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Materialism vs Physicalism (and Strawsonian Physicalism)

3,555 views · Published 7 August 2014 · 8:06 · Indexed 18 October 2026

Channel: Science, Technology & the Future · 2014 · Science & Technology

David Pearce (interviewed by Adam Ford) discusses the difference between Physicalism & Materialism - and also discusses Strawsonian Physicalism - the idea that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical. May answer which breathes fire into the equations.
What makes our minds distinctive - isn't that we are composed of novel stuff (along the conjecture that we everything is made up of fields of experience) - is that they support bound phenomenal consciousness. A Neurosurgeon may detect modules in the brain that are responsible for many things (vision processing, auditory perception, etc) but they can't - for whatever reason - find that they are bound in phenomenal objects apprehended by a unitary phenomenal self.

Blog post here: http://www.scifuture.org/materialism-vs-physicalism-and-strawsonian-physicalism-with-david-pearce/

PHYSICALISTIC IDEALISM
Does reductive physicalism entail monistic idealism?
A testable conjecture about the nature of the physical world.

Natural science promises a complete story of the world. No "element of reality" should be missing from the mathematical formalism of physics, i.e. relativistic quantum field theory or its more speculative extensions. The Standard Model is extraordinarily well tested. Within its conceptual framework, consciousness would seem not only causally impotent but physically impossible. Hence the "Explanatory Gap" and the Hard Problem of consciousness.

In recent years, a minority of researchers have proposed that the Hard Problem may be an artefact of materialist metaphysics. Contra Kant, but following Schopenhauer, Russell, Lockwood, Strawson, et al., the new idealists conjecture that the phenomenology of one's mind reveals the intrinsic nature of the physical - the elusive "fire" in the equations about which physics is silent. Our ordinary presupposition that the intrinsic character of the physical is devoid of phenomenal properties is an additional metaphysical assumption. This is hugely plausible, for sure, but not a scientific discovery. Perhaps most tellingly, the only part of the "fire" in the equations to which one ever enjoys direct access, i.e. one's own consciousness, discloses phenomenal properties that are inconsistent with a materialist ontology.

Untestability cuts both ways. Any conjecture that the world's fundamental quantum fields - and, presumably, fundamental macroscopic quantum phenomena such as superconductors or superfluid helium - are intrinsically experiential would seem unfalsifiable too: just speculative metaphysics.

Rather surprisingly, we shall see this isn't the case.

http://www.hedweb.com/physicalism/

Also of interest is John Wilkins on Materialism & Physicalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xn5w_KcdII

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Science, Technology & the Future

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