Thanks for the mention, Prudence. My main takeaway from the discussions in your comment section is that I really miss a kind of “manifesto” for my stance, which I call “process physicalism”. Because physicalism carries a lot of baggage that is, frankly, really incompatible with the way I view the landscape. So I am working on exactly that right now, and I hope I will be able to show that the, frankly, cartoonish version of physicalism is actually really annoying, even to us who approach this landscape with a bit more nuance.
Tomas, when you use the word "physicalism," what is the philosophic/ontolological meaning of the word "physical?"
I asked this recently of a tenured philosophy professor who is publishing a book on physicalism this year (I think under the auspices of Cambridge U press, but I'm not sure)
He said almost nobody in philosophy agrees on the meaning, and at best all one can say is, "What is fundamental is not mental."
It sounds like an apophatic statement.
Is there any positive meaning to the word "physical" as a philosophic view? I've never been able to find any
That’s a fair question, and I agree with the diagnosis that “physical” is often left underdefined in philosophy. My own use is intentionally not metaphysically final. I’m not appealing to a substance or an ultimate inventory of reality. What I mean by “physical” is a commitment about explanation: whatever exists must participate in spatiotemporal, causal, dynamical constraint, and must have identifiable failure modes. If something makes no difference to how systems persist, break down, or reorganize over time, then it does no explanatory work for the kinds of questions I’m asking. In that sense, my physicalism isn’t apophatic (“not mental”), but operational: it’s about what must be tracked to explain how certain systems actually function.
Ok, so the way you describe it, it fits perfectly well with the Vedantic view. So it really isn't physicalism in any sense. Why not drop the term since it serves no purpose.
And physicalism is not actually under defined at all. Philosophers want us to think this because if we thought about what they actually mean for just a few seconds, we'd realize that there is no meaning to what they write. Literally.
Physicalism is simply is a negative statement which if reversed, is very clear:
1. Something utterly unconscious, non living and unintelligent can exist without consciousness, life or intelligence, and perfect, unchanging order over billions of years can emerge and exist without even an infinitesimal hint of intelligence, life, or consciousness.
2. Consciousness, life and intelligence themselves are utterly and wholly dependent on something unconscious, non living and unintelligent.
These are statements of pure faith based on not a single empirical example. By holding to this term "physicalism" you render any possible further development of explanation incoherent.
On the other hand, by simply dropping the phrase "physicalism," all you say makes perfect sense and is quite intriguing and in fact, possibly even inspiring.
I would suggest to Prudence that it may be infinitely easier to dismantle physicalism altogether. Rather than trying for an alternative view, simply make clear what physicalism actually means.
Although all we ever can possibly know is a field of experience within an unlimited, unbound Consciousness, physicalism wants to posit something other than that, and asks us to believe in it by pure faith. Not only that, but this other thing, since it can't be connected, is by any possible definition, supernatural (if "natural" means the world of experience, apart from which, as Whitehead pointed out, is "bare nothingness).
If I told you I dropped a pack of cards from 10 feet and it landed on the floor as an exquisitely crafted card castle, you would not believe me, right? yet the physicalists want us to believe after the initial "big bang" a cosmic card castle formed with predictable regularities (laws of nature, supposedly) which have remained continuous and unchanged for 13.7 billion years.
if we don't believe this for the dropped card castle, why believe it in the physicalist religion?
We're asked to believe unfathomably impossible statements, based purely on faith in something super natural.
And on top of it all, the entire experienced universe, the physicalist neuroscientists tell us, is constructed in our brains, and the "real" universe is a universe of pure quantities that physicists tell us about.
It's like saying, "You know what's real? The smile of the Cheshire cat!"
I think much of what we end up arguing about is not my position at all, but a naïve, and ultimately incoherent, version of physicalism. (Which I personally find kind of laughable and extremely naïve.) That version presupposes that consciousness is the outcome of a heap of parts interacting in a serial, computational fashion inherited from a Turing-style picture of computation. On that view, experience is something produced downstream, which immediately reintroduces a homunculus problem: something has to receive or “read” the output.
That picture has never made sense to me, not because it is insufficiently physical, but because it fails to engage the basic features we cannot avoid when talking about phenomenological experience. Treating experience as an output rather than as constitutive guarantees that it will either be explained away or smuggled back in under another name.
This is why I ended up carving out what I call process physicalism. Not as a rebranding exercise, but because the dominant ontology leaves no conceptual space for irreducible processes. In this framework, process is the primary object of study. The identity of a system is its ongoing dynamics, not the result of its constituent parts producing an output.
I’m currently working on a manifesto to make this explicit, both in its logical commitments and its ontological structure, precisely to avoid these category errors. The aim is not to deny experience or mystify it, but to treat process as definitional rather than derivative.
Finally, because I want to avoid hand-waving as much as possible, I’m grounding this position in explicit mathematical formalization. The hope is that disagreement, when it comes, will have to engage with boundary conditions and formal constraints rather than free-floating intuitions. That’s also why this takes time: I want the position to fail, if it fails, for precise reasons.
If you see something as cartoonish, it’s good motivation to fill that space with something more insightful. I struggle to keep up with the science side of the discussion, my focus really is more on philosophy/theology, but I found your approach and ideas fascinating and original. I’d be interested to read about it in more detail. It’s worth the effort to produce the manifesto, to show the blueprint from the foundations all the way to the conclusion. It not only has the benefit that other people can then engage with it, you could possibly make connections you might not have seen until you make it explicit for others.
You and I have discussed some of these ideas a couple of times, and I’m sincerely glad you followed them all the way through to a fully articulated proposal. And what a proposal! It’s bold, beautifully constructed, imaginative, and ambitious AF. Its Internally consistent a, philosophically elegant, convincingly argued, and very well written.
You know I’m going to give you props for accommodating the science into your ontology instead of dismissing it. That move matters.
I can also genuinely relate to the idea of varying degrees of constraint within a universal field giving rise to mind and matter. I can appreciate the structural elegance of that framing.
Metaphor-wise, you were cooking.
Using Maxwell’s field theory as a model for epistemic reframing was a strong, disarming move. It grounds the reversal in something historically real and conceptually rich.
But my favorite was the brain as a guitar string shaping vibration into a note rather than producing it. That’s tactically sharp. It reframes correlation without denying the data.
The standing wave model works beautifully too.
You should be very proud of this piece structurally and philosophically. I’m genuinely glad you wrote it. Thanks!
