Physicalist Approach Research Articles

Substance metaphysics is incompatible with the causal closure of the metaphysical realm

The present paper argues that substantialist metaphysics are in tension with the physicalist idea that the universe is causally closed. The argument is a rather specific one and proceeds through three steps. The first step consists in arguing that monistic substance metaphysics allow for the existence of entities that cannot belong to the intended first order domain. This result sensitively depends on the nature of substances as invariant entities. The second step concludes that, if further domains are to be admitted, then they are inhabited by “higher” or (systematically) “nonstandard” entities and that, in both cases if not made somehow innocuous, such entities may take part on the metaphysical construction of the world through their own distinctive properties and causal powers. However, this latter claim is in contradiction with causal closure. But closure is the principle that mainly characterizes physicalist approaches in metaphysics and as such physicalist metaphysics cannot get rid of it. Who attempted making exotic properties and causal powers innocuous usually appealed to the Supervenience Argument. Unfortunately, as the third step proves, this argument is invalid. Finally, the paper looks forward and toward alternative models for physicalist metaphysics, like processbased models.
 Keywords: Metaphysics of Quantities, Abstraction Principles, Locationism.

From pictures to reality: modelling the phenomenology and psychophysics of 3D perception.

The dominant inferential approach to human 3D perception assumes a model of spatial encoding based on a physical description of objects and space. Prevailing models based on this physicalist approach assume that the visual system infers an objective, unitary and mostly veridical representation ofthe external world. However, careful consideration of the phenomenology of 3Dperception challenges these assumptions. I review important aspects of phenomenology, psychophysics and neurophysiology which suggest that human visual perception of 3D objects and space is underwritten by distinct and dissociated spatial encodings that are optimized for specific regions of space. Specifically, I argue that 3D perception is underwritten by at least three distinct encodings for (1) egocentric distance perception at the ambulatory scale, (2) exocentric distance (scaled depth) perception optimized for near space, and (3) perception of object shape and layout (unscaled depth). This tripartite division can more satisfactorily account for the phenomenology, psychophysics and adaptive logic of human 3D perception. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'New approaches to 3D vision'.

The Importance of Listening in Treating Invisible Illness and Long-Haul COVID-19.

Primary and specialty care clinicians strive to base diagnoses and treatment on specific, measurable abnormalities. Yet those with invisible, controversial illnesses such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) often have symptoms not explained by standard laboratory values. For instance, one of the cardinal features of ME/CFS is postexertional malaise, the exacerbation of symptoms-fatigue, pain, cognitive dysfunction-following exertion, which contradicts studies showing the health benefits of exercise. In these cases, overly physicalist approaches to caring for patients are not likely to be helpful, and a clinician's willingness to listen to a patient's experience of illness becomes essential.

The Double Intentionality of Moral Intentional Actions: Scotus and Ockham on Interior and Exterior Acts

Any account of intentional action has to deal with the problem of how such actions are individuated. Medieval accounts, however, crucially differ from contemporary ones in at least three respects: (i) for medieval authors, individuation is not a matter of description, as it is according to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ views; rather, it is a metaphysical matter. (ii) Medieval authors discuss intentional action on the basis of faculty psychology, whereas contemporary accounts are not committed to this kind of psychology. Connected to the use of faculty psychology is (iii) the distinction between interior and exterior acts. Roughly, interior acts are mental as opposed to physical acts, whereas exterior acts are acts of physical powers, such as of moving one’s body. Of course, contemporary accounts are not committed to this distinction between two ontologically different kinds of acts. Rather, they might be committed to views consistent with physicalist approaches to the mind. The main interpretative task in this paper is to clarify how Scotus and Ockham explain moral intentional action in terms of the role and involvement of these kinds of acts respectively. I argue that Scotus’s account is close to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ accounts, whereas Ockham’s account is incompatible with them.

Physicalism and the Incarnation Once More

In a previous publication, I offered a novel argument against physicalist approaches to the Incarnation called “the Two Sons Worry.” In brief, I argued that a physicalist who is committed to the ecumenical teachings about the Incarnation cannot easily escape the worry that there are two persons in Jesus Christ. Keith Hess has recently pointed out a flaw in the argument that I present. In this paper, I offer a reply that fixes the argument, thus leaving the problem for the physicalist intact.

