I'm naturally sympathetic to this perspective but I struggle with a definition of physicalism being given in terms of the principled possibility of a physical description of everything, since we know from the study of complexity that such a description is impossible in practice, so I have to wonder (especially as a pragmatist!) what this really commits us to.
I vacillate between thinking of myself as a physicalist and an anti-anti-physicalist. The idea of the physical doesn't hold special meaning for me - my problem is that anti-physicalist theories just don't carve things up convincingly. It's a vocabulary problem for me rather than a metaphysical one, and I suspect it needs to be dealt with on grounds of language rather than ontology.
To be more specific: I'm a pluralist because of the issues with reduction, so I think we need multiple explanatory vocabularies, but I think all of our vocabularies are mutually constraining and overlapping. The problem with anti-physicalism (and all metaphysics) is that it wants to have a vocabulary that's fully detached from the physical after having used the vocabulary of the physical to bootstrap it. It's an ouroboros.
If we refuse it, it's tempting to then say that, with all our vocabularies being entwined, physics is implicated in everything, and everything is made of physical parts and the relations between them, so we can call ourselves physicalists. But I think the privileging of any vocabulary as an ontological foundation is going to end up a kind of metaphysics because there's still an implicit bootstrapping from empirical observation to meta-theoretical constraints.
I would rather say nothing more than: don't think you can have free-floating vocabularies. Follow that rule and whatever's left over is fine, but probably doesn't need a name other than monism.
That's a fair point about it being impossible in practice. But I think even as pragmatists we can think and talk in terms of demons and an imagined "end of inquiry". We can perhaps think of them like a mathematical limit as we approach infinity, like you can always look further into the physical causes of a phenomena and learn more. Or think of it as a guiding principle for our investigations, but only that it's always an *option*.
I agree about not wanting to privilege any vocabulary as an ontological foundation.
My response to Hempel is to admit that, yes, physicalism is wrong, in ways we're constantly discovering and adjusting for. But the real question is whether it's less wrong than the alternatives, and if not, how, in most cases, we could ever know.
I like this approach. Embracing our fallibility rather than declaring the nature of ultimate reality in advance seems very wise to me.
Although I think it maybe misses the reason physicalists privilege physics. There must be some reason behind it, and from that reason I think we can characterise the core idea of physicalism.
My theory is it comes down to what provides reliable information. In fact when discussions of physicalism vs other views come up, I usually point out I'm more committed to evidence than to physicalism in particular. If seances produced reliable knowledge, I'd be prepared to accept their ontology.
An interesting post Joseph. And it comes close to my own feelings. To explore the idea further these are that... Science (and any other mode of human enquiry) probes the world. It returns with observations and explanations of those observations. The observations are often undeniable. But frequently they are informed by a certain way of looking or a certain way of reading the data. As such, we need to apply sceptical thinking not just to scientists explanations, but also their observations, looking for any assumptions, thinking, or experimental design which might be distorting the picture. There is no objective and wholly reliant way of doing this besides arguing it out, going looking for more observations that might give a new angle, and generally thrashing it out over successive generations of theories, math, and discoveries.
Science is therefore an intrinsically human, fallible, and limited enterprise, largely defined by the thinking, assumptions, and methodologies which shape it. That isn't a prison cell. Even with those limits and problems, it has done astounding things. But it is nowhere near the type of thing which most people today romanticise it as.
As a result, we need to divide reality from science, and try to wear several hats. Primarily, we should look at reality through our hearts. This is our life and we should live it fully and beautifully. Secondly, we should look at reality through the veil of science. But we should temper that by also trying to use our heart and deep thinking to decipher what is likely just the veil and what pertains to the world behind the veil. In short, we need to be either speculative scientists or philosophers, trying to gauge what our world actually is behind the language, methods, and discoveries of science.
Most of the best scientists would agree with this stance. Science is only a picture of our world based on the questions we have thought to ask it.
As such, I am sure science will find a way to explain most things by gazing at various physical phenomena. But I'm not convinced this explanation will be correct without seriously testing how such a view might be mistaken. In this, physicalism is useless. It is an absurd metaphysical position which claims it already knows the nature of everything. Not even most people who believe in a God think they know that.
Your definition of physicalism, however, is far more appealing, since it commits merely to the method of physical enquiry, while allowing for the possibility of other enquiries bearing insight. For me, however, it still romanticises the human predicament a bit too much, placing too much hope in science as a discoverer of ultimate realities, rather than a creatively evaluating approximator of possible reality.
In my mind, it is clear that science is fumbling its way progressively towards The Truth. Whether it will ever get there feels unlikely but we won't know if we don't try. Given this humanness, I have deep faith and awe at the scientific project (and would hope that I can contribute to it somehow), and I know that it's description of the world will always be necessarily shaped by a physical enquiry, so in that even more limited sense of the word I'm a physicalist (i.e. I celebrate science, am happy that it studies physical reality, and believe this is a deeply worthwhile and fruitful task), but I must remain entirely agnostic about the true nature of the world it's studying.
Here, beyond science, words like "physicalism" and "anti-physicalism" become a kind of nonsense. The world exists. Beautiful. Vast. Mysterious. What it actually is, who knows. But our science's physical depiction of it provides us with an extraordinary and frequently enchanting insight into it. Is it all "physical" beyond that? I don't really know what the word "physical" even means in that context. Does it merely mean "exist"? If so, then yes, everything which exists must surely exist. But does this include "non-physical" phenomena? In this context that word has no meaning. Non-existent things don't exist. So it would need to be something which also existed but simply didn't qualify as "physical" for some reason.
At this point we start to conceive of the entire argument between physicalists and anti-physicalists as a scrap over folk thinking. Whatever the real is will likely defy both. Whatever science decides will likely be "physicalist" by fiat. So both may end up being right in their own limited ways.
Thanks for reading. I hope you found it interesting 🤗
Thanks for the comment, definitely found it interesting!
> As a result, we need to divide reality from science, and try to wear several hats. Primarily, we should look at reality through our hearts. This is our life and we should live it fully and beautifully. Secondly, we should look at reality through the veil of science. But we should temper that by also trying to use our heart and deep thinking to decipher what is likely just the veil and what pertains to the world behind the veil. In short, we need to be either speculative scientists or philosophers, trying to gauge what our world actually is behind the language, methods, and discoveries of science.
I agree that we should look at reality through our hearts and live it fully and beautifully. But I disagree with "dividing reality from science", or thinking of science as a "veil", or trying to decipher "what pertains to the world behind the veil".
I would say that science is a lens, not a veil. It is a genuine means that allows us to see and engage with reality, and that seeing and engagement is genuinely real. Our other modes of knowing and engaging with reality are similarly lenses and not veils, and genuinely connect us with reality.
And I would say that there is no "world behind the veil", no "thing in itself", no "ultimate reality". So whether we are approaching it through our hearts or through poetry or through science, we are truly engaging with the real world, even though these lenses show us the world under different aspects. I think the idea of an ultimate reality imagines that there's one true conception of reality, but I think conceptualization is something *we* do, so that there's no one true conception of reality in itself. There are just conceptualizations that allow us to better engage with the world.
What an interesting and insightful reply Joseph 👍 Yes, I can see how your views here form the basis for your wider physicalism. I think our difference comes down to the division of the experiential world from the objective world. My experiential world is completely true in the way you describe. Nobody can tell me I'm not looking at a blue sky because I am. However, the objective world is a more thorny affair.
Some may feel we can never know anything about it, not even whether it exists, and I have some sympathies with this. Those who say we have direct contact with it, and thus direct knowledge of it, are oddly on more dubious footing in my opinion. If we accept that we are biological entities, it follows that we must be witnessing whatever it is through a biological veil. As we struggle to decipher this, we add all sorts of other veils. Each have the ability to give us insights. But none is transparent. Each introduces its own artefacts which we can get tripped up on. Thus, to me, just as some philosophical problems seem to be born from simple linguistic muddles, some science is tangled in its own veil. Apologies for not giving an example of this, but you will find several examples in my forthcoming book if you're patient enough to wait for it 😅
The thing I love about this discussion is that it feels we're both looking under the hood and getting down to some of the fundamentals underpinning the standard physicalist worldview and why others might legitimately feel we need to think outside the strict confines of that... and that doing so might actually be better science, not worse
As far as I can gather, he is saying the syllable is constituted by elements, and that when he is using alpha and beta here, he is actually referring to the sounds represented by those letters rather than as orthographic letters of the alphabet.
