To help make ends meet and help you become a better philosopher, and thus a better citizen and thinker, every season I’ll post three books from my long-standing recommendations list, and review and discuss their value.

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Today’s featured books are professional outlines of physicalism as an ontological position: the view that only physical things exist. This is the successor to “materialism.” No one who knows what they are talking about uses that word unironically anymore because we now know physical things include stuff other than matter, like events, photons, gravity, and spacetime. So it is now formally known as “physicalism.” Which is a subset of Naturalism generally, the view that nothing supernatural exists. There are non-physicalist naturalisms (e.g. Platonic Naturalism). But all scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports physicalist naturalism, hence it is rightfully the dominant theory (convincing 70% of naturalists in professional philosophy today).

My own book, Sense and Goodness without God, presents a physicalist worldview all the way to moral and aesthetic facts. And there is a very advanced eight-volume presentation of what we would now call a complete physicalist worldview by Mario Bunge, called A Treatise on Basic Philosophy. He did not call his system physicalist because he assumed that word excluded interacting systems as explanatory entities, but if that was ever how the word “physicalist” was used, it is not anymore. He called his worldview “systemic materialism,” but that basically is modern physicalism now. If you want to dive into that I recommend starting with Volume 4, Ontology II: A World of Systems (Springer 1979) and working out from there. But for introductions easier to read, cheaper to buy, and more up-to-date, I highly recommend these, each with its own unique strengths:

Why these?

They are the best one-stop-shops specifically for the defense of physicalism as an ontology. And they have all influenced my own philosophy in various ways. They are all productive (if sometimes challenging) reads. If you are seriously exploring your philosophy of life and want to get to this level of analysis (the building blocks of reality), you will gain a great deal from each one of these books even if you don’t agree with every conclusion in them—perhaps even especially when you don’t, because getting to the point of understanding enough to articulate why you disagree with anything they say is precisely the benefit these books produce.

Kim’s Physicalism

In Jaegwon Kim’s Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton University Press 2007) we get a thorough and competent treatment of the mind-body problem from someone who knows what he is talking about and isn’t trying to sell some crank idea. It interacts faithfully with the field and all his actual and potential critics, so you will come away well versed in the debate. Even though it’s eighteen years old now, there hasn’t been much since that this book doesn’t already effectively address or give you all the tools you need to address. His position is analytically sound, thoroughly science-based, and unificatory (finding a synthesis of views that explains those views in turn), which I have noted is usually a top sign of philosophical progress (see You Know They’re a [Good|Lousy] Philosopher If…).

Kim’s overall thesis (and defeater for all competing views) is “supervienience,” the view that every difference between any two mental states entails a difference in underlying physical states. And that basically means qualia, as Kim reduces the problem to that, since all other mental phenomena are already straightforwardly reducible to physics. Kim’s point is that certain neurosystems simply entail qualia, and therefore qualia are not something that require any further explanation in terms of basic ontology (thus automatically destroying the dumb Christian Argument from Psychophysical Harmony before they even invented it). But it is still possible to realize the same qualia with different physical systems, since the property of the system that demarcates qualia is the system itself (of causal arrangement), and not the components. This is why many different physical systems can realize the same mental state, but differences in mental state cannot be realized without corresponding differences in physical state—including, therefore, their occurring at all, the most fundamental example of “a difference.” So consciousness simply is an inevitable co-occurrence of certain interacting physical systems. No property or substance dualism required (much less magic).

By analogy, you and I could in principle play Legend of Zelda using the entire population of China engaging in an elaborate game of tag, whereby the last person in each causal chain hits a button that lights (or unlights) a pixel on a standard-resolution screen. The “computer” in that case is made up of people running around a country. But because it is following exactly the same pattern of interactions as realized in a Ricoh microchip (which is really just a set of binary instructions) connected to a Zelda ROM cartridge (which is really just another set of binary instructions), the game will play out identically on screen for us. In fact, apart from time lag (to hide which we can say we are in a warp bubble so time moves super slowly for us, so the population of China can run through a ton of movement in a bittysecond to us), we would never know the difference. (And yes. This means the people of China could create an artificial consciousness entirely made out of their meticulously obedient tag game.)

