Physicalism: what is it and what does this philosophy propose?

What is physicalism? Let us look at its ideas about ontology and the nature of the mind.

The daily experience of the human being, and his interaction with the intricacies of reality, leads him to think that everything that surrounds him has two possible substances: the tangible and the intangible. Or what is the same: what he can perceive and what he cannot perceive through the organs of sensation.

However, the truth is that the "impression" of our senses announces exclusively a perspective of things, sometimes misleading or biased, such as the straight line of the horizon (compared to the sphericity of the earth) or the apparent movements of the sun (which seems to rotate around the planet and not the opposite).

This veil, inherent to the inherent limitations of our biology, has fueled a certain skepticism among some of the greatest thinkers of recent history, who took up the baton of those who preceded them in the search for an elemental substratum for all things in the world, beyond the perceptual dictatorship of a simple observer.

At this juncture, physicalism, a philosophical model physicalism, a philosophical model that seeks to answer that seeks to answer one of the great dilemmas of history: what is it that makes up reality. As the years went by, it emerged as a materialist alternative in the particular field of Ontology, in an evident opposition to Platonic idealism and Cartesian dualism. Let's see it in detail.

What is physicalism?

Physicalism is a branch of philosophical knowledge, whose claim is to explore reality. In its theoretical corpus assumes that the nature of the existent is limited exclusively to the physical, that is, to matter (or to energy understood as the constitutive fabric of any tangible entity). (or to energy understood as the constitutive fabric of any tangible entity). It is therefore a form of monism, which reduces the complexity of the universe we inhabit to its most elementary substance, and which embraces materialism as an inspiration for the elaboration of its basic concepts (as well as naturalism).

This perspective is based on the epistemological branch of the philosophy of mind, which assumes that the ethereal substance we refer to as "soul" and/or "consciousness" must also be based on tangible reality. In this way, the brain would serve as organic support for all phenomena of psychic order, implicitly rejecting the existence of spirit and/or God. From such a perspective, the basic foundations of almost all religions would be denied.This precept was the main reason for the controversy it had to face since its inception.

The fact of considering any activity of the mind as an epiphenomenon of organic reality, reducible to the action of hormones and neurotransmitters on brain physiology, meant a confrontation with Descartes' dualistic thesis (Cartesian dualism). According to this philosophical perspective, which had a long tradition in the old continent, the physical (extenso) and the mental (cogitans) would be the two basic dimensions of reality (both equally important) and would be absolutely connected to each other (both the physical and the mental could be the cause or the consequence of an object or a situation).

The physicalist thesis would overthrow the ideas of dualism from the ground up.The mental would necessarily have to be a cause of the physical, and in no case could there be any relationship in the opposite direction. Following this idea, the links that shape any chain of events would have a tangible substrate, being susceptible of analysis and understanding with the tools of the natural sciences (which is why his proposal has been valued as a naturalistic philosophy). In this way, all mental processes would have their raison d'être in the brain, and through its study its gears and functioning mechanisms would be discovered. It would therefore be assumed that mental things do not have a reality of their own, but always depend on the physical.

Physicalism has been criticized by a great number of scholars, because it has been equated with materialism. However, it differs from it by the inclusion of "energy" as a form of matter in a state other than tangible (which materialism never contemplated), which allows it to adapt to spaces in which the latter never participated (such as the analogy between mind and brain).

Thus, in its applied form it emerges as a scientific working hypothesis that reduces everything to the material, and that does not question the plausibility of the theory from which it starts. It opts, therefore, for an application of an operational nature, including the possibility that the phenomena proper to psychology can be reduced to the neurological/biological..

In the following lines, some of the fundamental ideas related to the theoretical basis of stratification, which has been used to explain physicalist reductionism, and without which it is difficult to understand its dynamics in action, will be presented.

Physicalist reductionism: stratification.

