ABSTRACT
There is, today, no glimmer of a consensus amongst philosophers about the mind-body problem. Nevertheless, an increasing number of philosophers find themselves occupying a middle ground between physicalist reductionism, on the one hand, and dualism on the other. Physicalist reductionism I take to be the view that the physical story about what is going on in the brain and the world with which it interacts is in some sense the whole story. If there really are such things as mental states and processes – which eliminative materialists notoriously deny – then their existence must be logically implicit in facts statable in the language of physics. Space does not permit a detailed rebuttal of reductionist physicalism; nor do the arguments I have elsewhere presented4 admit of brief summary. But the simple intuitive argument is that a being provided with a description of you or me couched purely in the language of physics – even if it possessed unlimited powers of ratiocination – would have no way of deducing that our bodies were associated with awareness at all, much less what specifically it was like to be you or me.5 There is, of course, a lot more to be said on the matter; but attempts to disarm such intuitive arguments seem to me, in the end, uniformly unsuccessful. Indeed, for those not blinded by science, the falsity of reductionist physicalism will probably seem almost too obvious to require argument: Galen Strawson aptly describes it as “moonshine.”6