A less silly analogy has already been realized: Zelda plays indistinguishably on modern computer servers—no Nintendo, no ROM. But it could run on a computer made of gears, crystals, bacteria, mirrors. It doesn’t matter. The same system always produces the same effect: Legend of Zelda. But there is no way to get the screen to just “play” Legend of Zelda, as if by magic. There is no Platonic Form of “Legend of Zelda” that can cause the game to play as if from nowhere. There is no strange second substance that the game is made of. It’s all just a physical machine mechanically following instructions. There simply always has to be a specifically arranged kind of physical system behind it, producing it (selecting which pixels to light up and when). But if you want anything in Zelda to happen differently, you need to make a corresponding change to that underlying physical system.

That is supervenience. And it requires no extra anything to explain the game behaving the way it does. It’s all just physical machinery, causally interacting in a particular sequence. The machinery can be anything. But the causal interaction has to be the same, if you want to play the same exact game. Kim’s point is that: this is what the brain is to consciousness. Moreover, he argues, that is the only thing it even could be. And I agree (see The Mind Is a Process Not an Object: On Not Understanding Mind-Brain Physicalism and Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination). And this doesn’t just solve a philosophical problem (how do naturalists explain consciousness). It provides an argument for physicalism itself: since this is the only way consciousness could exist on physicalism, but not the way it would exist otherwise, all the corresponding observations actually are evidence for physicalism, and thus against God. The priors then simply clinch the deal.

Melnyk’s Manifesto

Andrew Melnyk’s A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism (Cambridge University Press 2007) came out the same year, and goes beyond Kim to fully work out physicalism across the board, and not just in respect to consciousness. Whereas Kim simply takes that for granted, and zeroes in on the “last remaining” debate over how that can explain consciousness, Melnyk builds out the entire project, much as I and Bunge did. As such, Melnyk’s Manifesto works like a precursor to Kim’s Physicalism. And though Melnyk eschews the term “supervenience” because he takes that to be too soft a claim, his alternative (“realization”) is semantically identical to Kim’s supervenience. They are really talking about the same thing.

In a sense Melnyk is rejecting certain previous supervenience models (like epiphenomenalism), and confusing them with supervenience simpliciter. Really, his “realization reductionism” is just a strong form of supervenience, lacking the baggage of prior supervenience models that people usually (like Melnyk) mistake supervenience “to mean.” But I understand that. Baggage fallacies are a common error in academic philosophy; you’ll find me remarking on that often. It’s why I usually eschew the word “supervenience” myself, relegating it to the “semantic trashpit of meaningless or inconsistently defined words” philosophy has littered itself with. Because people attach too much baggage to that word (see my discussion of supervenience with respect to moral facts, for example, in Are Moral Facts Not Natural Facts?). The key distinction is that Melnyk, like Kim and I, believes the supervenient ontology of consciousness (and social systems and propositions and laws of physics and everything else) is a necessary, not a contingent, relationship. Qualia are a logically necessary event given certain physical events. And thus their ontology reduces without remainder to the physical systems that realize them. Qualia are not epiphenomena. And supervenience is a reduction to physics. Which Melnyk concedes early on (that his realizationism entails some form of supervenience), but his concern is that there are “other kinds” of supervenience he has to dispatch before defending his. And so he does.

Melnyk treats several fundamental questions in philosophy central to defending physicalism, such as (indeed) the semantics of supervenience, but also reductionism, causation, chemical and biological essentialism, the ontology of propositions, and many other subjects. I may not always agree with him in every particular, but generally I think he’s right. And certainly his survey of the debates that need resolving and the questions that need answering is the kind of thing any serious physicalist (or even opponent of physicalism) should be familiar with.

Drescher’s Paradoxes

Gary Drescher’s Good And Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics (MIT Press 2006) is a much-overlooked book that has substantially influenced my worldview. Unlike Kim and Melnyk, Drescher is not focused on the minutiae of physicalism, but on broader issues and paradoxes that it could be deployed to solve. Or as the book’s own description puts it, “Drescher examines a series of provocative paradoxes about consciousness, choice, ethics, quantum mechanics, and other topics, in an effort to reconcile a purely mechanical view of the universe with key aspects of our subjective impressions of our own existence.” As such it is more about applying physicalism to solve philosophical problems than explaining or defending physicalism itself. And yet in that mode it still helps accomplish both. This is a deeper level of analysis. But it can be fruitful for deeper-level thinkers to go there.