Just making this hyper-pedantic quibble, because spoken words and syllables pre-dated the written ones (and apparently he talks more explicitly in those terms in Poetics 1457a "neither hinders nor causes the formation of a single significant sound or phrase out of several sounds"), and more importantly the point is that the sum is a different thing to the parts rather than the parts sitting side by side. That point is lost in the alphabetic letters case because the letters are distinctly present in the written syllable. In the spoken syllable they become something of its own kind. Cf. the example of flesh vs its "constituents" (elements) fire and earth.
(Disclaimer, I've never read the full text, or any texts of Aristotle apart from quotes. I'm just an alphabet nerd, so when triggered by that word found myself compelled to go digging. Please don't judge me! :-P)
Yes, that's the passage I was thinking of! You can read it as referring to the sounds rather than the written letters. I heard recently (in Carlo Rovelli's Anaximander book) that ancient Greek was the first truly phonetic written language, so there's also much less difference in ancient Greek between thinking in terms of letters vs thinking in terms of sounds.
That's an interesting point about the parts not "sitting side by side" so much in a spoken syllable. I think if we look at non-alphabetic writing systems they are much more like spoken words in that way. Which I think points us to a trend I've been thinking about before, where the world and our concepts of it seem to be becoming progressively more modular, with separable, movable elements. The kind of symbolic arguments and precise definitions you find in analytic philosophy would be an example.
> You can read it as referring to the sounds rather than the written letters.
I'm suggesting that the sounds is the preferred reading.
> I heard recently (in Carlo Rovelli's Anaximander book) that ancient Greek was the first truly phonetic written language, so there's also much less difference in ancient Greek between thinking in terms of letters vs thinking in terms of sounds.
I'd dispute the claim that Greek was the first "truly phonetic".
Firstly, the Greek language existed before it was written down, so it makes more sense to talk about a phonetic writing system. The honours for that go to proto-Sinaitic (pre-cursor to Canaanite, paleo-Hebrew, and Phonecian) . None of those had explicit vowels, but that's only a marginal difference in terms of tracking phonemes.
> That's an interesting point about the parts not "sitting side by side" so much in a spoken syllable. I think if we look at non-alphabetic writing systems they are much more like spoken words in that way.
Which non-alphabetic systems are you thinking of? If you mean syllabaries, then absolutely. but if logographic, then not at all.
> Which I think points us to a trend I've been thinking about before, where the world and our concepts of it seem to be becoming progressively more modular, with separable, movable elements.
Hmm, but Mandarin has been around for a long time, and that is highly analytic (modular) in terms of grammar. A quick search says that it tends to be cyclical rather than a trend, but I'm not fully sure how that plays out.
> The kind of symbolic arguments and precise definitions you find in analytic philosophy would be an example.
Been around in maths for a long time?
Cf. chemistry.Perhaps it is more to do with symbol frequency distributions?
Maybe more to do with particular domains demanding high precision?
Hmm. Good try! But does "everything there is to know about the thing" include intentional aspects or not? If the intentional aspects can be worked out purely from the physical description, then our demon should not have to bring any additional understanding to explain everything. If some additional knowledge is required, then "everything there is to know" cannot be explained from the physical description.
It seems to me that the problem begins when we suppose that all of reality is relational structure, but lacks intentionality. Whence, then, intentionality? It might help to take the view that relational structure _is_ intentionality -- that things relate to one another intentionally, and this gives rise to physics. Then "everything there is to know about the thing" can be worked out purely from the intentional description -- both its intentional and physical aspects.
> But does "everything there is to know about the thing" include intentional aspects or not? If the intentional aspects can be worked out purely from the physical description, then our demon should not have to bring any additional understanding to explain everything.
Yes, I think it includes intentional aspects. The facts about these are implicitly contained in a perfect purely physical description, but only *implicitly*. The interpretive framework in which they exist is not contained in the interpretive framework of physics, so the demon could not explicate the answer to those questions using physics alone. But supposing the demon knew the other interpretive *framework* and all the physical *facts*, it could then figure out the intentional facts too.
In fact through the lens of physics all interpretation is invisible, including the physical interpretive lens itself. And yet they are also implicitly specified by the physical facts.
> It seems to me that the problem begins when we suppose that all of reality is relational structure, but lacks intentionality. Whence, then, intentionality?
I don't suppose that all of reality is relational structure and lacks intentionality; I think that reality is relational structure, and intentionality is a structure that can only be seen when we are viewing reality through certain interpretive lenses. Through the lens of physics, intentionality disappears.
> It might help to take the view that relational structure _is_ intentionality -- that things relate to one another intentionally, and this gives rise to physics.
My difficulty with this is that I'm not sure what it would mean to say that relational structure simply is intentionality. For example, I think relational structure also covers the structures of the natural numbers, but I don't think there's any intentionality there. What would it mean to say that relational structure _is_ intentionality?
It sounds like the interpretive framework of physics is not complete. It includes only "physical facts." The demon needs another interpretive framework to figure out the "intentional facts" that are supposedly implicit in these physical facts.
However, if the intentional facts are truly implicit in the physical facts,the demon ought to be able (in principle) to make the necessary inferences without appeal to anything else but the physical facts. If the demon has to step outside the interpretive framework of physicalism into another, then physicalism is inadequate to describe everything the demon can know. The introduction of interpretive frameworks makes in even clearer that one interpretive framework by itself, namely physicalism, is not enough for a comprehensive description of everything that exists.
You ask what it would mean to say that relational structure _is_ intentionality. But what else could it be? In a relational structure, the meaning (or significance or functionality) of one thing is defined in terms of another; in fact this is mutual, and each of the relata derive their significance from the other. In Aristotelian terms, their material, efficient, formal, and final natures are all bound up with one another. Absent one of the relata, there is none of this.
Looking on, we may recognize as third parties the meanings of things for one another. If no one is looking, do those meanings persist all the same? Do the relata have meaning or significance or functionality for one another, even if humans aren't around to recognize it? I find it simpler to say so than to argue that until we noticed their intentionality, there was none.
Of course this would apply for the natural numbers. To the extent that they need each other to make any sense at all, they are caught up in intentional relationships.
It depends on what we mean by "complete". If we mean is it enough to *answer* all questions, the answer is no. But if we mean is it enough to *fix* the correct answer to all questions, I think the answer is yes.
I'd also add that the "intentional facts" are not a different reality or aspect of reality, they're the same reality being viewed through a different lens.
Interesting point about relational structure and intentionality. I think I'm gonna need to chew on it some more.
> Looking on, we may recognize as third parties the meanings of things for one another. If no one is looking, do those meanings persist all the same? Do the relata have meaning or significance or functionality for one another, even if humans aren't around to recognize it? I find it simpler to say so than to argue that until we noticed their intentionality, there was none.
We can say so they persisted even if never perceived. The thing is that the interpretive lens in which we see meaning is an interpretive lens that *really perceives reality*, just as the interpretive lens of physics is. Both are our conceptualizations, but they are *true* conceptualizations. Neither one is strictly mind-dependent, since they really perceive reality, but also neither is strictly mind-independent, since they are interpretations of reality.
I certainly agree that there are different lenses through which we attempt to make sense of reality. We might also call them paradigms, or framings, or contexts, or ways of knowing, or ways of seeing. I spend a lot of time talking about this on my blog. But I would say that each of them exposes an aspect of reality, and none of them may be said to "really perceive reality" except in that limited sense (although in that limited sense they do perceive reality). To _really_ perceive reality requires more than one lens. How many others is a good question; I think just two might be enough. My running metaphor involves the two eyes and depth perception.
All of them offer an interpretation of the meaning of things. It's just that the "things" are different. Each paradigm comes with its own ontology, along with relationships, or meanings, that are appropriate for that ontology.
But sorry, I don't mean to make this all about me. I just thought your idea could use a little pushback. I guess I'm like Socrates that way.
Right, I don't think any one lens on its own can truly capture the whole picture. Or rather, it can capture a picture of the whole but only in its own terms. Although for those with the right knowledge, translation and between interpretive frames/lenses is possible.
I would say that they really perceive reality because they perceive it truthfully. That doesn't mean it's "reality in itself", but it's also not not reality.
I totally agree about the different paradigms and ontologies.