Thanks Matthew, both for the kind words and for encouraging me to finish that. It was very satisfying to finally publish it. I am pleased with it, it’s faithful to the tradition while being in naturalist friendly language. I think of it like a conceptual translation which was probably why it was so challenging. But now I can see the path to build on that foundation and explain the entire metaphysical system, so I've created a lot more work for myself!
This is really interesting, thank you! I completely agree with the main argument stemming from the Vedanta school and I think the light metaphor for consciousness is perfect. I think there are even earlier instances of this in Indian thinking. While studying the Rigveda it occurred to me that a lot of the passages about Ushas (Dawn) may be talking about consciousness as light. For example, RV 1.48.9-10:
O Dawn, be radiant here with your glittering radiance, o Daughter of
Heaven,
conveying hither abundant good fortune for us, dawning forth at the
rituals of daybreak.
10. For the breathing and living of all is in you, when you dawn forth,
spirited one.
With your lofty chariot, radiant one, heed our call, you of bright
Hi again - a few minutes ago I saw a comment you made asking for feedback about panpsychism vs idealism. I couldn't find it again so I thought I'd drop by again here.
I wonder if the distinction in Indian philosophy between manas (chitta) and Consciousness (Chit) might be helpful. Much of modern idealism seems to conflate the two. If on the other hand, you look at not just "Chit" but Sat-Chit-Ananda, clearly, I think one has something beyond both idealism and panpsychism.
I'm sorry I haven't stated it very clearly. But I think David Bentley Hart does a beautiful job of making these distinctions in his book, "The Experience of God: Existence, Consciousness, Bliss" (t's not for nothing that he calls himself a "vedantic Christian" and is a great admirer of Sri Aurobindo!)
I have trouble navigating and finding things on substack too, but you can find notes people have posted on their profile. Comments are harder, you have to remember where you saw it.
I ended up deciding those terms are only useful in limited circumstances. I initially called this view cosmo-psychism but then left it out because it seemed superfluous anyway. If I was forced to fit it into a classification I’d call it realist-idealism.
I agree that the fact the Western tradition doesn’t distinguish between mind and consciousness makes it more difficult. I think Chalmers easy vs hard problem is basically the start of making these sort of distinctions, you’d probably know better than me on this, but maybe we could say, easy problems = manas or mind, a material element amenable to scientific study, hard = chitta, (maybe this is psychologies area of study?). That leaves chit as not really under consideration by philosophy of mind even though we’re both translating it as consciousness.
I’ve moved toward using words like subject and perspective to capture what I think chit really gets at. Maybe we could call it the witness and that would be closer to what Indian philosophy takes to be atma or jiva. But I’m not very familiar with these terminological distinctions and I tend to just choose a word that works for the context and the audience. My writing is more on the popular level anyway.
I’m a big fan of David Bentley Hart, especially that book, it cut through all the apologetic noise of new atheism like a hot knife through butter. That settles that. I’d love to hear him explain his views on Vedanta in more detail and how it’s influenced his Christianity. I’ve only just started exploring Sri Aurobindo’s ideas but I can see why they would resonate. When Christians talk of the Kingdom they’re talking about a transformation of the earth, not a transcending of it as such like we might think of most versions of moksha.
Leaving aside the endless struggles with language, your last point is interesting.
From what I know of Christian teaching up until, oh, maybe the mid 20th century, (except for people like de Chardin), when you talk with a theologian, minister, or other clergy members, you'll find they pay lip service to transforming the earth, but even nowadays, this "transformation" is a kind of superficial nice guy/gal ethical one.
I know I pick on her a lot, but one of the best examples of this I've come across in years is Liz Bucar's "Religion Reimagined" substack. Not a whiff of spirituality in her books or writings. When pushed to define spirituality, it's clear she's talking about pop psychology. The academic study of religion has always been among the most baffling things to me (a group of Indian philosophers went around to American departments of religion and of Buddhist studies as well - they asked the religion departments if they would hire Jesus if he applied to teach; and asked the Buddhist departments if they would hire the Buddha; in both cases, they said, no, Jesus and Buddha would be too biased in order to provide the appropriate objective analysis of their respective teachings)
As far as Christian religion, Liz almost entirely focuses on ethical issues which even the most devout physicalist would (with no sense of the utter intellectual incoherence of such views) be happy to support.
So whatever they claim in theory, in practice, of the 1000 masses I heard as music director of a Catholic church throughout the 1980s, there wasn't a single word about transformation of the earth.
And this was a time when my co-choral director, Padre Dominguez, was the director of immigration for the Archdiocese of New York, a time when we were accepting Salvadoran and Nicaraguan refugees from the wars we had started down there.
Religion! "The age of religions is over," Sri Aurobindo once said. It couldn't happen too soon for me! I don't see the kingdom of heaven manifesting until the existence of religion is almost wholly erased. God is a lot more patient about this than I am, I have to say. I suppose I should trust Her more.
There is a real trend to dilute Christianity to ethics that promotes social cohesion. Not that there’s any problem with it as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough to really call itself Christianity. It’s more like a secular ethics or political project. I haven’t read that Bucar substack so couldn’t comment but I’m thinking of people like Jordan Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I don’t really engage with that sort of thing, if I was a Christian I’d take a different tack. I have an article in the pipeline that re-conceptualises religion so it’s more like dharma, an individual pursuit not a set of metaphysical doctrines, there is precedent for that in the Western tradition as well. So rather than removing religion, we could renovate the existing structure.
Form the very small amount I’ve read about Sri Aurobindo, I believe the correct response to how hard life seems is - have faith that you chose this, and enjoy the experience of rising to the challenge and overcoming it. Or a more entertaining quip, you know you’re on an adventure when you start wishing you were back home in your lounge room.
All shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.
All shall be well, all manner of things shall be well. Julian of Norwich.
One more offering in terms of simplicity.
I was watching Swami Sarvapriyananda speaking with Rupert Spira today, and they were using a standard Vedantic "Movie" vs "movie screen" analogy (to pure consciousness vs the universe)
I thought about it a bit and wondered if it might not be a simple though rough analogy for many philosophic positions.
Here goes.
Mirra Alfassa once said there are (quite roughly) 3 major spiritual views:
(1) Ultimately only pure consciousness is real, and the rest is an illusion (this is pure Advaita but also similar to the idea of escaping into heaven or Nirvana)
(2) The transcendent Consciousness AND the world are both equally and fully Divine.
