Fundamental mentality in a physical world
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Fundamental mentality in a physical world Christopher Devlin Brown1 Received: 3 June 2020 / Accepted: 10 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Regardless of whatever else physicalism requires, nearly all philosophers agree that physicalism cannot be true in a world which contains fundamental mentality. I challenge this widely held attitude, and describe a world which is plausibly all-physical, yet which may contain fundamental mentality. This is a world in which priority monism is true—which is the view that the whole of the cosmos is fundamental, with dependence relations directed from the whole to the parts—and which contains only a single mental system, like a brain or computer. Because some properties of the whole are fundamental under priority monism, it follows that that the mental properties of a cosmos-encompassing brain or computer system may be fundamental in a priority monist world. Yet such a world need not contain anything physically unacceptable: the mental properties of the cosmos-encompassing brain or computer can be characterized in a physicalism-friendly functionalist or identity-theoretic way. Thus, as I see it, physicalism need not be false in such a world. This constitutes a challenge to those who hold the view that physicalism is inconsistent with the existence of fundamental mentality. Keywords Physicalism · No fundamental mentality · Via negativa · Functionalism · Priority monism
The metaphysical view called ‘physicalism’ asserts that there is nothing over and above the physical—if physicalism is true, then everything that exists is identical to, constituted by, or entirely dependent upon physical things. This view has become nearly orthodox in contemporary analytic philosophy, often operating as an assumed
Thanks to David Papineau, Barbara Montero, Torin Alter, Susan Schneider, Graham Priest and anonymous Synthese referees for many helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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Christopher Devlin Brown [email protected] Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
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background condition against which other discussions occur.1 Despite its massive popularity and influence, physicalism itself is not well understood. This is because the ‘physical’ in ‘nothing over and above the physical’ is underdefined, with different precisifications yielding different sorts of physicalism—and as yet, there is no consensus on the right way to refine the definition.2 A common way to understand the physical is as whatever is referred to by our best physics (Hellman and Thompson 1975; Smart 1978; Hellman 1985; Poland 1994; Melnyk 1997, 2002; Stoljar 2001). Unfortunately, this physics-based approach faces Hempel’s (1949, 1969) well-known dilemma: ‘physics’ is ambiguous, and can either refer to current physics or future physics. If ‘physics’ refers to current physics, a problem arises: there are yet-to-be-discovered entities and properties which are outside of the scope of current physics. Because current physics does not refer to these undiscovered things, their existence makes cur
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