3. Physicalism

Abstract

‘Physicalism’ looks at the view that everything that exists today—including human minds—came about in virtue of the rearrangements of and interactions between the physical particles and forces that emerged after the universe’s birth. There are a number of different versions of physicalism: identity theory, functionalism, mysterianism, eliminativism, non-reductive physicalism, and emergentism. The concept of multiple realization allows for the same type of mental states to have different neural signatures and contrasts physicalism with panpsychism, the view that the fundamental components of the universe are conscious. Most physicalists maintain the strongest philosophical argument for physicalism, what has come to be known as ‘the causal argument for physicalism’.