Great article! For a moment (when I saw your definition) I thought this was similar to a priori physicalism (all truths are a priori derivable or deducible from a complete physicalist description [i.e., a complete description given by and in terms of the physical sciences] of the world), but this is in fact less strong than that. (Or I'm assuming wrongly that a priori physicalism is incompatible with your physicalism, but that you'd tell me whether it is.) I'm sympathetic to this version of physicalism, since it seems to be "metaphysical" but not "in a big way," so to speak. I mean, what's doing the heavy work here (I think) is the concept of (micro)physical description. You say in another comment that this version is metaphysical because it says that everything can be understood in terms of material and efficient causes. However, does this "can be understood in terms of material and efficient causes" actually mean something "metaphysical," rather than some "fact" about our languages that we use to describe reality? What about the view that material and efficient causes are merely cognitive "shortcuts" we use to classify and describe reality? I actually do not like it so much when we humans do meta-physics (not metaphysics), that is, when we try to express something really real about the very nature of reality and that necessarily goes beyond what we accept as "real" for pragmatic reasons. But, anyway, it seems plausible to me to say that even if physics (and, by extension, physicalism) were somewhat committed to apparently non-physical or "metaphysical" (or "meta-physical"?) entities, like qualia, that won't be the end of physicalism. For instance, physicalists can be subjective physicalists: they can affirm that a full physical description leaves nothing out, but some physical properties (like qualia) can only be fully grasped subjectively or experientially, and so a full objective description of the world cannot reveal all about what exists or cannot provide all the possible information out there. (I do not want to promote myself lol, but I wrote an article about subjective physicalism where I explain the main idea of it. I'd really like to know your thoughts about it!) Thank you for writing this beautiful article.
I'm not really familiar with a priori physicalism, so I've had to look it up a bit, and it definitely seems similar. I think I would count as an a priori physicalist if I'm understanding it correctly, but what makes you say it's a less strong version? There's likely something I'm missing.
> I'm sympathetic to this version of physicalism, since it seems to be "metaphysical" but not "in a big way," so to speak. I mean, what's doing the heavy work here (I think) is the concept of (micro)physical description.
Exactly! It's a fairly minimalist physicalism I think.
> However, does this "can be understood in terms of material and efficient causes" actually mean something "metaphysical," rather than some "fact" about our languages that we use to describe reality? What about the view that material and efficient causes are merely cognitive "shortcuts" we use to classify and describe reality?
I think it's both. I take a generally pragmatist approach to metaphysics, so I do think material and efficient causes are our conceptualizations of the world, but if the conceptualization is successful and allows us to engage better with the world, then it is true. I wouldn't say that they are "merely" shortcuts though. It's real, even though it's coming through our concepts and our interpretive frame. So, I'm not suggesting that material and efficient causes belong to a Kantian noumena, but I don't really accept the idea of the noumena.
> I actually do not like it so much when we humans do meta-physics (not metaphysics), that is, when we try to express something really real about the very nature of reality and that necessarily goes beyond what we accept as "real" for pragmatic reasons.
Exactly! At that point, it's really not clear to me what "real" is supposed to mean.
> For instance, physicalists can be subjective physicalists: they can affirm that a full physical description leaves nothing out, but some physical properties (like qualia) can only be fully grasped subjectively or experientially, and so a full objective description of the world cannot reveal all about what exists or cannot provide all the possible information out there. (I do not want to promote myself lol, but I wrote an article about subjective physicalism where I explain the main idea of it. I'd really like to know your thoughts about it!)
Oh that's perfect timing, I was recommended to learn about subjective physicalism just recently! I'll give it a read :)
Ty! I think that you wouldn't say that if one has a full physicalist description of the world, one can a priori deduce every truth (including psychological, moral, and biological truths) from that description, even though it might be impossible in practice to do so. But a priori physicalism, it seems to me at least, requires the claim that only physicalist descriptions are the only true descriptions of the world in so far as they describe it accurately, and your physicalism holds the validity of other descriptions that might not be expressible by the physical sciences (if I understand it well!). Also, supervenience in that view, as far as I know, is asymmetrical.
> I take a generally pragmatist approach to metaphysics, so I do think material and efficient causes are our conceptualizations of the world, but if the conceptualization is successful and allows us to engage better with the world, then it is true. I wouldn't say that they are "merely" shortcuts though. It's real, even though it's coming through our concepts and our interpretive frame. So, I'm not suggesting that material and efficient causes belong to a Kantian noumena, but I don't really accept the idea of the noumena.
I agree with this! It's like truth depends to a certain extent on our conceptualizations, but this doesn't mean that they are unreal. What pragmatically works is true. I also think this is the correct way to do metaphysics because other options seem to engage in a type of inquiry that tries to reveal the same nature of reality, but attaining this goal seems impossible, or at least very difficult.
I think I would say that with a full physical description of the world, it should in principle be possible to a priori deduce every truth. So long as we also had knowledge of the relevant frame of reference for the truth. Like, if we had a full physical description and were asked if a person is happy or sad, we'd need to know what "person", "happy", and "sad" all mean, which are not concepts native to physics. So you still need a kind of translation between viewpoints.
> But a priori physicalism, it seems to me at least, requires the claim that only physicalist descriptions are the only true descriptions of the world in so far as they describe it accurately, and your physicalism holds the validity of other descriptions that might not be expressible by the physical sciences (if I understand it well!). Also, supervenience in that view, as far as I know, is asymmetrical.
Yeah that's it exactly!
> It's like truth depends to a certain extent on our conceptualizations, but this doesn't mean that they are unreal. What pragmatically works is true. I also think this is the correct way to do metaphysics because other options seem to engage in a type of inquiry that tries to reveal the same nature of reality, but attaining this goal seems impossible, or at least very difficult.
Yes! To be honest I'm not sure what it would mean for any metaphysical position to be true in any more absolute way. Calling one description "real" doesn't seem to actually have any implications, except that we should prefer that way of talking for some reason.
In my thoughts about these matters (physicalism and metaphysics), I'll have in mind these considerations, as well as what others here on Substack have said and argued. Pragmatist naturalism and physicalism have a lot of potential!
Something I've been puzzling over– a lot of physicalists want to be monists, but the theories afforded to us by physics as a discipline seem positively resplendent in fundamental particles, forces, energy, space, time, matter and antimatter and dark matter, and all the various dimensions, not to mention possible strings. It seems tricky to reconcile the panoply of postulates with the view that reality is one kind of thing.
This is a much stronger version of physicalism than the usual reductive account, and I appreciate that you’re not simply treating biological, intentional, formal, or final-causal descriptions as unreal.
I think the thing I’m still trying to get clear on is the status of the “interpretive lens.” Do you mean something close to a hermeneutical framework, where different modes of understanding genuinely disclose different aspects of reality? If so, I can see the appeal. But then I’m less sure how much explanatory weight the physical description is still meant to carry.
The distinction you make between the physical facts answering a question and merely fixing the answer seems important here. If intentional, formal, or final-causal questions only become intelligible once the relevant lens is supplied, then I wonder what makes that lens truth-disclosing rather than merely useful. Is it picking out an intelligible structure really present in the thing, or is it a framework we bring to the physical data?
If it’s the former, physicalism seems to have conceded quite a bit. If it’s the latter, then I’m not sure we have truth so much as usefulness or pragmatic organization. So I think the question I keep coming back to is: what grounds the truth of the lenses themselves?
> I think the thing I’m still trying to get clear on is the status of the “interpretive lens.” Do you mean something close to a hermeneutical framework, where different modes of understanding genuinely disclose different aspects of reality? If so, I can see the appeal. But then I’m less sure how much explanatory weight the physical description is still meant to carry.
Yes, hermeneutical frameworks which genuinely disclose different aspects of reality sounds about right. The physical description doesn't inherently carry any more explanatory weight than any other framework. Although it is always (in principle) an option.
> The distinction you make between the physical facts answering a question and merely fixing the answer seems important here.
Yeah I agree. I've been thinking about this a little more and I may have to do another post where I explore it a bit more, because I think there's some really interesting implications. Particularly, the physical lens can't account for any interpretation at all, even while it can fix all facts. But if we suppose a completely general "mental" lens, that could arguably contain within it all interpretive lenses, even while it would include none of the facts. Which pushes a good deal further from physicalism, so maybe is no longer worthy of the name? I'm not sure yet.
