Tags / 31 quotes from 4 sources
#materialism
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
The physicalist starting point
Again, Searle lays out in very clear terms the basic issue about foundational ontology as it relates to consciousness: We know independently that the world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force (or whatever the ultimately correct physics tell us are the…
Physicalism and how neurons create meaning
Physicalism in its most general form is the belief that the only things in the universe that are observer-independent are physical. This is also what ontological objectivity means: once again, what things in the Universe exist without human observers? Physicalism further…
Dissolving the divide between subjective and objective
But the divide between subjective and objective could also turn out to be an illusion of our own creation. This division goes to the core of our scientific worldview. If some form of physicalism is true, then the division between the inner subjective worlds will have to…
Hofmann on the West's spiritual crisis
Hofmann strongly believed that there was a spiritual crisis in Western civilization, and argued that society must shift from “the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Dualists and materialists make the same mistake
People who accept the reality and irreducibility of the mental tend to think of themselves as dualists. But to others, accepting an irreducible mental component in reality seems like giving up on the scientific world-view, so they deny the existence of any such mental reality…
The standard views in philosophy of mind are false
I write out of the conviction that the philosophy of mind is the most important subject in contemporary philosophy and that the standard views—dualism, materialism, behaviorism, functionalism, computationalism, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism—are false.
Idealism and materialism as two kinds of monism
The dualists said that there are two kinds of things or properties in the universe, and with the failure of dualism, it is natural to suppose that maybe there is only one kind of thing in the universe. Not surprisingly, this view is called “monism” and it comes in two flavors…
Materialism as the religion of our time
The single most influential family of views in the philosophy of mind throughout the twentieth century and leading into the twenty-first century is one version or another of materialism. Materialism is the view that the only reality that exists is material or physical reality…
From materialism to the computational theory of mind
In the next few pages I am going to sketch briefly the history of materialism in the twentieth century, up to the point where it finally reached its most sophisticated formulation in the computational theory of the mind, the theory that the brain is a computer and the mind is a…
Behaviorism: the mind is the behavior of the body
The earliest influential form of materialism in the twentieth century was called “behaviorism.” In its crudest version, behaviorism says the mind just is the behavior of the body. There is nothing over and above the behavior of the body that is constitutive of the mental…
Minds are just brains
The sheer implausibility of behaviorism had become an embarrassment by the 1960s and it was gradually replaced among materialist-minded philosophers by a doctrine called “physicalism,” sometimes called the “identity theory.” The physicalists said that Descartes was not wrong…
Type-type versus token-token identity
The type-type identity theory says “Every type of mental state is identical with some type of physical state.” By their own lights this is a bit sloppy, because the identity in question is between actual concrete tokens and not abstract universal types. What they meant is: for…
Davidson's anomalous monism
Anomalous monism is a view put forward by Donald Davidson20 for which he advances the following argument: Step 1: There are causal relations between mental phenomena and physical phenomena. Step 2: Wherever there are events related as cause and effect they must fall under…
Materialism leaves something out
In this chapter I will present the most common arguments against materialism, concentrating on functionalism, because it is currently the most influential version of materialism. In general, these attacks have the same logical structure: the materialist account leaves out some…
What is it like to be a bat
One of the earliest well-known arguments against functionalist types of materialism was advanced in an article by Thomas Nagel called, “What It Is Like to Be a Bat?”1 According to Nagel, the really difficult part of the mind-body problem is the problem of consciousness. Suppose…
Mary has never seen red
A similar argument was advanced by the Australian philosopher, Frank Jackson.2 Jackson imagines a neuro-biologist, Mary, who knows all there is to know about color perception. She has a total and complete knowledge of the neurophysiology of our color-perceiving apparatus, and…
Neither dualism nor materialism is acceptable
We end this chapter in a depressing intellectual state: neither dualism nor materialism is acceptable and yet they are presented to us as the only possibilities. Furthermore we know independently that both what dualism is trying to say and what materialism is trying to say are…
The true and false parts of materialism and dualism
Materialism tries to say truly that the universe is entirely made up of physical particles that exist in fields of force and are often organized into systems. But it ends up saying falsely that there are no ontologically irreducible mental phenomena. Dualism tries to say truly…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
We imagine the truth
Again, and even more derisively, the materialist stance would be that this is pure imagination. And again I wouldn’t contest this, so much as to reply that such so-called explanations merely beg the question. What is imagination? Surely that is the question. Why is it so…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Swinburne: physicalism doesn't face the data
‘The trouble with physicalism,’ Swinburne told me, ‘is that it doesn’t face the data, and the data first of all is the mental life. We have thoughts and feelings and so on and the occurrence of these does not entail the occurrence of goings on in the brain or conversely.’ The…
A complete account is more than a physical one
It should be clear that this argument simply repeats the kind of category mistake identified by Ryle. So it is true, as Swinburne says, that a physical account of the world is not a complete account of the world. But it does not follow that the world is comprised of more stuff…
Soul as light bulb, brain as socket
‘What I have argued,’ he writes, ‘… is that without a functioning brain, the soul will not function (i.e. have conscious episodes) – not that it will not exist.’9 Swinburne uses the analogy of a light bulb to explain this. ‘The soul is like a light bulb and the brain is like an…
Unified, material constructions
by themselves, these truths leave a lot of unanswered questions and problems. Together, they tell us we are unified, material constructions. Each one of these words is problematic. The degree to which we are unified is still vague. We say we are in some sense constructions, but…
Physical yet not essentially physical
On the one hand, I’ve been arguing that we are entirely physical, and that we have no material souls. But on the other, I insist we are not our brains or our bodies, and that our identity is defined by psychological continuity. We seem to be wholly physical yet oddly not…
No more than, but more than just, matter
The way I put it is that we are no more than, but more than just, matter. In other words, we are made up of nothing more than physical stuff, but to describe our true nature, you need more than just a physical vocabulary. You cannot fully describe what it is to be a person in…
Non-reductive physicalism
This way of looking at things – sometimes called non-reductive physicalism – seems to be the only way to reconcile…
Eliminative materialists feign anaesthesia
The first is that thoughts, feelings, emotions and so on are real. There are some ‘eliminative materialists’ who claim that they aren’t, but in I.A. Richards’s famous phrase, such thinkers seem to ‘feign anaesthesia’,…
Nothing but the stuff of physics
the third truth: that there is no stuff in the universe other than the stuff of physics. Not so long ago, you could have put that same basic thought in simpler terms and it would probably have been more persuasive: there is nothing in the universe apart from matter. That…
The self as a verb dressed as a noun
It seems the only way to make sense of this is that mental events emerge from physical ones, without being strictly identical with them. As the neurologist Todd E. Feinberg puts it, ‘your life is not a pack of cells; your life is what your particular pack of cells collectively…
Three central facts about ourselves
These are the three central facts about ourselves that we have to accept, if we believe that the Ego Trick has done its job and created unified individuals out of a bundle of mental, neural and physical activity. First, the unity of the self is psychological. Second, we are no…
Christians without dualist souls
Having dismissed the idea that we have immaterial souls, you might assume that there is nothing left to be said for the Christian idea of a life to come. However, I was surprised to discover that many Christians, including Pope Benedict XVI, do not believe in the dualist soul…