∗Thanks to audiences at Tufts University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Toronto for helpful comments and questions. Special thanks to Benj Hellie and Jonathan McCoy for detailed feedback on previous versions, and to Robert Axtell, whose suggestion that reductions in degrees of freedom play a role in the physically unproblematic emergence of complex systems (made during the 2...

Consider three answers to the question of what it actually is for you to be aware of the room you are in. (1) It is for the room in a way to exist. (2) It is for there to be only physical activity in your head, however additionally described. (3) It is for there to be non-spatial facts somehow in your head. The first theory, unlike the other two, satisfies five criteria for an adequate account ...

In recent years, much of the hope for the basic project of materialism, that of explaining mentality in purely physical terms, has been vested in materialist varieties of functionalism (Kim 1998, 73). 1 Instead of identifying mentality with either behavior or brain states as the failed approaches of behaviorism and physicalism do, functionalism identifies mental states as “consisting of a dispo...

In previous work (Wilson forthcoming), I have endorsed an account of the physical according to which an entity is physical just in case it is (approximately accurately) treated by current or future (in the limit of inquiry, ideal) physics, and is not fundamentally mental. Call this account of the physical the physics-based NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) account. The physics-based NFM account ...

From the perspective of nonlinear science, it is argued that one may accept physicalism and reject substance dualism without being forced into reductionism. This permits a property dualism under which biological and mental phenomena may emerge from intricate positive feedback networks, involving many levels of both the biological and cognitive hierarchies.

If physicalism is true, everything is physical. In other words, everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. Accordingly, if there are logical/mathematical facts, they must be necessitated by the physical facts of the world. The aim of this paper is to clarify what logical/mathematical facts actually are and how these facts can be accommodated in a purely physical world.

richard mckay rorty (1932-2007) is the american neo-pragmatist. criticizing the prevalent issues of traditional philosophy such as truth, knowledge, objectivity, logic and philosophy, he considers epistemology a modern subject which emerged via forging the mind by rene descartes. in his view, separation of mind–body is an unprecedented matter created in descartes philosophy. he thinks that, i...