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The Irrationality of Physicalism

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Abstract

This paper argues, not that physicalism is wrong, but that it is irrational. The paper defines standards of rationality, both metaphysical and epistemological, that physicalism necessarily inherits from science. Then it assesses physicalist efforts to naturalize consciousness in light of these. It concludes that physicalism allows its metaphysics to outrun its epistemology, in defiance of applicable standards, revealing a fundamental incoherence in the doctrine. The paper also briefly reviews other naturalization programs, to claim that physicalism, unlike the sciences, hasn’t proved fruitful.

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Notes

  1. This paper uses “entity” as a label for an existent of any kind. Objects, properties, events, processes, causes, etc. all count as entities.

  2. A basic entity is a basic building block not composed of anything else. Non-basic entities are composed of basic entities.

  3. See Lewtas (forthcoming a) for more about the doctrine, including a more detailed formulation of it.

  4. For more on emergentism, as well as a critique of it, see Lewtas (2013a).

  5. Thus we have “mind dust” panpsychism, the kind put forward by James (1890/1950) and Strawson (2006), and debated by Nagel (1979) and Van Cleve (1990). See Lewtas (2013b) and Lewtas (forthcoming b) for more about this view. Some panpsychists—Russellian panpsychists—go on to reduce (so-called) basic physical entities to basic conscious properties (with the result that basic conscious properties aren't instantiated by basic physical entities, but rather supply their underlying categorical grounds). See Lewtas (forthcoming c) for a critique of Russellian panpsychism.

  6. Other philosophers share this assessment, including most non-physicalists and even some physicalists (namely a posteriori physicalists, Chalmers' Type-B materialists, but not, of course, a priori physicalists, Chalmers' Type-A physicalists; see Chalmers 2003).

  7. See Lewtas (2013a) for further defence of this claim.

  8. The physical base counts as a Human cause of the emergent, because it stands in an appropriate formal relation to it [constant conjunction, counterfactual dependence, perfect correlation, condition necessary and sufficient (or merely sufficient), etc.]. But it doesn't count as a non-Human cause, where we understand non-Human causation as requiring that the natures of the causally related entities result in the causal relation between them. Put crudely, a non-Human cause actively brings its effect about.

  9. Most any physicalist text supports these claims. See Armstrong (1999) and Heil (2003) for particularly clear cases.

  10. Witness physicists' unease with the brute empirical values in the Standard Model. They therefore hope to uncover some rationale for these values. See Greene 2000.

  11. Witness efforts by some string theorists to derive basic physical entities from logic and mathematics alone (see Greene 2000).

  12. Levine (2001), 81 considers this one of physicalism's necessary core commitments. Science may one day abandon reductivism, Levine allows. But then it will falsify today's physicalism.

  13. Some philosophers, of otherwise naturalistic bent, endorse monist views according to which all concrete entities derive their ultimate reality, as well as their natures, from the whole, the cosmos, the One, which these thinkers understand as a single all-encompassing entity (see, for example, Schaffer 2010). This paper doesn't consider such philosophers physicalists. Although they look to science for the detailed natures of the cosmos and its parts, they turn away from presuppositions deeply embedded in science. To this extent, and despite appearances, they count as old-style metaphysicians rather than contemporary physicalists.

  14. This contingent empirical result becomes an essential feature of contemporary physicalism. If future science discovered that electrons have consciousness, or that consciousness plays a basic role in the collapse of the quantum wave function, then physicalism, today's doctrine, would be falsified. See Levine (2001), Stoljar (2001) and Wilson (2006) for physicalism's necessary insistence on non-basic mentality.

  15. The scientist can, of course, be promiscuous within the context of discovery so long as chaste within the context of justification.

  16. Thus Descartes and Leibniz, among many others, approached the world rationally through a priori philosophy as well as science. See Chalmers (1996, 2012) for a generally non-empirical but nevertheless rationalist engagement with the world.

  17. Paul (2012) argues that any metaphysics, and certainly naturalistic metaphysics (including especially physicalism), must accept epistemic trust.

  18. Thus Smolin (2007) dismisses string theory as metaphysics rather than science precisely because, in his view, string theory outruns the evidence.

  19. Different philosophers understand parsimony differently. This disagreement doesn't matter here.

  20. Lewtas (forthcoming a) defends this understanding of physicalism against alternatives. It also canvasses the problems it faces and the solutions to them.

  21. Many physicalists have reached this conclusion. See Lewtas (forthcoming a) for references as well as further argument along these lines.

  22. Here we understand “causal/functional” as we did above, and thus more widely than in mind–body functionalism.

  23. Some physicalists recognize, within the physical, not only dispositional reality, but also whatever non-dispositional entities, if any, ground dispositional reality (see Maxwell 1978). This paper has given reasons not to classify such views as instances of physicalism. Lewtas (forthcoming a) gives other reasons.

  24. See Levine (1983, 1993, 2001) for background on the explanatory gap.

  25. See Levine (2001) for an overview and harsh assessment of physicalist efforts tackling consciousness and the explanatory gap.