(3) transcendent Consciousness and the world are both fully Divine AD the manifestation is not simply the fulL Divine but is evolving over billions of years to manifest itself more fully.
That's pretty complicated right? Let's see if the movie/screen analogy helps.
(1) PURE NON DUALISM: The screen is ultimately the "Reality"of all the images in the movie. They are hardly more than an illusory play of light and have little or no importance in themselves.
(2) TANTRA: The screen and the movie are equally real and equally alive, dynamic and Divine but the movie's story itself has not much interest or importance (or, all stories are of equal importance)
(3) EVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUALITY: The screen and movie are equally real, AND the current movie is not so fully Divine, yet in the course of evolution may become so.
Let's see if this helps with other philosophies:
(1) PHYSICALISM/NATURALISM There is no screen, there is only the movie
(2) SUBSTANCE DUALISM: there is no screen, and the movie is made up of distinct matter and mind like substances
(3) IDEALIST NATURALISM (Kastrup) The movie is made up of a Mind At large, and there is no screen.
(4) PANPSYCHISM: There is no screen, and every aspect of the movie combines both matter and mind
(5) WHITEHEAD TYPE PROCESS PAN EXPERIENTIALISM There are no "things" in the movie it is only a flow of experience (and there is no need for positing the existence of some kind of screen like substance
(6) CLASSIC THEISM: within the movie, there is some kind of Infinite Mind which ultimately controls everything (there may be a screen, according to mystics like Meister Eckhart, but the classic theists out whether the movie characters can ever know the screen directly)
I know, the analogy wears thin after awhile, but it's kind of fun to try.
I think the Vedantic comparison of waking and lucid dreaming is infinitely more effective, but I find that most people trained i Western philosophy simply can't comprehend it. I find it utterly baffling how many ways they tend to distort it; i haven't tried it yet, but I wonder if this movie analogy might help.
I didn't see my own favorite critique of physicalism.
If "physicalism" is defined as "the idea that whatever is fundamental is not mental," then what accounts for order in the universe?
The physicalists are all incensed (though not religiously so!!) when one says "God did it."
But I don't see how this is anything different from "it just is."
So laws of nature just are.
And enough people are now finally saying, that maybe life isn't fully explicable by purely physical constituents, the explanation for how life emerged is the philosophy of emergentism (How did life emerge? It emerged! Simple answer!!)
And we find emergentism then covers everything else. Reason emerges, consciousness emerges, etc
I think Tomas' characterization of this as cartoonish is too kind. It's ghoulishly incoherent, particularly in light of the fact it is the implicit philosophy taught at all levels of education!
This post moved away from criticising naturalism and tried to outline a positive alternative, the Gaudiya view. It’s only the first article in what I think will be three parts and the next one will account for order in the universe as well as morality, only in the final one will I mention God.
I agree that makes people incensed and part of my motivation for presenting it this way, by starting with the hard problem and relying heavily on physics metaphors is to hopefully sidestep that cultural resistance to considering “spiritual” worldviews as serious contenders for explanation. At least long enough for them to be heard. This is why I used physics and there are no sanskrit terms, but you will understand if I say I’m trying to present achintya bhedabheda Vedanta of Jiva Goswami in modern terms, while being faithful to the tradition. I’m not sure how successful that is, but I’m happy with it as a first attempt and I’m excited about finishing the project.
I agree with you that physicalism is incoherent, which is why I’m increasingly inclined to think pointing out the problems with it is a waste of time, I’m going to do it once in detail and move on.
But the other thing I’d say in defence of physicalists, especially after talking to Tomas and Matthew, is to some extent we judge their metaphysics by our own explanatory standards, to expect that everything will be accounted for in a worldview.
But I think physicalism is best understood as attempting to balance on the razors edge between method and metaphysics, to not go too far into speculative metaphysical territory past what we can justify. It's a dynamic view, open to adaption at least in theory. And they have a good point, humans are inclined to get carried away with our fancies, our beautiful beatific visions of how reality could be, should be. So the best among the physicalists are a helpful restraint for anyone on the spiritual journey. They keep us firmly grounded and remind us where we are, not where we want to be. At the same time their view can solidify into dogma and keep us from attempting flight into the world behind the empirical veil.
I would remain steadfast in clear philosophic thinking that physicalism is NOT a method but a statement of faith.
I think the problem with critics of physicalism dating back the past 100 years is their writing is WAY too complicated.
The discussion on both sides is actually, way too complicated.
Bernardo Kastrup worked on this for 9 years and prior to 2019, he had already had in-depth conversations with 100s of physicalists. It only dawned on him in 2019 that physicalists had no idea what they were talkinga bout when they used the word “matter” and “physical,” and alternated colloquial and philosophic meanings without realizing it.
I just yesterday read something in one of Bernardo’s articles that had never ever occurred to me in thinking about this for 55 years. He was puzzling over psychologist and failed parapsychology researcher Susan Blackmore’s insistence that only physicalism could account for order in the universe, and that it was obvious that a mind based universe would be chaotic.
Damn! I remember corresponding with Arthur Reber (chosen by the American Psychological Association to respond to their indisputable summary of well replicated parapsychology experiments over 100 years). He simply stated that he didn’t need to look at the research evidence base the laws of physics forbid anything parapsychological.
His wife was my statistics adviser for my dissertation research on mindfulness in the treatment of physical pain. I gave her a copy of a sample of our book on yogic psychology, and she showed the part on parapsychology to her husband, Arthur. He asked me a question about meditation, and I responded. His response to that was, “I love the riot and craziness of my thought and I wouldn’t want to change that at all.”
Ultimately, the physicalists EXPEIRENCE the universe as clear and orderly and their minds as chaotic, so they can’t believe consciousness could underlie the universe. not only that, but they FEEL themselves as solipsistic individuals.
It’s not through intellectual argument this is going to be resolved. I plan, in the coming years, to make simple animations illustrating quite clearly what physicalists believe.
In the attempt to understand this, any sincere person watching will come to a natural, feeingful understanding of what non duality (whether of the qualified non dualistic kind of the devotional schools or otherwise) actually means in experience.
I agree with that, the debate won’t be resolved and it’s why it’s increasingly bogged down in analytic philosophical minutia and needs some fresh approaches. Your idea sounds like a good one from that point of view, especially bringing your practical psychology and spiritual skills to that sort of project.