Mobilization sources of the problems of supervence of consciousness and spiritual production of the modern era

The article examines the mobilization origins of the problem of supervenience of consciousness. In modern philosophy, the most consistent critic of the physicalist approach to the problem of consciousness is D. Chalmers, author of the bestselling Conscious Mind. While building his own system of evidence, D. Chalmers actively borrows images of popular mass culture, one of which is the zombie. The article substantiates the position that Chalmers' choice should not be regarded as a manifestation of shocking. “Phenomenological zombie,” as Chalmers defines it, in terms of the limitations of conscious experience, corresponds to Karl Marx's ideas about the harmful influence of partial labor on the proletariat. A modernized society based on mass production made it possible to transfer the principles of economic mobilization into spiritual activity. Becoming a spiritual production, spiritual activity loses its creator, which gives way to a “phenomenological zombie” thinking in cliches.

Posidonius' Cosmology

Posidonius incorporated important concepts of Peripatetic physics into his system. Posidonius adopted a finitist cosmological model where the extra- cosmic void was not infinite but just as large as the cosmos’ size at the time of the conflagration (F 84/97a E ̶ K). He accepted the idea that there are ab- solute directions towards which the elements naturally tend to move and in which they will naturally remain (F 93 E ̶ K). Similarly, Posidonius concei- ved the four elements as interactive given the new relationship of mutual contrariety, and adopted a physicalist approach where the hot elements are active (F 93, F 101 E ̶ K). The analysis of the long fragments preserved in Strabo (F 229 E ̶ K) and Priscianus Lydus (F 219 E ̶ K) has further shown the significance of heat as an active power in Posidonius’ physics.

Two Kinds of High-Level Probability

AbstractAccording to influential views the probabilities in classical statistical mechanics and other special sciences are objective chances, although the underlying mechanical theory is deterministic, since the deterministic low level is inadmissible or unavailable from the high level. Here two intuitions pull in opposite directions: One intuition is that if the world is deterministic, probability can only express subjective ignorance. The other intuition is that probability of high-level phenomena, especially thermodynamic ones, is dictated by the state of affairs in the world. We argue in support of this second intuition and we show that in fact there are two different ways in which high-level probability describes matters of fact, even if the underlying microscopic reality is deterministic. Our analysis is novel, but supports approaches by, e.g., Loewer, Albert, Frigg and Hoefer, List and Pivato. In particular, the reductive view we propose here can be seen as a naturalization of the above approaches. We consider consequences of our result for nonreductive physicalist approaches, such as functionalism, that admit multiple realization of the kinds that appear in the special sciences by physical kinds. We show that nonreductive physicalism implies the existence of nonphysical matters of fact.

A Physicalistic Approach to Conceptual Clarification of Philosophical Therapy

A Physicalistic Approach to Conceptual Clarification of Philosophical Therapy

Landscapes with different logics: A physicalistic approach to semantic conflicts in spatial planning

AbstractThis paper deals with the ways of categorising landscapes as ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ using a physicalist approach, where these terms have special meaning. The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the question whether such a division is still meaningful with regard to anthropogenic landscapes, not least in spatial planning. The concerns raised in this paper depart from the increasingly complicated structure of geographical space, including that of anthropogenic landscapes. Our standpoint is illustrated using cases of landscape ambiguities from Poland, Germany, Romania and Greece. Leaning on frameworks of physicalist (mechanicistic) theory, this paper suggests an explanation to the outlined semantic conflicts. This is done by pointing to the relationality between the impact of centripetal and centrifugal forces, the specifics of socio-economic development, as well as the varying landscape forms that emerge from the differences within that development.

Why is the transference theory of causation insufficient? The challenge of the Aharonov-Bohm effect

The transference theory reduces causation to the transmission (or regular manifestation) of physical conserved quantities, like energy or momenta. Although this theory aims at applying to all fields of physics, we claim that it fails to account for a quantum electrodynamic effect, viz. the Aharonov-Bohm effect. After having argued that the Aharonov-Bohm effect is a genuine counter-example for the transference theory, we offer a new physicalist approach of causation, ontic and modal, in which this effect is embedded.

Psychosis and schizophrenia: effects of changes in psychiatric classifications on clinical and theoretical approaches to mental illness.

This article discusses changes in the diagnostic classification systems for mental illness, especially the conceptual weakening of the "psychosis" category while schizophrenia became the only psychosis. Current pathological classifications prioritize a physicalist approach. Consequently, conditions that previously were associated with neurosis and subjectivity are being medicalized, conditions previously recognized as psychotic are relocated under the heading of personality disorders, and psychosis has been reduced to schizophrenia and considered a deficit of psychic functions. This article indicates the clinical and operational validity of the notion of "psychosis" as a nosographic category permitting a more complex approach to "schizophrenia", which in psychiatry is the last concept that bears the symbolic weight of madness.

