Russellian physicalism is a view on the nature of consciousness which promises to satisfy demands both traditional physicalists and non-physicalists. It does so by identifying subjective experience with physically acceptable categorical properties underlying structural dispositional described science. Though promising, faces at least two serious challenges: (i) it has been argued that science d...

Many computational modeling approaches of the mind seem to be characterized by an implicit strong physicalism, which frequently leads to confusion in philosophy of AI. This work aims at pointing out some fundamental aspects of this problem, both with respect to the relation between epistemological computationalism and physical realization, and the view of symbol manipulation as constrained comp...

∗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 ...