A lot of the time when I’m pointing out the defects with naturalism my intended audience isn’t convincing naturalists, it’s giving spiritual people a tool to overcome modern scepticism. To give themselves intellectual permission to at least explore their chosen spiritual path. If you don’t have philosophical training, you’ll take the physicalist bluster than science shows no soul, no God seriously.
I hope to show with my model that it’s not intellect that’s moving us or the world, it’s will. We engage our intellect in service of our will, we justify our metaphysics after the fact. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s the natural order of things. And the physicalist is in denial about it, they think that not moving, not committing to a metaphysics but straddling the razor edge because the intellect can’t traverse the ground is a valid mode of participation in reality.
But the intellect doesn’t participate in reality, it abstracts from it. Acting in the world doesn’t give us the option not to participate and our metaphysics sets the orientation of that participation. So in the end, the physicalist is forced to move “as if” physicalism is true in the very sense spiritual people are talking about when they point out it’s defects as a complete explanation of reality.
Which is pretty much just me expressing in a verbose way the same thing you said about what all these metaphysical views mean “in experience.”
Hi, as I said to Tomas just awhile ago, I really appreciate this conversation which feels so much more like listening than arguing. I’m still (after more than half a century) learning so much about how to engage these kinds of topics.
You may know this already, but I’ve heard B Alan Wallace talk about a fascinating approach to philosophy in general among TIbetan Buddhist scholars and practitioners.
In at least one of the four major Tibetan schools, they start out with a kind of crude, realist, materialist view point. The students are required to learn it thoroughly and at least to attempt to defend it against all critiques.
Next they learn something sort of resembling a substance dualist/panpsychist view. Following that, they learn a pure idealist view 9”Mind-Only”) and as with each of the views, learn to defend it against all others.
I think some years back, Wallace told of the next viewless view, the Madyamaka (Middle Way) which is not really a view at all but a means of deconstructing all views, as the final point of study.
But since he began focusing more on Dzogchen, he offered the experience or recognition (beyond “experience”) of Rigpa as the ultimate end of all philosophic study.
Anyway, it sounds like a wonderful training in flexibility and a constant reminder of the limitations of all mental views.
May we all enjoy our conversations, and offer that which is most beneficial to each other, and celebrate the beauty and wonder and Delight of existence with each other.
This is thoughtful and clearly written. The framing of consciousness as constraint and shaping really makes me think. So does the guitar string image. I liked that a lot.
I also liked that you're trying to keep physics intact. A lot of consciousness-first writing loses credibility by treating science as something to transcend. You're accounting for it instead.
One place I wanted more grounding: spacetime starts feeling quietly demoted without being named as such. If your intuition is that spacetime is emergent, you could actually strengthen the piece by pointing to places where physics itself already strains against classical assumptions.
Bell inequalities are one example. They don't argue for consciousness primacy, but they do show that locality and separability are already compromised at a deep level. The spacetime story relies on both.
Positive geometries in scattering amplitudes are another. That work suggests physical structure can be computed without spacetime being part of the starting vocabulary at all.
Neither settles the metaphysics. But they let the intuition lean on places where physics is already uncomfortable.
I’d be curious to see where you’d take the argument if you let it brush up a little harder against those technical fault lines.
Thanks for reading and your thoughtful comment. I fastidiously avoided any mention of quantum mechanics because it immediately brands it as “woo” in most people’s minds, but also because I’m out of my depth with the science. I can only justify its use as metaphor, a conceptual tool.
Your point about spacetime is really interesting. I’ve been trying to keep my writing disciplined with a tight focus for an article. This one was the hard problem and using the language people expect for that topic. I almost left out the biological section because I felt like it was sprawling past that focus, but it was just so neat I couldn’t help myself.
Maybe I should have made spacetime more explicit in the matter section. Space would be the relations between patterns, time would be the order of change of those patterns. Spacetime is relational and functional, and I would probably say a condition of embodied experience rather than emergent from it, but maybe that’s a quibble. My intuition on that isn’t very clear. I guess my primary aim is to explain a theology rather than fill in the science details. I’m not well equipped to deal with the science, whereas I’m confident with the theology.
But I think you’ll understand if I said, the tight article focus forced me to stop at Shankara’s ultimate, the field. Shankara’s still on board but not for long. My next step will be to label the movement of the waves as will and the direction of that movement as value. But my ideas for exactly how to do this are still in seed form, I can see the path to build on the metaphor all the way to the Gaudiya’s ultimate, but right now the details of the path are hazy.
I hadn't fully clocked how much mentioning quantum instantly flips a "crystal gazing" switch in people's heads. You're right though. It derails more than it helps unless you're very careful about how you frame it.
Your clarification on spacetime helps a lot. Reading it as relational and functional, a condition of embodied experience instead of something fully downstream of consciousness, fits the piece better than anything I was projecting onto it.
I appreciate you naming theology as the aim. That's an honest frame. I tend to drift toward structural questions because I don't trust closure. That's my own bias showing.
Shankara to will to value to Gaudīya is a real arc. The fact that the details are still hazy feels healthy. I'm genuinely curious to see where you take it next.
Well I won’t say much more because I don’t want to risk giving out spoilers, it’s more enjoyable for you to read the final piece. But I think you’ll enjoy it, you don’t have to trust closure, or agree with it, to appreciate it done neatly. And hopefully I can pull it off, you’ve motivated me to get to work on it.
>We can explain how the brain processes information, how neurons fire, but what we can’t explain is why that should feel like anything at all.
Again, your opinion.
>Why isn’t it just going on in the dark with no one experiencing it?
Like p-zombied?
>That gap, between the physical process and felt experience, is the hard problem of consciousness.
Some say!
>Most modern answers to the hard problem of consciousness assume that consciousness emerges from the activity of the brain.
I mean, that sounds like a magic begging framing. Does AI sycophancy emerge from the activity of the atoms in computers? Sounds like a pretty hard problem to me! That's what I think you're doing here.
>But that assumption is doing all the work. This strong sense of emergence is a placeholder for an explanation, it’s only telling us what needs to be true if physicalism is true.
True for identity theory and non-reductive physicalism. Utterly false for Dennettian functionalism.
My goal in this series isn’t to refute every version of naturalism, it’s to present an alternative framework that I think offers a stronger account of consciousness.
Thanks for the mention, Prudence. My main takeaway from the discussions in your comment section is that I really miss a kind of “manifesto” for my stance, which I call “process physicalism”. Because physicalism carries a lot of baggage that is, frankly, really incompatible with the way I view the landscape. So I am working on exactly that right now, and I hope I will be able to show that the, frankly, cartoonish version of physicalism is actually really annoying, even to us who approach this landscape with a bit more nuance.
