James

The community of naturalists accepts that it is intuitively puzzling how phenomenal consciousness with its diaphanous texture could have emerged from matter and how it can now be realized in an abundance of sentient beings. Yet the prevailing consensus, with some notable exceptions, is that consciousness, like life, must have emerged diachronically from matter fi nding its way into new kinds of dynamic states; and that each mental state realized synchronically (seeing red now) must be some kind of material state in a brain, the body, or certain kinds of bodies-in-the world. In contemporary terms, there has been an emerging consensus that token physicalism is a legitimate regulative assumption for mind science, and, furthermore, it may very well be true: each and every mental event is some brain or extended bodily event, even if not every kind of mental event is the same kind of physical event ( type physicalism ).