Physicalism Is Dead
By Marc Wittmann Ph.D., research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Originally published at Psychology Today.
In essence, physicalism boils down to the idea that only matter matters if we want to understand the behavior of humans. In principle, as many neuroscientists and philosophers alike have proclaimed, our thoughts and feelings are solely explainable by neural processes. To study the workings of the brain is all you need in order to describe what makes as humans. I have the feeling that those neuroscientists and philosophers consider themselves new Nietzsches, fearless avant-garde thinkers who communicate a truth to unenlightened people: as movements of charged ions and neurotransmitters we are infinite nothingness.
The reductionist physicalist position entails that what is primarily and immediate to every person—phenomenal consciousness—does not exist. This has led the philosopher Galen Strawson in an article to quote thinkers from antiquity to psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman: “We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.” According to Strawson the “most remarkable episode in the history of human thought” is that those believers deny the existence of something that everyone knows with certainty to exist: conscious experience, a first-person phenomenal perspective. Other physicalists at least acknowledge that we are conscious beings, but that phenomenal consciousness is “produced” by the brain. Future knowledge of how neural signals generate consciousness will for sure explain subjectivity – from a purely neurobiological standpoint. The unsolvable problem here is, however, that ‘neurobiological processes’ and ‘subjective experience’ stem from different, even if correlated, knowledge frameworks. The liver produces bile in order to turn fat into energy. Within the biological framework liver produces something. The brain cannot produce consciousness because subjective experience is not something that is part of a biologically measurable mechanism. The sentence that ‘the brain produces consciousness’ is a category mistake.
But perhaps physicalism is dead and we have not yet noticed? There are several contemporary madmen who proclaim the death of physicalism. In a recent post, I wrote about the movement of the romantics who thought outside the box in order to understand consciousness. In more recent years, there has been a similar movement in the sciences of consciousness. As an example, a prominent neuroscientist, Christoph Koch, now favors a modern version of panpsychism: the idea that the mind is an omnipresent feature of reality and therefore must be present throughout the universe.
So, what are the contemporary alternative standpoints? The absurdity of self-denial, the denial of phenomenal consciousness, is contrasted in a form of idealism which proclaims that consciousness is all there is. Phenomenal subjectivity has undeniable primacy when when it comes to knowledge about ourselves and the world. Consciousness comes first. In the conceptualization of philosophical idealism, following Immanuel Kant, one could say that the experienced world is a representation of the outside world. We do not have direct access to this world. In a modern form, this idea, as formulated by Bernardo Kastrup (2024), comes under the name of analytic idealism. There is thus no matter? According to this stance: No. What might seem as absurd at first glance becomes more convincing when we realize that what we call the external world is my experience of that world. The physical world is created through observation with our senses. Of course, the sense organs are also part of the alleged outside world—the eyes and ears in my head. However, these biological structures are also my experiences. Turning the perspective around: The claim that everything is experience seems more convincing than the claim that we do not have conscious experience at all and that everything is matter.
It is a fact that even hard-nosed researchers who ignore a potential phenomenological analysis of experience nevertheless still have to rely on the subjective experience of their human participants. In experimental settings participants have to somehow convey their subjective experience—for example, by pressing buttons for “seeing” certain targets. To accommodate this fact, experimental psychologist Max Velmans (2009) has introduced the notion of reflexive consciousness. For an understanding of consciousness we need both the first-person and the third-person perspectives as complementary frameworks. Together with the third-person perspective, the inherently personal and subjective experience is naturally complementary knowledge for any researcher of consciousness.
References
Kastrup, B. (2024). Analytic idealism in a nutshell. London: iff Books.
Velmans, M. (2009). Understanding consciousness. Hove: Routledge.
This article was originally published at Psychology Today and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
Discover more from Harmonist
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Related Posts
Homeward Bound →
Mystic Poetry and Yogic Enlightenment →
Śrīla Jīva Gosvāmī →