> If intentional, formal, or final-causal questions only become intelligible once the relevant lens is supplied, then I wonder what makes that lens truth-disclosing rather than merely useful. Is it picking out an intelligible structure really present in the thing, or is it a framework we bring to the physical data?
Yeah I would say it's the former. The physical lens is not privileged as more real than any other in my opinion. Which is a significant concession for physicalism, but I think what we want from physicalism is generally not really an account of "ultimate reality". And I think it makes the view much more reasonable and much nicer too.
The map is never the territory, but neither is any single map. Perhaps wisdom begins when we realize that reality can be viewed through many true descriptions without being reduced to any one of them.
Essentially the crucial bit is rejecting the notion that there are elements of reality that are irreducibly mental/ensouled, that is that are not explainable mechanistically, even in principle. Right?
Yes, pretty much. Although not reducible or explainable in the sense of "explaining away". The mental is still real, but mental phenomena can also always be viewed in purely physical terms.
So, we should embrace a partial Aristotelianism with just material and efficient causes for ontology (a functional definition overall). The other two causes can be naturalized, such as formal causes are real patterns, and final causes are evolved teleofunctionalities? These naturalized other two causes are the macro-level special sciences (i.e., Dennett's design and intentional stances) as we move up from the bit-map of fundamental physics to the enduring patterns of life and behavior. Real patterns do change (evolve or die off) over time, and so does teleofunctionality.
We could embrace physics for our ontology, but my preference is not committing exclusively to any one ontology. I don't think there's much meaning in identifying any one point of view as "really real" or an ultimate reality.
I completely agree with the need to avoid a dogmatic micro-physics that claims the mantle of being the truest explanation of reality (greedy reductionism, as Dennett put it). I see the 'hierarchy' (for lack of a better term) as a functional, practical, and scale-dependent tool, rather than a fixed metaphysical order from ground to ceiling. The structures and patterns are genuinely real at their own levels of scale and description. The nouns we use (like phlogiston or miasma) are provisional placeholders that change as we refine our structural understanding. Germs are a more accurate way of understanding cholera than miasma, but miasma did latch onto a real pattern (the connection between open sewers and disease). And when chemistry transitioned from phlogiston to oxygen, the underlying structural relations were largely preserved.
I like what you’re trying to do here Joseph. But it also seems a bit too wordy or complex to also get an Occam stamp of approval. Every time we call ourselves physicalists (or materialists, naturalists, and other synonyms), it would be nice if people were able to grasp what we mean without also needing to review this blog post. So to reference my own brand of metaphysics (which I presume you share) I like to use an extremely explicit term. I call myself a “systemic causalist”. It’s the presumption that all things happen exclusively by means of preceding causal dynamics associated with the system that we’re part of. Any violation could thus be referred to as “magical”. An outside god that affects our world without being subjected to such causality would obviously display such magic. But also a quantum event would be magical if it isn’t ultimately determined to occur exactly as it does occur. Furthermore I believe that a new sort of philosophy community (called “metascientists”) should found standard science upon the metaphysical premise that systemic causality never fails, and so leave all magical speculation to a different variety of science that could be referred to as “causal plus”. It seems logical to me that standard science would function better if magical proposals were instead considered elsewhere, and specifically because magic seems to effectively render science obsolete.
The main issue I have—and I think this is actually the issue you’re running up against without realizing it—is how could a physical description of reality be both comprehensive while simultaneously conceding that it can be described in other ways?
The reason why this isn’t immediately obvious in your thought process until the very end is because you simply move scales at a physical level of analysis, looking at the micro and macrostructures.
But when you finally arrive at the crux of the problem—phenomenological experience—you’re forced to concede that Laplace’s demon requires a different kind of knowledge that isn’t reducible to physical description. Rather than detecting this incompatibility, you side-step it by making all the necessary facts “implicit” within the physical description, being able to be worked out “in principle.”
So apparently the experiencing subject—the very thing doing the “working out”—is just another implicit fact within the physical description. Which really just dodges the question of how. How could the experience of the color red be “comprehensively” described according to its wavelength, when that description leaves out its phenomenology entirely?
To my eyes, you’re flirting with dual aspect monism without quite getting there. The ability for something to be derived “in principle” is only coherent if you can gesture at how, in principle—otherwise the argument becomes circular.
I worry that we find ourselves selves in a nothing-burger pickle by defining ‘physical’ through Aristotle’s four causes. Does this account of physicalism rule out any alternative positions? This is perfectly compatible with idealism, as well as dualisms of many sorts. It doesn’t seem to be a distinctive position, or saying anything metaphysically meaningful.
Another worry, regarding the first bit, is that I’m not sure how this is much different than the second horn of Hempel’s dilemma. “Everything that exists, could, in principle be given a comprehensive description in terms of physics”. Our current physics can’t give such a description, so it would need to be an ideal theory.
I think it rules out alternatives. It rules out things like Aquinas's conception of angels, which are intentional beings who are pure form with no matter. And rules out Platonic Forms similarly. And arguably it rules out panpsychism too, since we might think that consciousness always involves intentionality.
I suppose it would be an ideal theory, but it evades the dilemma because it specifies what would or would not constitute an "ideal physics". So if physics evolved over time to include the study of Thomist angels and qualia, that physics would not be what's involved in this version of physicalism, even if that physics is entirely true. It's nailed down the meaning of physics enough that the "ideal theory" still has positive content.
I’m not sure if merely ruling out these alternatives are enough though, isn’t a definition of physical that is compatible with various forms of idealism and dualism by itself a problem for the definition? I think there is another worry though, which is that the definition contains what we are calling into question. When defining Aristotle’s four causes you write,
“By defining physics in terms of material and efficient causes and the exclusion of formal and final causes we keep what I believe is the core idea of physicalism, without overcommitting to present theories and without leaving physicalism unspecified until a later date”
The term ‘material’ is what’s in question, so I doubt that we can contain ‘material’ in a definition of physicalism because what’s being called into question is the meaning of ‘physical’-‘material’-alike.
I don't think it is compatible with dualism. The immaterial soul/intellect from Descartes or Christianity is also a form that can subsist without matter, and not fully explainable in terms of efficient causality. I'm not sure idealism is compatible with this definition, although some versions may be.
I don't think there's an issue with using material causes in the definition, because it's more about looking at a thing in terms of its constituent parts, rather than any specific conception of what those parts are.
What do you take ‘material’ to mean? I can’t make sense of an account of matter or material without a sense of ‘physical’, if physical is being called into question, I take it that material is too, by synonymy, unless you take it that material and physical mean something else?
In the Aristotelian sense, the material cause is just the *parts* a thing can be broken into. So the matter of a house is bricks/beams/tiles etc. Our organs are part of the matter of our bodies. Letters are the matter of a written word.
Applying that to my relationalist view, if we imagine we'd mapped out the network of relations, we could look at a set of interlocking relations as one complex composite relation. Eg there's a relationship between a car's accelerator pedal and the wheels, but we can break that relationship down into many parts. It's those simplest structural parts that physics as defined here investigates.
> If you know what an animal intends to do then the behaviour of the atoms that compose the animal become far more predictable, and predictability is exactly what allows for compression and efficiency
It's possibly interesting to consider that alongside the use of motion vectors in video compression (higher order patterns that happen to map to "behavioural" patterns in the subjects in the video), and in another aspect, the use of psycho-acoustic models in lossy audio compression (the intended audience affects the compression implementation).
Definitely interesting to consider! I was prioritizing lossless compression because I wanted to make the point that they're not necessarily a "second rate" kind of reality, but I also think it makes total sense to think about how things exist from our real perspective, rather than that of hypothetical demons. Actually, using the demon is arguably subtly relying on the view from nowhere that I so often oppose...
I'm naturally sympathetic to this perspective but I struggle with a definition of physicalism being given in terms of the principled possibility of a physical description of everything, since we know from the study of complexity that such a description is impossible in practice, so I have to wonder (especially as a pragmatist!) what this really commits us to.
I vacillate between thinking of myself as a physicalist and an anti-anti-physicalist. The idea of the physical doesn't hold special meaning for me - my problem is that anti-physicalist theories just don't carve things up convincingly. It's a vocabulary problem for me rather than a metaphysical one, and I suspect it needs to be dealt with on grounds of language rather than ontology.
