Physicalism and consciousness — part II
Why smart people resist physicalism, and what I say when they push back
In the first part of this essay, I laid out what physicalism actually claims (and doesn’t), marshaled five independent lines of evidence in its favor, took the “hard problem” seriously without capitulating to it, and argued that the main alternatives — substance dualism, property dualism, panpsychism, and idealism — dissolve on inspection into either interaction problems they can’t solve or mysteries they’ve merely renamed. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and a reasonable reader might feel that the case is, if not closed, at least strongly tilted. And yet — as my three smart friends at that party reminded me — intelligent, informed people resist physicalism with remarkable tenacity. So in this second part I want to do two things: understand why that resistance runs so deep, and then address the most serious objections directly. Consider it a philosophical sparring session, with me playing both sides as honestly as I can.
Why smart people resist physicalism
We now come to the obvious question: why do so many smart, sometimes scientifically or philosophically informed people reject physicalism, usually in favor of an alternative that is exceedingly fuzzy and far more improbable?
To use a famous phrase coined by Daniel Dennett (who was a physicalist), the “intuition pump” of first-person experience is very powerful and hard to resist. “My consciousness feels like more than neurons” is the way it is often put. But of course personal (subjective) feelings about metaphysics simply don’t count as evidence.
There is also a significant component of motivated reasoning on the part of some deniers of physicalism, especially if they have a strong religious background. To them, physicalism can feel reductive, threatening to meaning, to moral status, or the hope of an afterlife. But meaning is a human creation, not a mind-independent property of the universe; morality also is a human invention, albeit not an arbitrary one, as it attempts to solve the problem of getting along in increasingly complex and structured societies; and I honestly think — together with the Epicureans, the Stoics, and plenty others — that it’s time to abandon the childish belief that we will somehow survive death. This is the life we get, folks, let’s make the best of it!
Moreover, I have often observed in non-physicalists a conflation of what is admittedly scientifically inexplicable right now with the far stronger statement that something is scientifically inexplicable in principle. This entirely conflates epistemology and ontology, and amounts to an argument from ignorance akin to that put forth by creationists when they speak of a god-of-the-gaps.
It is crucial, I think, to distinguish epistemic humility (we don’t fully understand consciousness yet) from metaphysical panic (therefore non-physicalism). Humility is a moral and intellectual virtue, but jumping to strong metaphysical conclusions without evidence may be characterized as an example of pseudo- (or at least bad) philosophy.
All of the above amounts to one crucial methodological point: science operates under what is often referred to as methodological naturalism: we look for physical explanations of physical effects. This is not dogma (more on the “dogma” thing in a moment) — it’s the methodology that has produced all of our successful science. As opposed to, I would add, the spectacular non-successes, in terms of understanding the world, of both religion and metaphysics.
Positing non-physical substances or properties when physical explanations are incomplete is not a scientific move, nor is it a rational or philosophically sound move. It’s the god-of-the-gaps applied to the mind.
“You’re so dogmatic, Massimo!”
I hear that a lot. And perhaps I am. But let me try to defend myself, and all physicalists, from this slur.
The objection conflates two very different things: metaphysical dogmatism (science has all the answers, consciousness is already fully explained) and methodological commitment (physical explanations are the right kind to look for). A physicalist need not assert the former — and shouldn’t. The honest position, and the one that I strive to maintain and articulate, is that we don’t yet have a satisfying account of consciousness, and may not for a long time. But that’s true for plenty of other perfectly sound scientific questions where naturalism and physicalism would not be doubted, like the origin of life, for instance, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or the endeavours of physicists to find a general “theory of everything.”
What the physicalist is committed to, rather, is that (if and) when the explanation arrives, it will be a physical one — not because of dogmatic faith in science, but because every alternative has fared worse empirically and every successful scientific explanation of mind-relevant phenomena has been physical.
There’s also the issue of a tu quoque here: the non-physicalist is equally making a metaphysical commitment, but with far less evidential backing! Accusing the physicalist of dogmatism while positing non-physical substances or fundamental experiential properties for which one has not a shred of evidence is not a neutral, open-minded move — it’s a different dogmatism with fewer constraints. Epistemic humility cuts both ways, I should think.
