Physicalism - Strawsonian Physicalism

Strawsonian Physicalism

Physicalism and materialism are often supposed to be close cousins. But this needn't be the case. On the contrary, one can be both a physicalist and a panpsychist - or even a monistic idealist. Strawsonian physicalists acknowledge the world is exhaustively described by the equations of physics. There is no "element of reality", as Einstein puts it, that is not captured in the formalism of theoretical physics — the quantum-field theoretic equations and their solutions. However, physics gives us no insight into the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world — what "breathes fire into the equations and makes there a world for us to describe" as arch-materialist Steven Hawking poetically laments. Key terms in theoretical physics like "field" are defined purely mathematically.

So is the intrinsic nature of the physical, the "fire" in the equations, a wholly metaphysical question? Kant claimed famously that we would never understand the noumenal essence of the world, simply phenomena as structured by the mind. Strawson, drawing upon arguments made by Oxford philosopher Michael Lockwood but anticipated by Russell, turns Kant on his head. Actually, there is one part of the natural world that we do know as it is in itself, and not at one remove, so to speak — and its intrinsic nature is disclosed by subjective properties of one's own conscious mind. Thus it transpires that the "fire" in the equations is utterly different from what one's naive materialist intuitions would suppose.