To be more specific: I'm a pluralist because of the issues with reduction, so I think we need multiple explanatory vocabularies, but I think all of our vocabularies are mutually constraining and overlapping. The problem with anti-physicalism (and all metaphysics) is that it wants to have a vocabulary that's fully detached from the physical after having used the vocabulary of the physical to bootstrap it. It's an ouroboros.
If we refuse it, it's tempting to then say that, with all our vocabularies being entwined, physics is implicated in everything, and everything is made of physical parts and the relations between them, so we can call ourselves physicalists. But I think the privileging of any vocabulary as an ontological foundation is going to end up a kind of metaphysics because there's still an implicit bootstrapping from empirical observation to meta-theoretical constraints.
I would rather say nothing more than: don't think you can have free-floating vocabularies. Follow that rule and whatever's left over is fine, but probably doesn't need a name other than monism.
That's a fair point about it being impossible in practice. But I think even as pragmatists we can think and talk in terms of demons and an imagined "end of inquiry". We can perhaps think of them like a mathematical limit as we approach infinity, like you can always look further into the physical causes of a phenomena and learn more. Or think of it as a guiding principle for our investigations, but only that it's always an *option*.
I agree about not wanting to privilege any vocabulary as an ontological foundation.
A very Peircean approach. We can get better or less wrong with our current science, but as finite beings we'll never reach the actual end of inquiry.
My response to Hempel is to admit that, yes, physicalism is wrong, in ways we're constantly discovering and adjusting for. But the real question is whether it's less wrong than the alternatives, and if not, how, in most cases, we could ever know.
I like this approach. Embracing our fallibility rather than declaring the nature of ultimate reality in advance seems very wise to me.
Although I think it maybe misses the reason physicalists privilege physics. There must be some reason behind it, and from that reason I think we can characterise the core idea of physicalism.
My theory is it comes down to what provides reliable information. In fact when discussions of physicalism vs other views come up, I usually point out I'm more committed to evidence than to physicalism in particular. If seances produced reliable knowledge, I'd be prepared to accept their ontology.
An interesting post Joseph. And it comes close to my own feelings. To explore the idea further these are that... Science (and any other mode of human enquiry) probes the world. It returns with observations and explanations of those observations. The observations are often undeniable. But frequently they are informed by a certain way of looking or a certain way of reading the data. As such, we need to apply sceptical thinking not just to scientists explanations, but also their observations, looking for any assumptions, thinking, or experimental design which might be distorting the picture. There is no objective and wholly reliant way of doing this besides arguing it out, going looking for more observations that might give a new angle, and generally thrashing it out over successive generations of theories, math, and discoveries.
Science is therefore an intrinsically human, fallible, and limited enterprise, largely defined by the thinking, assumptions, and methodologies which shape it. That isn't a prison cell. Even with those limits and problems, it has done astounding things. But it is nowhere near the type of thing which most people today romanticise it as.
As a result, we need to divide reality from science, and try to wear several hats. Primarily, we should look at reality through our hearts. This is our life and we should live it fully and beautifully. Secondly, we should look at reality through the veil of science. But we should temper that by also trying to use our heart and deep thinking to decipher what is likely just the veil and what pertains to the world behind the veil. In short, we need to be either speculative scientists or philosophers, trying to gauge what our world actually is behind the language, methods, and discoveries of science.
Most of the best scientists would agree with this stance. Science is only a picture of our world based on the questions we have thought to ask it.
As such, I am sure science will find a way to explain most things by gazing at various physical phenomena. But I'm not convinced this explanation will be correct without seriously testing how such a view might be mistaken. In this, physicalism is useless. It is an absurd metaphysical position which claims it already knows the nature of everything. Not even most people who believe in a God think they know that.
Your definition of physicalism, however, is far more appealing, since it commits merely to the method of physical enquiry, while allowing for the possibility of other enquiries bearing insight. For me, however, it still romanticises the human predicament a bit too much, placing too much hope in science as a discoverer of ultimate realities, rather than a creatively evaluating approximator of possible reality.
In my mind, it is clear that science is fumbling its way progressively towards The Truth. Whether it will ever get there feels unlikely but we won't know if we don't try. Given this humanness, I have deep faith and awe at the scientific project (and would hope that I can contribute to it somehow), and I know that it's description of the world will always be necessarily shaped by a physical enquiry, so in that even more limited sense of the word I'm a physicalist (i.e. I celebrate science, am happy that it studies physical reality, and believe this is a deeply worthwhile and fruitful task), but I must remain entirely agnostic about the true nature of the world it's studying.
Here, beyond science, words like "physicalism" and "anti-physicalism" become a kind of nonsense. The world exists. Beautiful. Vast. Mysterious. What it actually is, who knows. But our science's physical depiction of it provides us with an extraordinary and frequently enchanting insight into it. Is it all "physical" beyond that? I don't really know what the word "physical" even means in that context. Does it merely mean "exist"? If so, then yes, everything which exists must surely exist. But does this include "non-physical" phenomena? In this context that word has no meaning. Non-existent things don't exist. So it would need to be something which also existed but simply didn't qualify as "physical" for some reason.
At this point we start to conceive of the entire argument between physicalists and anti-physicalists as a scrap over folk thinking. Whatever the real is will likely defy both. Whatever science decides will likely be "physicalist" by fiat. So both may end up being right in their own limited ways.
Thanks for reading. I hope you found it interesting 🤗
Thanks for the comment, definitely found it interesting!
> As a result, we need to divide reality from science, and try to wear several hats. Primarily, we should look at reality through our hearts. This is our life and we should live it fully and beautifully. Secondly, we should look at reality through the veil of science. But we should temper that by also trying to use our heart and deep thinking to decipher what is likely just the veil and what pertains to the world behind the veil. In short, we need to be either speculative scientists or philosophers, trying to gauge what our world actually is behind the language, methods, and discoveries of science.
I agree that we should look at reality through our hearts and live it fully and beautifully. But I disagree with "dividing reality from science", or thinking of science as a "veil", or trying to decipher "what pertains to the world behind the veil".
I would say that science is a lens, not a veil. It is a genuine means that allows us to see and engage with reality, and that seeing and engagement is genuinely real. Our other modes of knowing and engaging with reality are similarly lenses and not veils, and genuinely connect us with reality.
And I would say that there is no "world behind the veil", no "thing in itself", no "ultimate reality". So whether we are approaching it through our hearts or through poetry or through science, we are truly engaging with the real world, even though these lenses show us the world under different aspects. I think the idea of an ultimate reality imagines that there's one true conception of reality, but I think conceptualization is something *we* do, so that there's no one true conception of reality in itself. There are just conceptualizations that allow us to better engage with the world.
What an interesting and insightful reply Joseph 👍 Yes, I can see how your views here form the basis for your wider physicalism. I think our difference comes down to the division of the experiential world from the objective world. My experiential world is completely true in the way you describe. Nobody can tell me I'm not looking at a blue sky because I am. However, the objective world is a more thorny affair.
Some may feel we can never know anything about it, not even whether it exists, and I have some sympathies with this. Those who say we have direct contact with it, and thus direct knowledge of it, are oddly on more dubious footing in my opinion. If we accept that we are biological entities, it follows that we must be witnessing whatever it is through a biological veil. As we struggle to decipher this, we add all sorts of other veils. Each have the ability to give us insights. But none is transparent. Each introduces its own artefacts which we can get tripped up on. Thus, to me, just as some philosophical problems seem to be born from simple linguistic muddles, some science is tangled in its own veil. Apologies for not giving an example of this, but you will find several examples in my forthcoming book if you're patient enough to wait for it 😅
The thing I love about this discussion is that it feels we're both looking under the hood and getting down to some of the fundamentals underpinning the standard physicalist worldview and why others might legitimately feel we need to think outside the strict confines of that... and that doing so might actually be better science, not worse
You and @Joseph Rahi are legends. Thanks for writing up this little thread!
Very tangential quibble:
> For example, he considered the letters of the alphabet to be the material cause of words.
Do you have a reference for that?
After some digging (ChatGPT + Perseus) I'm guessing perhaps Metaphysics VII.17 (1041b) e.g.
ἡ δὲ συλλαβὴ οὐκ ἔστι τὰ στοιχεῖα, οὐδὲ τῷ βα ταὐτὸ τὸ β καὶ α, οὐδ᾽ ἡ σὰρξ πῦρ καὶ γῆ
...