Tomas, when you use the word "physicalism," what is the philosophic/ontolological meaning of the word "physical?"
I asked this recently of a tenured philosophy professor who is publishing a book on physicalism this year (I think under the auspices of Cambridge U press, but I'm not sure)
He said almost nobody in philosophy agrees on the meaning, and at best all one can say is, "What is fundamental is not mental."
It sounds like an apophatic statement.
Is there any positive meaning to the word "physical" as a philosophic view? I've never been able to find any
That’s a fair question, and I agree with the diagnosis that “physical” is often left underdefined in philosophy. My own use is intentionally not metaphysically final. I’m not appealing to a substance or an ultimate inventory of reality. What I mean by “physical” is a commitment about explanation: whatever exists must participate in spatiotemporal, causal, dynamical constraint, and must have identifiable failure modes. If something makes no difference to how systems persist, break down, or reorganize over time, then it does no explanatory work for the kinds of questions I’m asking. In that sense, my physicalism isn’t apophatic (“not mental”), but operational: it’s about what must be tracked to explain how certain systems actually function.
Ok, so the way you describe it, it fits perfectly well with the Vedantic view. So it really isn't physicalism in any sense. Why not drop the term since it serves no purpose.
And physicalism is not actually under defined at all. Philosophers want us to think this because if we thought about what they actually mean for just a few seconds, we'd realize that there is no meaning to what they write. Literally.
Physicalism is simply is a negative statement which if reversed, is very clear:
1. Something utterly unconscious, non living and unintelligent can exist without consciousness, life or intelligence, and perfect, unchanging order over billions of years can emerge and exist without even an infinitesimal hint of intelligence, life, or consciousness.
2. Consciousness, life and intelligence themselves are utterly and wholly dependent on something unconscious, non living and unintelligent.
These are statements of pure faith based on not a single empirical example. By holding to this term "physicalism" you render any possible further development of explanation incoherent.
On the other hand, by simply dropping the phrase "physicalism," all you say makes perfect sense and is quite intriguing and in fact, possibly even inspiring.
I would suggest to Prudence that it may be infinitely easier to dismantle physicalism altogether. Rather than trying for an alternative view, simply make clear what physicalism actually means.
Although all we ever can possibly know is a field of experience within an unlimited, unbound Consciousness, physicalism wants to posit something other than that, and asks us to believe in it by pure faith. Not only that, but this other thing, since it can't be connected, is by any possible definition, supernatural (if "natural" means the world of experience, apart from which, as Whitehead pointed out, is "bare nothingness).
If I told you I dropped a pack of cards from 10 feet and it landed on the floor as an exquisitely crafted card castle, you would not believe me, right? yet the physicalists want us to believe after the initial "big bang" a cosmic card castle formed with predictable regularities (laws of nature, supposedly) which have remained continuous and unchanged for 13.7 billion years.
if we don't believe this for the dropped card castle, why believe it in the physicalist religion?
We're asked to believe unfathomably impossible statements, based purely on faith in something super natural.
And on top of it all, the entire experienced universe, the physicalist neuroscientists tell us, is constructed in our brains, and the "real" universe is a universe of pure quantities that physicists tell us about.
It's like saying, "You know what's real? The smile of the Cheshire cat!"
I think much of what we end up arguing about is not my position at all, but a naïve, and ultimately incoherent, version of physicalism. (Which I personally find kind of laughable and extremely naïve.) That version presupposes that consciousness is the outcome of a heap of parts interacting in a serial, computational fashion inherited from a Turing-style picture of computation. On that view, experience is something produced downstream, which immediately reintroduces a homunculus problem: something has to receive or “read” the output.
That picture has never made sense to me, not because it is insufficiently physical, but because it fails to engage the basic features we cannot avoid when talking about phenomenological experience. Treating experience as an output rather than as constitutive guarantees that it will either be explained away or smuggled back in under another name.
This is why I ended up carving out what I call process physicalism. Not as a rebranding exercise, but because the dominant ontology leaves no conceptual space for irreducible processes. In this framework, process is the primary object of study. The identity of a system is its ongoing dynamics, not the result of its constituent parts producing an output.
I’m currently working on a manifesto to make this explicit, both in its logical commitments and its ontological structure, precisely to avoid these category errors. The aim is not to deny experience or mystify it, but to treat process as definitional rather than derivative.
Finally, because I want to avoid hand-waving as much as possible, I’m grounding this position in explicit mathematical formalization. The hope is that disagreement, when it comes, will have to engage with boundary conditions and formal constraints rather than free-floating intuitions. That’s also why this takes time: I want the position to fail, if it fails, for precise reasons.
If you see something as cartoonish, it’s good motivation to fill that space with something more insightful. I struggle to keep up with the science side of the discussion, my focus really is more on philosophy/theology, but I found your approach and ideas fascinating and original. I’d be interested to read about it in more detail. It’s worth the effort to produce the manifesto, to show the blueprint from the foundations all the way to the conclusion. It not only has the benefit that other people can then engage with it, you could possibly make connections you might not have seen until you make it explicit for others.
Hell yeah, Prudence! This was great!
You and I have discussed some of these ideas a couple of times, and I’m sincerely glad you followed them all the way through to a fully articulated proposal. And what a proposal! It’s bold, beautifully constructed, imaginative, and ambitious AF. Its Internally consistent a, philosophically elegant, convincingly argued, and very well written.
You know I’m going to give you props for accommodating the science into your ontology instead of dismissing it. That move matters.
I can also genuinely relate to the idea of varying degrees of constraint within a universal field giving rise to mind and matter. I can appreciate the structural elegance of that framing.
Metaphor-wise, you were cooking.
Using Maxwell’s field theory as a model for epistemic reframing was a strong, disarming move. It grounds the reversal in something historically real and conceptually rich.
But my favorite was the brain as a guitar string shaping vibration into a note rather than producing it. That’s tactically sharp. It reframes correlation without denying the data.
The standing wave model works beautifully too.
You should be very proud of this piece structurally and philosophically. I’m genuinely glad you wrote it. Thanks!
Thanks Matthew, both for the kind words and for encouraging me to finish that. It was very satisfying to finally publish it. I am pleased with it, it’s faithful to the tradition while being in naturalist friendly language. I think of it like a conceptual translation which was probably why it was so challenging. But now I can see the path to build on that foundation and explain the entire metaphysical system, so I've created a lot more work for myself!
