Abstract
The physical world, as Ted Honderich points out in his book Actual Consciousness, is almost invariably thought of as necessarily objective. What exactly this means is controversial. However, the rough idea is that there is no aspect of the physical world that can, in principle, be experienced by only one person. As such, physicalism would be refuted by irreducible subjective facts—facts, for example, about what my conscious experience of seeing red is like that cannot be fully conveyed in objective terms about light reflectances, the physiology of color vision and so forth. Athough Honderich pushes against the conception of the physical as inhospitable to private, subjective experience, I argue that he does not go far enough.
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Notes
- 1.
If our world were like this, the mental would fail to depend on our fundamental physics as long as the mental is not part of fundamental physics.
- 2.
I am assuming that facts about composition, that is, facts about when certain entities compose a further object, are contingent since in the imagined scenario the fundamental entities of physics only contingently compose chemical bonds. Though this is a controversial view, it does have its defenders. See, for example, Nolan (2005) and Cameron (2007, 99–121).
- 3.
Is it reasonable to question the ubiquity of higher- to lower-level dependence relations in the nonmental realm? My sense is that although some philosophers of science question whether we can reductively explain chemistry and other higher-level sciences in terms of physics, they are hesitant to claim that these higher-level sciences do not depend on physics because, after all, the philosophers of mind say that this would mean that physicalism is false! (For arguments against the reducibility of chemistry to physics, see Hendry (forthcoming, Sect. 3) and Jaap van Brakel (2000, 119–150).) However, the possibility of a physically disordered world as well as a nothing-but-physics world suggests that the truth of physicalism does not require the dependence of chemistry and other higher-level sciences on physics. And once we relinquish this requirement, it is not unreasonable to think that the clues which have led some philosophers to question the reducibility of higher-level sciences to physics might lead these same philosophers to question the dependence of higher-level sciences on physics.
- 4.
- 5.
For a contrary view, see Peter van Inwagen (2009, part 3).
References
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Montero, B.G. (2018). Physicalism Without Dependence. In: Caruso, G. (eds) Ted Honderich on Consciousness, Determinism, and Humanity. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66754-6_5
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