στοιχεῖον δ᾽ ἐστὶν εἰς ὃ διαιρεῖται ἐνυπάρχον ὡς ὕλην, οἷον τῆς συλλαβῆς τὸ α καὶ τὸ β.
As far as I can gather, he is saying the syllable is constituted by elements, and that when he is using alpha and beta here, he is actually referring to the sounds represented by those letters rather than as orthographic letters of the alphabet.
Just making this hyper-pedantic quibble, because spoken words and syllables pre-dated the written ones (and apparently he talks more explicitly in those terms in Poetics 1457a "neither hinders nor causes the formation of a single significant sound or phrase out of several sounds"), and more importantly the point is that the sum is a different thing to the parts rather than the parts sitting side by side. That point is lost in the alphabetic letters case because the letters are distinctly present in the written syllable. In the spoken syllable they become something of its own kind. Cf. the example of flesh vs its "constituents" (elements) fire and earth.
(Disclaimer, I've never read the full text, or any texts of Aristotle apart from quotes. I'm just an alphabet nerd, so when triggered by that word found myself compelled to go digging. Please don't judge me! :-P)
Yes, that's the passage I was thinking of! You can read it as referring to the sounds rather than the written letters. I heard recently (in Carlo Rovelli's Anaximander book) that ancient Greek was the first truly phonetic written language, so there's also much less difference in ancient Greek between thinking in terms of letters vs thinking in terms of sounds.
That's an interesting point about the parts not "sitting side by side" so much in a spoken syllable. I think if we look at non-alphabetic writing systems they are much more like spoken words in that way. Which I think points us to a trend I've been thinking about before, where the world and our concepts of it seem to be becoming progressively more modular, with separable, movable elements. The kind of symbolic arguments and precise definitions you find in analytic philosophy would be an example.
> You can read it as referring to the sounds rather than the written letters.
I'm suggesting that the sounds is the preferred reading.
> I heard recently (in Carlo Rovelli's Anaximander book) that ancient Greek was the first truly phonetic written language, so there's also much less difference in ancient Greek between thinking in terms of letters vs thinking in terms of sounds.
I'd dispute the claim that Greek was the first "truly phonetic".
Firstly, the Greek language existed before it was written down, so it makes more sense to talk about a phonetic writing system. The honours for that go to proto-Sinaitic (pre-cursor to Canaanite, paleo-Hebrew, and Phonecian) . None of those had explicit vowels, but that's only a marginal difference in terms of tracking phonemes.
> That's an interesting point about the parts not "sitting side by side" so much in a spoken syllable. I think if we look at non-alphabetic writing systems they are much more like spoken words in that way.
Which non-alphabetic systems are you thinking of? If you mean syllabaries, then absolutely. but if logographic, then not at all.
> Which I think points us to a trend I've been thinking about before, where the world and our concepts of it seem to be becoming progressively more modular, with separable, movable elements.
Hmm, but Mandarin has been around for a long time, and that is highly analytic (modular) in terms of grammar. A quick search says that it tends to be cyclical rather than a trend, but I'm not fully sure how that plays out.
> The kind of symbolic arguments and precise definitions you find in analytic philosophy would be an example.
Been around in maths for a long time?
Cf. chemistry.Perhaps it is more to do with symbol frequency distributions?
Maybe more to do with particular domains demanding high precision?
Hmm. Good try! But does "everything there is to know about the thing" include intentional aspects or not? If the intentional aspects can be worked out purely from the physical description, then our demon should not have to bring any additional understanding to explain everything. If some additional knowledge is required, then "everything there is to know" cannot be explained from the physical description.
It seems to me that the problem begins when we suppose that all of reality is relational structure, but lacks intentionality. Whence, then, intentionality? It might help to take the view that relational structure _is_ intentionality -- that things relate to one another intentionally, and this gives rise to physics. Then "everything there is to know about the thing" can be worked out purely from the intentional description -- both its intentional and physical aspects.
Thanks!
> But does "everything there is to know about the thing" include intentional aspects or not? If the intentional aspects can be worked out purely from the physical description, then our demon should not have to bring any additional understanding to explain everything.
Yes, I think it includes intentional aspects. The facts about these are implicitly contained in a perfect purely physical description, but only *implicitly*. The interpretive framework in which they exist is not contained in the interpretive framework of physics, so the demon could not explicate the answer to those questions using physics alone. But supposing the demon knew the other interpretive *framework* and all the physical *facts*, it could then figure out the intentional facts too.
In fact through the lens of physics all interpretation is invisible, including the physical interpretive lens itself. And yet they are also implicitly specified by the physical facts.
> It seems to me that the problem begins when we suppose that all of reality is relational structure, but lacks intentionality. Whence, then, intentionality?
I don't suppose that all of reality is relational structure and lacks intentionality; I think that reality is relational structure, and intentionality is a structure that can only be seen when we are viewing reality through certain interpretive lenses. Through the lens of physics, intentionality disappears.
> It might help to take the view that relational structure _is_ intentionality -- that things relate to one another intentionally, and this gives rise to physics.
My difficulty with this is that I'm not sure what it would mean to say that relational structure simply is intentionality. For example, I think relational structure also covers the structures of the natural numbers, but I don't think there's any intentionality there. What would it mean to say that relational structure _is_ intentionality?
It sounds like the interpretive framework of physics is not complete. It includes only "physical facts." The demon needs another interpretive framework to figure out the "intentional facts" that are supposedly implicit in these physical facts.
However, if the intentional facts are truly implicit in the physical facts,the demon ought to be able (in principle) to make the necessary inferences without appeal to anything else but the physical facts. If the demon has to step outside the interpretive framework of physicalism into another, then physicalism is inadequate to describe everything the demon can know. The introduction of interpretive frameworks makes in even clearer that one interpretive framework by itself, namely physicalism, is not enough for a comprehensive description of everything that exists.
You ask what it would mean to say that relational structure _is_ intentionality. But what else could it be? In a relational structure, the meaning (or significance or functionality) of one thing is defined in terms of another; in fact this is mutual, and each of the relata derive their significance from the other. In Aristotelian terms, their material, efficient, formal, and final natures are all bound up with one another. Absent one of the relata, there is none of this.
Looking on, we may recognize as third parties the meanings of things for one another. If no one is looking, do those meanings persist all the same? Do the relata have meaning or significance or functionality for one another, even if humans aren't around to recognize it? I find it simpler to say so than to argue that until we noticed their intentionality, there was none.
Of course this would apply for the natural numbers. To the extent that they need each other to make any sense at all, they are caught up in intentional relationships.
It depends on what we mean by "complete". If we mean is it enough to *answer* all questions, the answer is no. But if we mean is it enough to *fix* the correct answer to all questions, I think the answer is yes.
I'd also add that the "intentional facts" are not a different reality or aspect of reality, they're the same reality being viewed through a different lens.
Interesting point about relational structure and intentionality. I think I'm gonna need to chew on it some more.
> Looking on, we may recognize as third parties the meanings of things for one another. If no one is looking, do those meanings persist all the same? Do the relata have meaning or significance or functionality for one another, even if humans aren't around to recognize it? I find it simpler to say so than to argue that until we noticed their intentionality, there was none.
We can say so they persisted even if never perceived. The thing is that the interpretive lens in which we see meaning is an interpretive lens that *really perceives reality*, just as the interpretive lens of physics is. Both are our conceptualizations, but they are *true* conceptualizations. Neither one is strictly mind-dependent, since they really perceive reality, but also neither is strictly mind-independent, since they are interpretations of reality.
I certainly agree that there are different lenses through which we attempt to make sense of reality. We might also call them paradigms, or framings, or contexts, or ways of knowing, or ways of seeing. I spend a lot of time talking about this on my blog. But I would say that each of them exposes an aspect of reality, and none of them may be said to "really perceive reality" except in that limited sense (although in that limited sense they do perceive reality). To _really_ perceive reality requires more than one lens. How many others is a good question; I think just two might be enough. My running metaphor involves the two eyes and depth perception.
All of them offer an interpretation of the meaning of things. It's just that the "things" are different. Each paradigm comes with its own ontology, along with relationships, or meanings, that are appropriate for that ontology.
But sorry, I don't mean to make this all about me. I just thought your idea could use a little pushback. I guess I'm like Socrates that way.