This is really interesting, thank you! I completely agree with the main argument stemming from the Vedanta school and I think the light metaphor for consciousness is perfect. I think there are even earlier instances of this in Indian thinking. While studying the Rigveda it occurred to me that a lot of the passages about Ushas (Dawn) may be talking about consciousness as light. For example, RV 1.48.9-10:
O Dawn, be radiant here with your glittering radiance, o Daughter of
Heaven,
conveying hither abundant good fortune for us, dawning forth at the
rituals of daybreak.
10. For the breathing and living of all is in you, when you dawn forth,
spirited one.
With your lofty chariot, radiant one, heed our call, you of bright
bounty.
Interesting piece, good stuff 😀👍
Hi again - a few minutes ago I saw a comment you made asking for feedback about panpsychism vs idealism. I couldn't find it again so I thought I'd drop by again here.
I wonder if the distinction in Indian philosophy between manas (chitta) and Consciousness (Chit) might be helpful. Much of modern idealism seems to conflate the two. If on the other hand, you look at not just "Chit" but Sat-Chit-Ananda, clearly, I think one has something beyond both idealism and panpsychism.
I'm sorry I haven't stated it very clearly. But I think David Bentley Hart does a beautiful job of making these distinctions in his book, "The Experience of God: Existence, Consciousness, Bliss" (t's not for nothing that he calls himself a "vedantic Christian" and is a great admirer of Sri Aurobindo!)
I have trouble navigating and finding things on substack too, but you can find notes people have posted on their profile. Comments are harder, you have to remember where you saw it.
I ended up deciding those terms are only useful in limited circumstances. I initially called this view cosmo-psychism but then left it out because it seemed superfluous anyway. If I was forced to fit it into a classification I’d call it realist-idealism.
I agree that the fact the Western tradition doesn’t distinguish between mind and consciousness makes it more difficult. I think Chalmers easy vs hard problem is basically the start of making these sort of distinctions, you’d probably know better than me on this, but maybe we could say, easy problems = manas or mind, a material element amenable to scientific study, hard = chitta, (maybe this is psychologies area of study?). That leaves chit as not really under consideration by philosophy of mind even though we’re both translating it as consciousness.
I’ve moved toward using words like subject and perspective to capture what I think chit really gets at. Maybe we could call it the witness and that would be closer to what Indian philosophy takes to be atma or jiva. But I’m not very familiar with these terminological distinctions and I tend to just choose a word that works for the context and the audience. My writing is more on the popular level anyway.
I’m a big fan of David Bentley Hart, especially that book, it cut through all the apologetic noise of new atheism like a hot knife through butter. That settles that. I’d love to hear him explain his views on Vedanta in more detail and how it’s influenced his Christianity. I’ve only just started exploring Sri Aurobindo’s ideas but I can see why they would resonate. When Christians talk of the Kingdom they’re talking about a transformation of the earth, not a transcending of it as such like we might think of most versions of moksha.
This is hard, isn't it:>))
Leaving aside the endless struggles with language, your last point is interesting.
From what I know of Christian teaching up until, oh, maybe the mid 20th century, (except for people like de Chardin), when you talk with a theologian, minister, or other clergy members, you'll find they pay lip service to transforming the earth, but even nowadays, this "transformation" is a kind of superficial nice guy/gal ethical one.
I know I pick on her a lot, but one of the best examples of this I've come across in years is Liz Bucar's "Religion Reimagined" substack. Not a whiff of spirituality in her books or writings. When pushed to define spirituality, it's clear she's talking about pop psychology. The academic study of religion has always been among the most baffling things to me (a group of Indian philosophers went around to American departments of religion and of Buddhist studies as well - they asked the religion departments if they would hire Jesus if he applied to teach; and asked the Buddhist departments if they would hire the Buddha; in both cases, they said, no, Jesus and Buddha would be too biased in order to provide the appropriate objective analysis of their respective teachings)
As far as Christian religion, Liz almost entirely focuses on ethical issues which even the most devout physicalist would (with no sense of the utter intellectual incoherence of such views) be happy to support.
So whatever they claim in theory, in practice, of the 1000 masses I heard as music director of a Catholic church throughout the 1980s, there wasn't a single word about transformation of the earth.
And this was a time when my co-choral director, Padre Dominguez, was the director of immigration for the Archdiocese of New York, a time when we were accepting Salvadoran and Nicaraguan refugees from the wars we had started down there.
Religion! "The age of religions is over," Sri Aurobindo once said. It couldn't happen too soon for me! I don't see the kingdom of heaven manifesting until the existence of religion is almost wholly erased. God is a lot more patient about this than I am, I have to say. I suppose I should trust Her more.
There is a real trend to dilute Christianity to ethics that promotes social cohesion. Not that there’s any problem with it as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough to really call itself Christianity. It’s more like a secular ethics or political project. I haven’t read that Bucar substack so couldn’t comment but I’m thinking of people like Jordan Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I don’t really engage with that sort of thing, if I was a Christian I’d take a different tack. I have an article in the pipeline that re-conceptualises religion so it’s more like dharma, an individual pursuit not a set of metaphysical doctrines, there is precedent for that in the Western tradition as well. So rather than removing religion, we could renovate the existing structure.
Form the very small amount I’ve read about Sri Aurobindo, I believe the correct response to how hard life seems is - have faith that you chose this, and enjoy the experience of rising to the challenge and overcoming it. Or a more entertaining quip, you know you’re on an adventure when you start wishing you were back home in your lounge room.
All shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.
All shall be well, all manner of things shall be well. Julian of Norwich.
One more offering in terms of simplicity.
I was watching Swami Sarvapriyananda speaking with Rupert Spira today, and they were using a standard Vedantic "Movie" vs "movie screen" analogy (to pure consciousness vs the universe)
I thought about it a bit and wondered if it might not be a simple though rough analogy for many philosophic positions.
Here goes.
Mirra Alfassa once said there are (quite roughly) 3 major spiritual views:
(1) Ultimately only pure consciousness is real, and the rest is an illusion (this is pure Advaita but also similar to the idea of escaping into heaven or Nirvana)
(2) The transcendent Consciousness AND the world are both equally and fully Divine.
(3) transcendent Consciousness and the world are both fully Divine AD the manifestation is not simply the fulL Divine but is evolving over billions of years to manifest itself more fully.
