Real naturalism (original) (raw)
Many current formulations of naturalism are profoundly anti-naturalistic. This is because they still favour some sort of reductive approach to experience (= consciousness, conscious experience). The bedrock of any remotely realistic naturalism, hence any serious or real naturalism, is outright non-reductive realism about experience. This is because the existence of experience is a certainly known natural fact (it’s the most certainly known general natural fact). (2) By ‘realism about experience’ I mean real realism about experience. What is real realism about experience? Real realists about experience take experience to be essentially what they took it to be before they did any philosophy, e.g. when they were 6 years old. (3) Physicalism is the view that concrete reality is entirely physical in nature. I take physicalism to be part of naturalism. So I take it that experience is entirely physical. (4) Physicalist naturalism rules out anything incompatible with the truths of physics, obviously enough. But there’s a crucial respect in which physics only gives structural information about the nature of concrete reality, and has nothing to say about the intrinsic nature of the concrete reality in so far as its intrinsic nature is more than its structure. (5) It follows that physicalist naturalism can’t rule out panpsychism or panexperientialism, which is the simplest theory of the nature of reality. (6) There is no evidence for the existence of any non-experiential reality. So truly hard-nosed physicalism has no reason to posit its existence, although it must admit the existence of the certainly known natural fact of experience.
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