis of physical reduction, more the realization every level can be wildly different. This view of emergence supports reduction, that things are just quarks and fields after ...
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Something similar to The Knowledge Argument which works within Physicalism?
Here is The Knowledge Argument according to SEP (Mary is either monochrome or views the world through monochrome monitor):
(1) Mary has all the physical information concerning human color vision ...
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Knowing the laws of the universe but not its total state or ontology, what does philosophy have to say?
Since GR but also in special relativity and QM we can have laws, yet never access to the total physical state of the universe at any time. And that the ontology of science, the physical, is changing ...
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How does a dualist explain changing their mind?
If I'm a monist about the mind and physicalism and/or causal determinism, when I change my mind about some topic, I can posit something causally linked to my mind as changing my opinion. Perhaps I ...
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Experiment to prove that dualism is true
To prove experimentally that dualism is true, the dualist would need to show that:
Let be a person in physical state A at some instant t1 with conscious experience X.
Now, in another instant t2, the ...
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How can materialists make claims?
I dont have all the modern philosophical terms down, but I cannot see how materialists/physicalists can make any claims. If there is nothing but physical universe, then there is no “truth”. Actually ...
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Every experience is a new qualia? In reference to Dennett and RoboMary
Preliminary: RoboMary is a robot, but so are we - large robots made of smaller robots made of smaller robots. She does not yet have the experience of color. Dennett puts forth a physicalist way for ...
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Is a physical process identical to an algorithm computing it?
I have read three questions about algorithms and their relation to the human brain.
Two recent ones:
Question on Godel's Remark on Algorithmic Nature of Mind
and:
Why doesn't Searle's ...
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Physicalism - continuity of personal identity
What is the physicalist view on the continuity of personal identity?
For example, suppose something terrible will happen to my body in the far future... would the physicalist say it's rational to be ...
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How can we formally define the laws of a physical universe?
Have any philosophers come up with a workable formal, mathematical definition for what the laws of an arbitrary physical universe might be? Such a definition would need to allow specification of ...
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Is there a materialist explanation for the type-token distinction?
Is there a materialist theory in philosophy that goes beyond giving a dictionary definition of the type/token distinction and attempts to explain what types and tokens really are in material terms, e....
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What's the relationship between physical and logical causation?
I have always presumed that logical causation - such as logical rules like the formation of a valid syllogism, or the law of the excluded middle - operate independently of physical causation. That is, ...
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Is Polanyi's critique of physicalist view of the mind flawed?
In Personal Knowledge chapter 11 Polanyi elaborates his critique of the "physico-chemical investigations of a machine" by carefully dividing reasons and causes as types of explanations:
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Where does computations occur, in Mind or in Matter?
Short and silly question, but it opens-up to a separation of idealism and materialism on the basis of information.
If computations (in the scenario of a materialistic-computational perspective of the ...
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Do panpsychism and its variants (such as Russellian monism) face an interaction problem?
Many philosophers of the mind—such as David Chalmers, Galen Strawson and Philip Goff—have become sympathetic to variants of panpsychism when it comes to explaining consciousness. Yet, on their own ...
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Which kind of physics does everything reduce to?
I don't know whether the proper term is Physicalism or Physical Reductionism (it's Reductive Physicalism--thank you, Conifold), but what I'm referring to is the position that everything reduces to ...
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Would it be trivial to think the physical as those entities which are necessary for a maximally complete physics?
I've been studying physicalism for a presentation I'll be doing on Shelly Kagan's book Death. One of the slides is on its problems, and one of those problems is that we don't have a clear definition ...
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Is the concept of information nonphysical?
To keep within the guidelines of only asking questions that have a definite answer, I will stipulate that I am asking about cases where the question has been considered in an academically respectable ...
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How is the causality of mind consistent with the law of conservation of energy?
How is the causality of mind consistent with the law of conservation of energy?
Intuitively, the mind can influence the physical world (with causality), and it is hard to see how such causality does ...
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How can complex material systems emerge in ways that allow them to transcend fundamental material structures?
One of the quandaries of reductionism from what I understand is how complex systems can emerge to overtake simple ones. This may sound convoluted, so bear with me as I try to explain.
According to a ...
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Is there an argument against physicalism on the grounds that the view would make what we call a subjective experience astronomically unlikely?
If we assume that physcialism is true and all that there is, then we can safely assume that what we think of as subjective experience and consciousness, is driven by the atoms in our brain and the ...
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Is physicalism an unfalsifiable position?
A follow up from this question: is materialism a self refuting position
Does physicalism include epistemological principles that make it impossible to disprove by its own standard ?
If I am a ...
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Debate on dualism, physicalism. etc in philosophy of mind
(I do not have a philosophy background but I do read philosophy myself.)
I have read some review papers of emergence theory, where philosophy of mind is a major battle ground. I find an absence of a ...
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Does strong AI disprove physicalism?
This question is motivated by a comment to an answer I provided to another question about John Searle and the Chinese Room Argument: What relevance, if any, does collective memory in ants have to John ...
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What's the problem with taking physicalism as "all there is is physical, so no problem between abstract/conceptual and physical can exist"?
What's the problem with taking physicalism as "all there is is physical, so no problem between abstract/conceptual and physical can exist"?
Why is "all there is is physical" not enough? Why does one ...
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The philosophical relationship of morality, rationalism, atheism and physicalism
I am an atheist and I hold a physicalist view of the world, that the world is made but of one kind of stuff (call it "physical", if you want) and the universe is composed only of one kind of ...
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What is the definition of physical? Is that definition clear enough to make the a distinction between physical and non-physical?
Awkwardly synthesizing jobermark's old question Is there a boundary on 'physical'? with my (badly put) question Can physics talk about non-physical entities/concepts, and if not which academic ...
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