That's pretty complicated right? Let's see if the movie/screen analogy helps.
(1) PURE NON DUALISM: The screen is ultimately the "Reality"of all the images in the movie. They are hardly more than an illusory play of light and have little or no importance in themselves.
(2) TANTRA: The screen and the movie are equally real and equally alive, dynamic and Divine but the movie's story itself has not much interest or importance (or, all stories are of equal importance)
(3) EVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUALITY: The screen and movie are equally real, AND the current movie is not so fully Divine, yet in the course of evolution may become so.
Let's see if this helps with other philosophies:
(1) PHYSICALISM/NATURALISM There is no screen, there is only the movie
(2) SUBSTANCE DUALISM: there is no screen, and the movie is made up of distinct matter and mind like substances
(3) IDEALIST NATURALISM (Kastrup) The movie is made up of a Mind At large, and there is no screen.
(4) PANPSYCHISM: There is no screen, and every aspect of the movie combines both matter and mind
(5) WHITEHEAD TYPE PROCESS PAN EXPERIENTIALISM There are no "things" in the movie it is only a flow of experience (and there is no need for positing the existence of some kind of screen like substance
(6) CLASSIC THEISM: within the movie, there is some kind of Infinite Mind which ultimately controls everything (there may be a screen, according to mystics like Meister Eckhart, but the classic theists out whether the movie characters can ever know the screen directly)
I know, the analogy wears thin after awhile, but it's kind of fun to try.
I think the Vedantic comparison of waking and lucid dreaming is infinitely more effective, but I find that most people trained i Western philosophy simply can't comprehend it. I find it utterly baffling how many ways they tend to distort it; i haven't tried it yet, but I wonder if this movie analogy might help.
And I like the movie/screen analogy, and more so the lucid dream/waking analogy, MUCH more than the ocean/wave analogy.
I didn't see my own favorite critique of physicalism.
If "physicalism" is defined as "the idea that whatever is fundamental is not mental," then what accounts for order in the universe?
The physicalists are all incensed (though not religiously so!!) when one says "God did it."
But I don't see how this is anything different from "it just is."
So laws of nature just are.
And enough people are now finally saying, that maybe life isn't fully explicable by purely physical constituents, the explanation for how life emerged is the philosophy of emergentism (How did life emerge? It emerged! Simple answer!!)
And we find emergentism then covers everything else. Reason emerges, consciousness emerges, etc
I think Tomas' characterization of this as cartoonish is too kind. It's ghoulishly incoherent, particularly in light of the fact it is the implicit philosophy taught at all levels of education!
Hi Don,
This post moved away from criticising naturalism and tried to outline a positive alternative, the Gaudiya view. It’s only the first article in what I think will be three parts and the next one will account for order in the universe as well as morality, only in the final one will I mention God.
I agree that makes people incensed and part of my motivation for presenting it this way, by starting with the hard problem and relying heavily on physics metaphors is to hopefully sidestep that cultural resistance to considering “spiritual” worldviews as serious contenders for explanation. At least long enough for them to be heard. This is why I used physics and there are no sanskrit terms, but you will understand if I say I’m trying to present achintya bhedabheda Vedanta of Jiva Goswami in modern terms, while being faithful to the tradition. I’m not sure how successful that is, but I’m happy with it as a first attempt and I’m excited about finishing the project.
I agree with you that physicalism is incoherent, which is why I’m increasingly inclined to think pointing out the problems with it is a waste of time, I’m going to do it once in detail and move on.
But the other thing I’d say in defence of physicalists, especially after talking to Tomas and Matthew, is to some extent we judge their metaphysics by our own explanatory standards, to expect that everything will be accounted for in a worldview.
But I think physicalism is best understood as attempting to balance on the razors edge between method and metaphysics, to not go too far into speculative metaphysical territory past what we can justify. It's a dynamic view, open to adaption at least in theory. And they have a good point, humans are inclined to get carried away with our fancies, our beautiful beatific visions of how reality could be, should be. So the best among the physicalists are a helpful restraint for anyone on the spiritual journey. They keep us firmly grounded and remind us where we are, not where we want to be. At the same time their view can solidify into dogma and keep us from attempting flight into the world behind the empirical veil.
I would remain steadfast in clear philosophic thinking that physicalism is NOT a method but a statement of faith.
I think the problem with critics of physicalism dating back the past 100 years is their writing is WAY too complicated.
The discussion on both sides is actually, way too complicated.
Bernardo Kastrup worked on this for 9 years and prior to 2019, he had already had in-depth conversations with 100s of physicalists. It only dawned on him in 2019 that physicalists had no idea what they were talkinga bout when they used the word “matter” and “physical,” and alternated colloquial and philosophic meanings without realizing it.
I just yesterday read something in one of Bernardo’s articles that had never ever occurred to me in thinking about this for 55 years. He was puzzling over psychologist and failed parapsychology researcher Susan Blackmore’s insistence that only physicalism could account for order in the universe, and that it was obvious that a mind based universe would be chaotic.
Damn! I remember corresponding with Arthur Reber (chosen by the American Psychological Association to respond to their indisputable summary of well replicated parapsychology experiments over 100 years). He simply stated that he didn’t need to look at the research evidence base the laws of physics forbid anything parapsychological.
His wife was my statistics adviser for my dissertation research on mindfulness in the treatment of physical pain. I gave her a copy of a sample of our book on yogic psychology, and she showed the part on parapsychology to her husband, Arthur. He asked me a question about meditation, and I responded. His response to that was, “I love the riot and craziness of my thought and I wouldn’t want to change that at all.”
Ultimately, the physicalists EXPEIRENCE the universe as clear and orderly and their minds as chaotic, so they can’t believe consciousness could underlie the universe. not only that, but they FEEL themselves as solipsistic individuals.
It’s not through intellectual argument this is going to be resolved. I plan, in the coming years, to make simple animations illustrating quite clearly what physicalists believe.
In the attempt to understand this, any sincere person watching will come to a natural, feeingful understanding of what non duality (whether of the qualified non dualistic kind of the devotional schools or otherwise) actually means in experience.
I agree with that, the debate won’t be resolved and it’s why it’s increasingly bogged down in analytic philosophical minutia and needs some fresh approaches. Your idea sounds like a good one from that point of view, especially bringing your practical psychology and spiritual skills to that sort of project.
