Why Physicalism Seems to Be (and Is) Incompatible with Intentionality
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Why Physicalism Seems to Be (and Is) Incompatible with Intentionality Richard Johns 1 Received: 28 May 2019 / Accepted: 20 January 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract There is a long history of philosophical intuition that the human mind must be more than physical or mechanical. I argue that this intuition arises from the perfect “transparency” of physical and mechanical states, in the sense that such states have no obscure or occult elements, but are fully intelligible in (usually) mathematical terms. In the paper, I derive a contradiction from the claim that such a physical system has genuine intentionality, comparable with an intelligent human. The contradiction arises from the fact that, according to physicalism, the physical properties of a brain state determine the narrow propositional content of any conscious thought occurring in that state. This fact allows a physical property of brain states to be defined using Cantor’s diagonal construction, and then a contradiction results if a physical system is assumed to form thoughts involving that property.
Physicalism, and the materialist view that preceded it, faces a common criticism: we have a strong intuition that nothing fully physical or mechanical could possibly be a mind. In this paper, I will investigate the source of this intuition and present a new argument in support of it. My argument differs from previous arguments in this vein, in that it aims to show that physicalism is inconsistent with intentionality, rather than consciousness or phenomenal qualities. The intuition that nothing physical or mechanical could be a mind is driven, I will argue, by the fact that such systems have states that are entirely clear and intelligible, having precise mathematical characterizations. We shall therefore begin by recounting the historical origins of this idea, and its role in arguments against physicalism.
* Richard Johns [email protected]
1
Langara College, 100 W. 49th Ave, Vancouver, BC V5Y 2Z6, Canada
R. Johns
1 Mechanism, Physicalism and the Mind The pioneers of the mechanical philosophy, philosophers such as Boyle, Descartes and Gassendi, saw no prospect of understanding everything in mechanical terms. Some tricky properties, such as colours, were declared to exist only in the mind of the observer. Of course that merely moved the problem rather than solving it, as one must still give an account of the mind. Most followed Descartes in seeing the mind as essentially non-mechanical, but a few materialists (notably Hobbes) dared to suggest that the mind itself is part of the mechanical world. Nowadays the strict mechanical philosophy, where the physical world consists of particles having geometrical qualities only, is not tenable. Even in Newton’s day the gravitational force was problematic for this view, as the force appeared to act magically at a distance without any contact between the particles affected. More recently physicists have discovered that the physical world is subtler than Descartes could have imagined. Fields are needed, as well a
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