Right, I don't think any one lens on its own can truly capture the whole picture. Or rather, it can capture a picture of the whole but only in its own terms. Although for those with the right knowledge, translation and between interpretive frames/lenses is possible.
I would say that they really perceive reality because they perceive it truthfully. That doesn't mean it's "reality in itself", but it's also not not reality.
I totally agree about the different paradigms and ontologies.
No need to apologise!
Great article! For a moment (when I saw your definition) I thought this was similar to a priori physicalism (all truths are a priori derivable or deducible from a complete physicalist description [i.e., a complete description given by and in terms of the physical sciences] of the world), but this is in fact less strong than that. (Or I'm assuming wrongly that a priori physicalism is incompatible with your physicalism, but that you'd tell me whether it is.) I'm sympathetic to this version of physicalism, since it seems to be "metaphysical" but not "in a big way," so to speak. I mean, what's doing the heavy work here (I think) is the concept of (micro)physical description. You say in another comment that this version is metaphysical because it says that everything can be understood in terms of material and efficient causes. However, does this "can be understood in terms of material and efficient causes" actually mean something "metaphysical," rather than some "fact" about our languages that we use to describe reality? What about the view that material and efficient causes are merely cognitive "shortcuts" we use to classify and describe reality? I actually do not like it so much when we humans do meta-physics (not metaphysics), that is, when we try to express something really real about the very nature of reality and that necessarily goes beyond what we accept as "real" for pragmatic reasons. But, anyway, it seems plausible to me to say that even if physics (and, by extension, physicalism) were somewhat committed to apparently non-physical or "metaphysical" (or "meta-physical"?) entities, like qualia, that won't be the end of physicalism. For instance, physicalists can be subjective physicalists: they can affirm that a full physical description leaves nothing out, but some physical properties (like qualia) can only be fully grasped subjectively or experientially, and so a full objective description of the world cannot reveal all about what exists or cannot provide all the possible information out there. (I do not want to promote myself lol, but I wrote an article about subjective physicalism where I explain the main idea of it. I'd really like to know your thoughts about it!) Thank you for writing this beautiful article.
Thank you!
I'm not really familiar with a priori physicalism, so I've had to look it up a bit, and it definitely seems similar. I think I would count as an a priori physicalist if I'm understanding it correctly, but what makes you say it's a less strong version? There's likely something I'm missing.
> I'm sympathetic to this version of physicalism, since it seems to be "metaphysical" but not "in a big way," so to speak. I mean, what's doing the heavy work here (I think) is the concept of (micro)physical description.
Exactly! It's a fairly minimalist physicalism I think.
> However, does this "can be understood in terms of material and efficient causes" actually mean something "metaphysical," rather than some "fact" about our languages that we use to describe reality? What about the view that material and efficient causes are merely cognitive "shortcuts" we use to classify and describe reality?
I think it's both. I take a generally pragmatist approach to metaphysics, so I do think material and efficient causes are our conceptualizations of the world, but if the conceptualization is successful and allows us to engage better with the world, then it is true. I wouldn't say that they are "merely" shortcuts though. It's real, even though it's coming through our concepts and our interpretive frame. So, I'm not suggesting that material and efficient causes belong to a Kantian noumena, but I don't really accept the idea of the noumena.
> I actually do not like it so much when we humans do meta-physics (not metaphysics), that is, when we try to express something really real about the very nature of reality and that necessarily goes beyond what we accept as "real" for pragmatic reasons.
Exactly! At that point, it's really not clear to me what "real" is supposed to mean.
> For instance, physicalists can be subjective physicalists: they can affirm that a full physical description leaves nothing out, but some physical properties (like qualia) can only be fully grasped subjectively or experientially, and so a full objective description of the world cannot reveal all about what exists or cannot provide all the possible information out there. (I do not want to promote myself lol, but I wrote an article about subjective physicalism where I explain the main idea of it. I'd really like to know your thoughts about it!)
Oh that's perfect timing, I was recommended to learn about subjective physicalism just recently! I'll give it a read :)
Ty! I think that you wouldn't say that if one has a full physicalist description of the world, one can a priori deduce every truth (including psychological, moral, and biological truths) from that description, even though it might be impossible in practice to do so. But a priori physicalism, it seems to me at least, requires the claim that only physicalist descriptions are the only true descriptions of the world in so far as they describe it accurately, and your physicalism holds the validity of other descriptions that might not be expressible by the physical sciences (if I understand it well!). Also, supervenience in that view, as far as I know, is asymmetrical.
> I take a generally pragmatist approach to metaphysics, so I do think material and efficient causes are our conceptualizations of the world, but if the conceptualization is successful and allows us to engage better with the world, then it is true. I wouldn't say that they are "merely" shortcuts though. It's real, even though it's coming through our concepts and our interpretive frame. So, I'm not suggesting that material and efficient causes belong to a Kantian noumena, but I don't really accept the idea of the noumena.
I agree with this! It's like truth depends to a certain extent on our conceptualizations, but this doesn't mean that they are unreal. What pragmatically works is true. I also think this is the correct way to do metaphysics because other options seem to engage in a type of inquiry that tries to reveal the same nature of reality, but attaining this goal seems impossible, or at least very difficult.
I think I would say that with a full physical description of the world, it should in principle be possible to a priori deduce every truth. So long as we also had knowledge of the relevant frame of reference for the truth. Like, if we had a full physical description and were asked if a person is happy or sad, we'd need to know what "person", "happy", and "sad" all mean, which are not concepts native to physics. So you still need a kind of translation between viewpoints.
> But a priori physicalism, it seems to me at least, requires the claim that only physicalist descriptions are the only true descriptions of the world in so far as they describe it accurately, and your physicalism holds the validity of other descriptions that might not be expressible by the physical sciences (if I understand it well!). Also, supervenience in that view, as far as I know, is asymmetrical.
Yeah that's it exactly!
> It's like truth depends to a certain extent on our conceptualizations, but this doesn't mean that they are unreal. What pragmatically works is true. I also think this is the correct way to do metaphysics because other options seem to engage in a type of inquiry that tries to reveal the same nature of reality, but attaining this goal seems impossible, or at least very difficult.
Yes! To be honest I'm not sure what it would mean for any metaphysical position to be true in any more absolute way. Calling one description "real" doesn't seem to actually have any implications, except that we should prefer that way of talking for some reason.
In my thoughts about these matters (physicalism and metaphysics), I'll have in mind these considerations, as well as what others here on Substack have said and argued. Pragmatist naturalism and physicalism have a lot of potential!
Something I've been puzzling over– a lot of physicalists want to be monists, but the theories afforded to us by physics as a discipline seem positively resplendent in fundamental particles, forces, energy, space, time, matter and antimatter and dark matter, and all the various dimensions, not to mention possible strings. It seems tricky to reconcile the panoply of postulates with the view that reality is one kind of thing.
This is a much stronger version of physicalism than the usual reductive account, and I appreciate that you’re not simply treating biological, intentional, formal, or final-causal descriptions as unreal.
I think the thing I’m still trying to get clear on is the status of the “interpretive lens.” Do you mean something close to a hermeneutical framework, where different modes of understanding genuinely disclose different aspects of reality? If so, I can see the appeal. But then I’m less sure how much explanatory weight the physical description is still meant to carry.
The distinction you make between the physical facts answering a question and merely fixing the answer seems important here. If intentional, formal, or final-causal questions only become intelligible once the relevant lens is supplied, then I wonder what makes that lens truth-disclosing rather than merely useful. Is it picking out an intelligible structure really present in the thing, or is it a framework we bring to the physical data?
If it’s the former, physicalism seems to have conceded quite a bit. If it’s the latter, then I’m not sure we have truth so much as usefulness or pragmatic organization. So I think the question I keep coming back to is: what grounds the truth of the lenses themselves?
Thanks!
> I think the thing I’m still trying to get clear on is the status of the “interpretive lens.” Do you mean something close to a hermeneutical framework, where different modes of understanding genuinely disclose different aspects of reality? If so, I can see the appeal. But then I’m less sure how much explanatory weight the physical description is still meant to carry.
Yes, hermeneutical frameworks which genuinely disclose different aspects of reality sounds about right. The physical description doesn't inherently carry any more explanatory weight than any other framework. Although it is always (in principle) an option.
> The distinction you make between the physical facts answering a question and merely fixing the answer seems important here.