A lot of the time when I’m pointing out the defects with naturalism my intended audience isn’t convincing naturalists, it’s giving spiritual people a tool to overcome modern scepticism. To give themselves intellectual permission to at least explore their chosen spiritual path. If you don’t have philosophical training, you’ll take the physicalist bluster than science shows no soul, no God seriously.
I hope to show with my model that it’s not intellect that’s moving us or the world, it’s will. We engage our intellect in service of our will, we justify our metaphysics after the fact. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s the natural order of things. And the physicalist is in denial about it, they think that not moving, not committing to a metaphysics but straddling the razor edge because the intellect can’t traverse the ground is a valid mode of participation in reality.
But the intellect doesn’t participate in reality, it abstracts from it. Acting in the world doesn’t give us the option not to participate and our metaphysics sets the orientation of that participation. So in the end, the physicalist is forced to move “as if” physicalism is true in the very sense spiritual people are talking about when they point out it’s defects as a complete explanation of reality.
Which is pretty much just me expressing in a verbose way the same thing you said about what all these metaphysical views mean “in experience.”
Hi, as I said to Tomas just awhile ago, I really appreciate this conversation which feels so much more like listening than arguing. I’m still (after more than half a century) learning so much about how to engage these kinds of topics.
You may know this already, but I’ve heard B Alan Wallace talk about a fascinating approach to philosophy in general among TIbetan Buddhist scholars and practitioners.
In at least one of the four major Tibetan schools, they start out with a kind of crude, realist, materialist view point. The students are required to learn it thoroughly and at least to attempt to defend it against all critiques.
Next they learn something sort of resembling a substance dualist/panpsychist view. Following that, they learn a pure idealist view 9”Mind-Only”) and as with each of the views, learn to defend it against all others.
I think some years back, Wallace told of the next viewless view, the Madyamaka (Middle Way) which is not really a view at all but a means of deconstructing all views, as the final point of study.
But since he began focusing more on Dzogchen, he offered the experience or recognition (beyond “experience”) of Rigpa as the ultimate end of all philosophic study.
Anyway, it sounds like a wonderful training in flexibility and a constant reminder of the limitations of all mental views.
May we all enjoy our conversations, and offer that which is most beneficial to each other, and celebrate the beauty and wonder and Delight of existence with each other.
This is thoughtful and clearly written. The framing of consciousness as constraint and shaping really makes me think. So does the guitar string image. I liked that a lot.
I also liked that you're trying to keep physics intact. A lot of consciousness-first writing loses credibility by treating science as something to transcend. You're accounting for it instead.
One place I wanted more grounding: spacetime starts feeling quietly demoted without being named as such. If your intuition is that spacetime is emergent, you could actually strengthen the piece by pointing to places where physics itself already strains against classical assumptions.
Bell inequalities are one example. They don't argue for consciousness primacy, but they do show that locality and separability are already compromised at a deep level. The spacetime story relies on both.
Positive geometries in scattering amplitudes are another. That work suggests physical structure can be computed without spacetime being part of the starting vocabulary at all.
Neither settles the metaphysics. But they let the intuition lean on places where physics is already uncomfortable.
I’d be curious to see where you’d take the argument if you let it brush up a little harder against those technical fault lines.
Thanks for reading and your thoughtful comment. I fastidiously avoided any mention of quantum mechanics because it immediately brands it as “woo” in most people’s minds, but also because I’m out of my depth with the science. I can only justify its use as metaphor, a conceptual tool.
Your point about spacetime is really interesting. I’ve been trying to keep my writing disciplined with a tight focus for an article. This one was the hard problem and using the language people expect for that topic. I almost left out the biological section because I felt like it was sprawling past that focus, but it was just so neat I couldn’t help myself.
Maybe I should have made spacetime more explicit in the matter section. Space would be the relations between patterns, time would be the order of change of those patterns. Spacetime is relational and functional, and I would probably say a condition of embodied experience rather than emergent from it, but maybe that’s a quibble. My intuition on that isn’t very clear. I guess my primary aim is to explain a theology rather than fill in the science details. I’m not well equipped to deal with the science, whereas I’m confident with the theology.
But I think you’ll understand if I said, the tight article focus forced me to stop at Shankara’s ultimate, the field. Shankara’s still on board but not for long. My next step will be to label the movement of the waves as will and the direction of that movement as value. But my ideas for exactly how to do this are still in seed form, I can see the path to build on the metaphor all the way to the Gaudiya’s ultimate, but right now the details of the path are hazy.
That all tracks. I respect the restraint.
I hadn't fully clocked how much mentioning quantum instantly flips a "crystal gazing" switch in people's heads. You're right though. It derails more than it helps unless you're very careful about how you frame it.
Your clarification on spacetime helps a lot. Reading it as relational and functional, a condition of embodied experience instead of something fully downstream of consciousness, fits the piece better than anything I was projecting onto it.
I appreciate you naming theology as the aim. That's an honest frame. I tend to drift toward structural questions because I don't trust closure. That's my own bias showing.
Shankara to will to value to Gaudīya is a real arc. The fact that the details are still hazy feels healthy. I'm genuinely curious to see where you take it next.
Well I won’t say much more because I don’t want to risk giving out spoilers, it’s more enjoyable for you to read the final piece. But I think you’ll enjoy it, you don’t have to trust closure, or agree with it, to appreciate it done neatly. And hopefully I can pull it off, you’ve motivated me to get to work on it.
>Consciousness resists physical explanation.
Opinion, not fact. Just saying.
>We can explain how the brain processes information, how neurons fire, but what we can’t explain is why that should feel like anything at all.
Again, your opinion.
>Why isn’t it just going on in the dark with no one experiencing it?
Like p-zombied?
>That gap, between the physical process and felt experience, is the hard problem of consciousness.
Some say!
>Most modern answers to the hard problem of consciousness assume that consciousness emerges from the activity of the brain.
I mean, that sounds like a magic begging framing. Does AI sycophancy emerge from the activity of the atoms in computers? Sounds like a pretty hard problem to me! That's what I think you're doing here.
>But that assumption is doing all the work. This strong sense of emergence is a placeholder for an explanation, it’s only telling us what needs to be true if physicalism is true.
True for identity theory and non-reductive physicalism. Utterly false for Dennettian functionalism.
My goal in this series isn’t to refute every version of naturalism, it’s to present an alternative framework that I think offers a stronger account of consciousness.
Fair enough. But is as much as you don't try to refute what I take up here, you're not addressing the Dennettian school of functionalism.