The emergence of macroscopic regularity

Special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics) describe various regularities holding at some high macroscopic level. One of the central questions concerning these macroscopic regularities is how they are related to the laws of physics governing the underlying microscopic physical reality. In this paper we show how a macroscopic regularity may emerge from an underlying microscopic structure, and how the appearance of multiple realizability of the special sciences by physics comes about in a reductionist-physicalist framework. On this basis we explain how complexity at the high level can arise due to a sort of harmony between the microscopic dynamics and observer-dependent macroscopic properties. We show that observer-dependent properties, which underlie the emergence of macroscopic properties and of macroscopic complexity, are objective physical facts. We argue that such physical properties remove the mystery from the multiple realizability of special sciences’ kinds, since the latter are grounded in shared physical properties. Finally we explain how and in what sense in our reductive physicalist approach the special sciences are still autonomous after all.

Making the Case for the Soul in an Age of Neuroscience

Modern philosophy has been inhospitable to the soul. In the English-speaking world, the dominant tendency, since Hobbes and Locke, has been to subordinate the mental to the physical. Even where mental phenomena are granted real existence, they are construed as effects of underlying physical processes. To explain them is to identify their physical causes. Physicalist approaches to the mind cannot but see the soul as, in Gilbert Ryle's derisive phrase, a “ghost in the machine.” It is an unwanted leftover from a religious age with a bygone philosophical psychology. To the extent that mental entities do any explanatory work, modern philosophy favors “mind” over “soul.”

O pewnym eksperymencie myślowym przeciwko determinizmowi woli

The article presents a thought experiment against the deterministic theory of consciousness (i.e. free will), which is a consequence of a naturalistic (materialist) and physicalist approach to the problem of consciousness, prevailing in contemporary philosophy of mind. The physicalist approach presupposes the possibility of third-person descriptions of human actions in physical terms, and a fortiori the predictability, in principle, of human behaviour. The experiment emphasizes some consequences of this approach, especially some logical problems to which it gives rise.

Some Difficulties of Physicalistic Approach

Consciousness is not an object that can be enumerated or related to some other object. It cannot be separated from us; we cannot step aside from it or distance ourselves from it, for consciousness is non-spatial. NeuroQuantology | December 2012 | Volume 10 | Issue 4 | Page 663-669

Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas by Steven Jensen

BOOK REVIEWS 321 pope? Sieben has provided the historical foundation; dogmatic theologians must evaluate the data and answer the remaining questions. JOHN MCDERMOTT, S.J. Sacred Heart Major Seminary Detroit, Michigan Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas. By STEVEN JENSEN. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Pp. 324. $35.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8132-1727-7. Steven Jensen explores issues central to the contemporary debate about the proper understanding of Thomas Aquinas on the specification of human acts in their interior and exterior dimensions. He divides his work into seven chapters, dealing with human actions, intention, exterior actions, love of others, difficulties, teleology, and moral species. Human actions, as opposed to acts of a human being, are those actions that are knowingly and willingly performed rather than operations that can be done while unconscious such as circulating blood or growing. Jensen contrasts, in this chapter and throughout the book, two schools of thought in approaching these matters which he calls “physicalism” and “Abelardianism.” A physicalist approach regards the exterior act as able to have a moral species simply in virtue of its material properties considered independently and separately from the will of the acting person. By contrast, the Abelardian approach focuses on the intentions of the acting person which alone gives moral character to the exterior action. The latter approach Jensen associates with such authors as Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, as well as Martin Rhonheimer. Steven Long, Jean Porter, and Kevin Flannery are identified as defenders of the physicalist approach . On Jensen’s view, both physicalism and Abelardianism capture some element of truth but remain defective. In treating intention, Jensen distinguishes what he calls “a broad expansive view, a lean view, and a middle view” (45). In the first approach, all foreseen consequences count as intended, in the second approach only those effects of the action that are desired as an end count as intended, and the third view holds that intention includes both the means and the end though disagreements may arise concerning whether any particular effect is intended as a means or an end. Jensen notes the myriad of difficulties and the various senses and meanings of intention which arise in part from conflicting interpretations of Aquinas (in particular, his treatment of self-defense in STh II-II, q. 64, a. 7) but also from rival intuitions about the moral permissibility of particular actions (such as craniotomy). BOOK REVIEWS 322 In the chapter on exterior actions, Jensen highlights the difference between the exterior action as executed and the exterior action as conceived in the mind of the agent. The exterior action as executed receives its moral character from the intentions of the agent. But the intentions of the agent themselves receive moral character from the exterior act as conceived by the agent. Jensen then considers what it is that specifies the exterior act as conceived. “[T]he exterior action has an order or direction to some natural form, abstracted from its moral character” (78). This order can arise from nature, from a further intention, or from reason, and Jensen thinks that primarily reason gives order to exterior actions as conceived. Reason in turn is not merely active and constructive but also must act in accordance with the realities, including causal links, that constrain the possibilities of human behavior. One cannot travel from Seattle to New York by means of eating popcorn. Jensen writes also that there is a difference between the order that a conceived action in fact has and the order that the action should have. When these two orders are in conflict, then the action is evil. The order of love, the subject of chapter 4, is the order that an action should have, and so actions that are incompatible with this order are morally wrong. The love of friendship seeks the good of the beloved for the beloved’s own sake and refuses to use anyone for the sake of any further end. By contrast, the love of cupidity loves an object but not for the object’s sake, as the man who loves wine loves wine for the sake of his drinking it...