Yeah I agree. I've been thinking about this a little more and I may have to do another post where I explore it a bit more, because I think there's some really interesting implications. Particularly, the physical lens can't account for any interpretation at all, even while it can fix all facts. But if we suppose a completely general "mental" lens, that could arguably contain within it all interpretive lenses, even while it would include none of the facts. Which pushes a good deal further from physicalism, so maybe is no longer worthy of the name? I'm not sure yet.
> If intentional, formal, or final-causal questions only become intelligible once the relevant lens is supplied, then I wonder what makes that lens truth-disclosing rather than merely useful. Is it picking out an intelligible structure really present in the thing, or is it a framework we bring to the physical data?
Yeah I would say it's the former. The physical lens is not privileged as more real than any other in my opinion. Which is a significant concession for physicalism, but I think what we want from physicalism is generally not really an account of "ultimate reality". And I think it makes the view much more reasonable and much nicer too.
The map is never the territory, but neither is any single map. Perhaps wisdom begins when we realize that reality can be viewed through many true descriptions without being reduced to any one of them.
> The idea that the are distinct “levels” of reality is confusing our conceptualizations for the thing being conceptualized.
Amen man!!
Essentially the crucial bit is rejecting the notion that there are elements of reality that are irreducibly mental/ensouled, that is that are not explainable mechanistically, even in principle. Right?
Yes, pretty much. Although not reducible or explainable in the sense of "explaining away". The mental is still real, but mental phenomena can also always be viewed in purely physical terms.
So, we should embrace a partial Aristotelianism with just material and efficient causes for ontology (a functional definition overall). The other two causes can be naturalized, such as formal causes are real patterns, and final causes are evolved teleofunctionalities? These naturalized other two causes are the macro-level special sciences (i.e., Dennett's design and intentional stances) as we move up from the bit-map of fundamental physics to the enduring patterns of life and behavior. Real patterns do change (evolve or die off) over time, and so does teleofunctionality.
We could embrace physics for our ontology, but my preference is not committing exclusively to any one ontology. I don't think there's much meaning in identifying any one point of view as "really real" or an ultimate reality.
Yeah exactly, real patterns all the way!
I completely agree with the need to avoid a dogmatic micro-physics that claims the mantle of being the truest explanation of reality (greedy reductionism, as Dennett put it). I see the 'hierarchy' (for lack of a better term) as a functional, practical, and scale-dependent tool, rather than a fixed metaphysical order from ground to ceiling. The structures and patterns are genuinely real at their own levels of scale and description. The nouns we use (like phlogiston or miasma) are provisional placeholders that change as we refine our structural understanding. Germs are a more accurate way of understanding cholera than miasma, but miasma did latch onto a real pattern (the connection between open sewers and disease). And when chemistry transitioned from phlogiston to oxygen, the underlying structural relations were largely preserved.
I like what you’re trying to do here Joseph. But it also seems a bit too wordy or complex to also get an Occam stamp of approval. Every time we call ourselves physicalists (or materialists, naturalists, and other synonyms), it would be nice if people were able to grasp what we mean without also needing to review this blog post. So to reference my own brand of metaphysics (which I presume you share) I like to use an extremely explicit term. I call myself a “systemic causalist”. It’s the presumption that all things happen exclusively by means of preceding causal dynamics associated with the system that we’re part of. Any violation could thus be referred to as “magical”. An outside god that affects our world without being subjected to such causality would obviously display such magic. But also a quantum event would be magical if it isn’t ultimately determined to occur exactly as it does occur. Furthermore I believe that a new sort of philosophy community (called “metascientists”) should found standard science upon the metaphysical premise that systemic causality never fails, and so leave all magical speculation to a different variety of science that could be referred to as “causal plus”. It seems logical to me that standard science would function better if magical proposals were instead considered elsewhere, and specifically because magic seems to effectively render science obsolete.
The main issue I have—and I think this is actually the issue you’re running up against without realizing it—is how could a physical description of reality be both comprehensive while simultaneously conceding that it can be described in other ways?
The reason why this isn’t immediately obvious in your thought process until the very end is because you simply move scales at a physical level of analysis, looking at the micro and macrostructures.
But when you finally arrive at the crux of the problem—phenomenological experience—you’re forced to concede that Laplace’s demon requires a different kind of knowledge that isn’t reducible to physical description. Rather than detecting this incompatibility, you side-step it by making all the necessary facts “implicit” within the physical description, being able to be worked out “in principle.”
So apparently the experiencing subject—the very thing doing the “working out”—is just another implicit fact within the physical description. Which really just dodges the question of how. How could the experience of the color red be “comprehensively” described according to its wavelength, when that description leaves out its phenomenology entirely?
To my eyes, you’re flirting with dual aspect monism without quite getting there. The ability for something to be derived “in principle” is only coherent if you can gesture at how, in principle—otherwise the argument becomes circular.
Great post! I have two worries.
I worry that we find ourselves selves in a nothing-burger pickle by defining ‘physical’ through Aristotle’s four causes. Does this account of physicalism rule out any alternative positions? This is perfectly compatible with idealism, as well as dualisms of many sorts. It doesn’t seem to be a distinctive position, or saying anything metaphysically meaningful.
Another worry, regarding the first bit, is that I’m not sure how this is much different than the second horn of Hempel’s dilemma. “Everything that exists, could, in principle be given a comprehensive description in terms of physics”. Our current physics can’t give such a description, so it would need to be an ideal theory.
Thank you!
I think it rules out alternatives. It rules out things like Aquinas's conception of angels, which are intentional beings who are pure form with no matter. And rules out Platonic Forms similarly. And arguably it rules out panpsychism too, since we might think that consciousness always involves intentionality.
I suppose it would be an ideal theory, but it evades the dilemma because it specifies what would or would not constitute an "ideal physics". So if physics evolved over time to include the study of Thomist angels and qualia, that physics would not be what's involved in this version of physicalism, even if that physics is entirely true. It's nailed down the meaning of physics enough that the "ideal theory" still has positive content.
I’m not sure if merely ruling out these alternatives are enough though, isn’t a definition of physical that is compatible with various forms of idealism and dualism by itself a problem for the definition? I think there is another worry though, which is that the definition contains what we are calling into question. When defining Aristotle’s four causes you write,
“By defining physics in terms of material and efficient causes and the exclusion of formal and final causes we keep what I believe is the core idea of physicalism, without overcommitting to present theories and without leaving physicalism unspecified until a later date”
The term ‘material’ is what’s in question, so I doubt that we can contain ‘material’ in a definition of physicalism because what’s being called into question is the meaning of ‘physical’-‘material’-alike.
I don't think it is compatible with dualism. The immaterial soul/intellect from Descartes or Christianity is also a form that can subsist without matter, and not fully explainable in terms of efficient causality. I'm not sure idealism is compatible with this definition, although some versions may be.
I don't think there's an issue with using material causes in the definition, because it's more about looking at a thing in terms of its constituent parts, rather than any specific conception of what those parts are.
What do you take ‘material’ to mean? I can’t make sense of an account of matter or material without a sense of ‘physical’, if physical is being called into question, I take it that material is too, by synonymy, unless you take it that material and physical mean something else?
In the Aristotelian sense, the material cause is just the *parts* a thing can be broken into. So the matter of a house is bricks/beams/tiles etc. Our organs are part of the matter of our bodies. Letters are the matter of a written word.
Applying that to my relationalist view, if we imagine we'd mapped out the network of relations, we could look at a set of interlocking relations as one complex composite relation. Eg there's a relationship between a car's accelerator pedal and the wheels, but we can break that relationship down into many parts. It's those simplest structural parts that physics as defined here investigates.
> If you know what an animal intends to do then the behaviour of the atoms that compose the animal become far more predictable, and predictability is exactly what allows for compression and efficiency
It's possibly interesting to consider that alongside the use of motion vectors in video compression (higher order patterns that happen to map to "behavioural" patterns in the subjects in the video), and in another aspect, the use of psycho-acoustic models in lossy audio compression (the intended audience affects the compression implementation).
Definitely interesting to consider! I was prioritizing lossless compression because I wanted to make the point that they're not necessarily a "second rate" kind of reality, but I also think it makes total sense to think about how things exist from our real perspective, rather than that of hypothetical demons. Actually, using the demon is arguably subtly relying on the view from nowhere that I so often oppose...