Cartesian dualism postulated an ontological division for the essence of all things in reality, with two different but largely interconnected dimensions: matter and thought or cognition. However, physicalism proposed a much more complex structure for this natural ordering: stratification. Its logic implies the succession of many levels, following a hierarchy of relative complexities that would start from the essential and progressively ascend to much more elaborate constructions.

The body of any human being would be in its essence an accumulation of particles, but it would become more sophisticated as it reaches the higher levels of the scale (such as cells, tissues, organs, organs, cells, tissues, organs, organs, organs). (such as cells, tissues, organs, systems, etc.) to culminate in the formation of a consciousness. The higher levels would contain in their own composition the lower ones in their totality, while those located at the bases would be devoid of the essence of those occupying the apex (or would be only partial representations).

Consciousness would be a phenomenon dependent on the activity of an organ (the brain), which would be of lesser complexity than the consciousness itself. Therefore, the effort to understand it (anatomy, function, etc.) would imply a form of encircling knowledge about how one thinks, and in the last instance an approximation to the consciousness itself. It is inferred from this that that there is no such thing as thought as a reality independent of the physical basis that would make it possible. This process supposes an inference of higher strata of this hierarchy from the observation of the lower ones, generating analogies from one to the other and thus understanding that their essence is to a great extent equivalent. From such a prism, phenomenology (subjective and unique construction of meaning) would depend only on physical qualities inherent to biology.

It is at this point that many authors point out the reductionism implicit in physicalism.. Such criticisms focus (above all) on the potential existence of differential characteristics for each of the levels, which would make an adequate comparison between them (of the part with the whole) difficult and would leave the question of the relationship between mind-body unresolved. The currents that most vehemently questioned this physicalism were anti-reductionism (due to the excessive parsimony of its approaches and the naivety of its logical deductions) and eliminativism (which rejected the existence of the levels or of the hierarchies that could be established between them).

Main opponents of physicalism

Its main critics were Thomas Nagel (who pointed out that human subjectivity cannot be apprehended from the viewpoint of physicalism, since it is closely associated with individual perspective and processes) and Daniel C. Dennett (although he supported physicalism, he fought to maintain the idea of free will, since he understood it as an inalienable quality of the human being). The denial of this precept, which is given a cardinal value in the context of religion, also exacerbated the complaints of the Christian thinkers of the time.

Although they were all very notable oppositions to physicalism, the most relevant of them arose from subjective idealism (George Berkeley). Such a doctrine of thought (also monistic) did not conceive of the existence of any matter, and was oriented only toward the mental plane of reality. It would be a way of reflecting that would be located within immaterialism, to the point of conceiving a world formed only by consciousness. Just as in the case of physicalism, idealism would explicitly reject Cartesian dualism (for such is the nature of monisms), although it would do so in the opposite way to Cartesian dualism.

The idealist vision would place the axis of reality in the individual who thinks, and who is therefore an agent subject in the construction of all that he comes to know. Within this perspective, two variants can be distinguished: the radical one (according to which everything that exists before the eyes of an observer is created by himself in a process of conscious ontology, so that nothing would exist outside the activity of his own mind) and the moderate one (reality would be nuanced by his own mental activity, so that the individual would adopt a particular perspective of things according to the way he thinks and feels).

The debate between the two perspectives is still active todayand although there are certain points of convergence (such as the full conviction about the existence of ideas, despite divergences in nuances) their views tend to be irreconcilable. They suppose, therefore, antagonistic ways of perceiving the world, which are rooted in what is perhaps the most elementary question that philosophy has in its repertoire: what is the human being and how is the fabric of the reality in which he lives?

Bibliographical references:

• Lemke, T. (2015). Varieties of materialism. BioSocieties, 10, 490-495.
• Shrum, L., Lowrey, T., Pandelaere, M., Ruvio, A., Gentina, L. ... and Nairn, A. (2014). Materialism: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Journal of Marketing Management, 30(17), 14-42.