Towards Teaching Chemistry as a Language

This paper presents views on the teaching of chemistry and directions for its further development. A detailed critical analysis is offered for the inadequacy of much of the current teaching, weighed that it is by a conventional, traditional and, as it turns out, rather outdated sense of the material to be covered. The ambient meta-discourse on the nature of chemistry is unduly dominated by the physicalist assumption, believing chemistry to be reducible to physics, which I hold to be unrefutable and thus parascientific. This all-too-tenuous link is countered with a parallel, bolstered by a slew of examples and analogies, between chemistry and linguistics: it is both more legitimate, in terms of the supporting evidence, considerably more effective than a physicalist approach. Chemical teaching needs to hybridize the bottom-up and the top-down communication vectors between the students and their teacher. It can only benefit from infusion of a strong dose of history. Chemistry ought to be taught in like manner to a language, on the dual evidence of the existence of an iconic chemical language, of formulas and equations; and of chemical science being language-like and a combinatorial art.

Mind, Mortality and Material Being

Many religiously minded materialist philosophers have attempted to understand the doctrine of the survival of death from within a physicalist approach. Their goal is not to show the doctrine false, but to explain how it can be true. One such approach has been developed by Peter van Inwagen. After explaining what I call the duplication objection, I present van Inwagen’s proposal and show how a proponent might attempt to solve the problem of duplication. I argue that the very features of the view that aid the proponent in responding to the duplication objection entails the possibility of an impossible state of affairs—that two distinct persons can at the same time be identical with the same bundle of material simples. The religiously minded materialist is caught between the horns of a dilemma. One’s view regarding human persons must be robust enough to account for personal identity over time, and so not fall to the duplication objection. At the same time, the view must not entail the possibility of two persons temporarily having complete coincident existence.

Inverse zombies, anesthesia awareness, and the hard problem of unconsciousness

Philosophical (p-) zombies are constructs that possess all of the behavioral features and responses of a sentient human being, yet are not conscious. P-zombies are intimately linked to the hard problem of consciousness and have been invoked as arguments against physicalist approaches. But what if we were to invert the characteristics of p-zombies? Such an inverse (i-) zombie would possess all of the behavioral features and responses of an insensate being, yet would nonetheless be conscious. While p-zombies are logically possible but naturally improbable, an approximation of i-zombies actually exists: individuals experiencing what is referred to as “anesthesia awareness.” Patients under general anesthesia may be intubated (preventing speech), paralyzed (preventing movement), and narcotized (minimizing response to nociceptive stimuli). Thus, they appear—and typically are—unconscious. In 1–2 cases/1000, however, patients may be aware of intraoperative events, sometimes without any objective indices. Furthermore, a much higher percentage of patients (22% in a recent study) may have the subjective experience of dreaming during general anesthesia. P-zombies confront us with the hard problem of consciousness—how do we explain the presence of qualia? I-zombies present a more practical problem—how do we detect the presence of qualia? The current investigation compares p-zombies to i-zombies and explores the “hard problem” of unconsciousness with a focus on anesthesia awareness.