  26. These are a priori physicalists, Chalmers' Type-A materialists (see Chalmers 2003).

  27. See Lycan (1996) and Tye (1995) for general support of such claims.

  28. Pereboom doesn't insist that his qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis mirrors the truth of things. He claims, more modestly, that it remains an open and rational epistemic possibility. He therefore puts it forth, not as part of a mind–body theory, but as a device to blunt the force of anti-physicalist arguments, like the knowledge and conceivability arguments, which rest, at the end of the day, on the explanatory gap. This paper bypasses this subtlety.

  29. See 22–23.

  30. See 3, 7 and 8. Thus “[m]y intention isn't to work out the details of a positive argument for physicalism but rather to assess the prospects for physicalism in the face of the strongest challenges to it…” (7).

  31. Armstrong counts as a higher-order perception theorist: he believes consciousness results from a perception-like awareness of other mental states. So “perception”, at the end of the passage, effectively means experience.

  32. If we define experience as experienced to include the unexperienced, then we also tumble into incoherence, thereby violating epistemological rationalism (which enjoins the physicalist, at the very least, to forswear outright contradiction).

  33. This isn't merely the counsel of impatience. It doesn't mean, for instance, that we should give up trying to cure cancer because we've fallen short for well-nigh 60 years. We don't have a cure, but we readily see the shape a cure might take. Physicalists have wrestled with consciousness for just as long yet haven't made intelligible even the possibility of a physicalistic explanation.

  34. These are Chalmers' Type-B materialists, much the majority (see Chalmers 2003). See, for example, Hill (1991), Loar (1997) and Levine (2001).

  35. Few physicalists embrace this strategy in print, although Chalmers (1996, 2010) claims that many favour it in personal communication and many more are committed to it. We'll see that Levine (2001) toys with it without definitively endorsing or rejecting it.

  36. Many physicalists adopt this approach. See, for example, McGinn (1989) and Papineau (2007).

  37. Different philosophers use different terms. Chalmers (1996, 2003, 2010) speaks of strong metaphysical necessities. Levine (2001) talks about brute metaphysical necessities (partly because he distinguishes strong metaphysical necessities, which he deems barely acceptable, from brute metaphysical necessities, which, in most passages, he deems unacceptable). See ahead for citations.

  38. The case is a little more nuanced than these arguments suggest. Levine distinguishes between (to use his jargon) brute metaphysical necessities and strong metaphysical necessities (55, 59). Then he argues that strong metaphysical necessities, while carrying heavy theoretical costs, don't offend the canons of good philosophy as badly as do brute metaphysical necessities (58–60). Finally, he denies that his kind of physicalism need subscribe to strong metaphysical necessities anyway (55). For two reasons this paper doesn't accept Levine's pleas of innocence. First, it finds his distinction between strong and brute metaphysical necessities elusive. Second, it judges that Levine commits himself to brute identities/necessities notwithstanding his words to the contrary. Here the paper would repeat the argument made in the text, this time taking into account technicalities in Levine's presentation glossed over above.

  39. The paper can't look at all of them. New ones pop up all the time. Think of poor Hercules, lopping off the Hydra's heads, only to have two heads spring forth from each severed stump.

  40. See Alter & Walter (2007) for papers pursuing and criticizing this strategy.

  41. Levine understands modes of presentation as ways entities, or referents, present to us. “One must distinguish between concepts and properties. Concepts are, roughly, modes of presentation of properties (as well as objects)” (46).

  42. See the essays in Alter & Walter (2007), the works cited there, and the discussions in Levine (2001) of other concept dualists.

  43. We can read McGinn more charitably, of course—not as arguing for physicalism, but as exploring what must follow about us from the truth of physicalism coupled with our inability to see its truth. But even this kinder reading reveals metaphysical hubris. Compare McGinn with the creationist, who, confronted with the fossil record, suggests that God brought forth the world six thousand years ago with fossils in place.

  44. See Nagel (2012) for an extended argument to this effect.

  45. See Miller (2013) for an overview of physicalist meta-ethical thinking.

  46. See, for example, Perry (1979).

  47. Lewis (1986) reduces possibilities to concrete actualities, but only at prohibitive ontological cost!

  48. See, for example, Quine (1961).

  49. Most physicalists adopt a broadly Human account of causation. See Mackie (1980) and Lewis (1983) for examples.

  50. Humans about causation are committed to the contingency of both causal relations and laws of nature. See Lewtas (2013a) and Lewtas (forthcoming d) for more about this.

  51. See Quine (1960) and Kripke (1982).

  52. See Lewtas (forthcoming e) for further development of these points.

  53. Here we have the problem of ruling out, as illegitimate, incorrect but actual word uses. Suppose someone mistakenly uses “horse” to refer to a cow. How, on causal/covariational accounts, can his word not, on that occasion at least, mean cow? Fodor (1987) discusses these kinds of issues at length.

  54. Levine (2001) claims this.

  55. See, for example, Lycan (2008).

  56. The author thanks Joe Viste for encouraging him to bring this paper's arguments together in one place. The paper would never have come about but for him.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

    Pat Lewtas

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Lewtas, P. The Irrationality of Physicalism. Axiomathes 24, 313–341 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-013-9227-2

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