Drescher starts with obligatory chapters on why we should assume physicalism is true and how it could explain consciousness, and though you’ll get more thorough treatments from Melnyk and Kim, Drescher’s overview is still a helpful read, particularly as it is approached more from a broad view, and in plainer English. It doesn’t try to argue with naysayers; it just takes the position seriously and lays it out. But the real juice is in what comes next, which you won’t get hardly anywhere else: a survey of the B-theory (or block theory) of time and how it makes sense of our first-person experience; a genuine pitch for the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (which is, most people forget, straightforwardly deterministic); a good breakdown of fatalism in explaining why compatibilism is obviously the only kind of free will anyone really wants; a rare solution to Newcomb’s Problem that produces powerful insights into what moral conscience really is; a refreshing discussion of “deriving an ought from an is”; and, at last, a humble treatment of the meaning of life.

In every case, Drescher’s approach is different from likely any you’ve come across before, and that is its value and appeal. You won’t be stuck in any field-wide ruts of assumption here. You’ll get a different perspective that can adjust or improve your own. And yet those familiar with my own positions on things will also see a lot of parallels—and notably, I wrote Sense and Goodness before this, and thus was moved to see many of the same conclusions reached. When two independent thinkers coming from two different perspectives come to the same conclusions of a lot of things, that tends to indicate they are on to something. Which is why naturalism gains support from Wang Ch’ung and the Confucian naturalists ending up substantively in the same place as Aristotelian and Epicurean naturalists thousands of miles away at exactly the same time, while the utter failure of the Chinese to invent anything like Christianity pretty much refutes that worldview hook, line, and sinker.

I differ from Drescher only in not being as sold on the Many Worlds interpretation of QM but for reasons not relevant to his point. That could well be true, and it would change nothing about my worldview. I just don’t find it epistemically likely, because it fails to account for the other worlds themselves, why they split (and only thus), and why signals cannot pass between them. It’s missing a lot of ontological groundwork. And any attempt to put that groundwork back in makes it convolutedly implausible again. In other words, MW creates more questions than it answers, and anything that does that tends to be a bad explanation of things. But that doesn’t detract from its being a coherent and thus plausible truth, compatible with physicalism, which has no major effect on any other conclusion in philosophy. Because all the same consequences follow from other models already. Cosmological multiverse theories and hypothetically simulating worlds to choose the best in Rawlsian fashion, for example, all do the same work that embracing MW would inspire. So it isn’t necessary to get to any particular conclusion.

…like Drescher’s own transworld risk theory, which he develops in his chapter on Newcomb’s Problem. And I completely agree with Drescher’s brilliant observations about that. Not only is it the case that, “obviously,” you should take only the one box (but that’s apparently not obvious to most philosophers—see my discussion of this, which summarizes Drescher’s), but Drescher connects this revelation to moral philosophy in a profound way: he uses it to demonstrate that moral facts derive from what sort of person you want to be, and what that entails regarding outcomes, including that transworld risk theory (I have run through similar reasoning to Drescher’s in The Objective Value Cascade, and explained a lot of the same points Drescher makes about Game Theory and Social Contract Theory in The Real Basis of a Moral World). And he makes this point with Newcomb’s by making both boxes transparent. You have to read his chapter to understand what I mean. But it’s one of the best uses of an obscure micro-problem to build, nevertheless, a major result that matters to everyone.

Conclusion

Jaegwon Kim’s Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Andrew Melnyk’s A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism, and Gary Drescher’s Good And Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics are all fantastic books, and essential readings for physicalists, yet all for different reasons. Melnyk builds out and defends physicalism, from semantics to biology, laying the groundwork (and all the usual fights over it) for Kim’s in-depth treatment of the “hard problem” of consciousness, on which their positions overlap and reinforce each other. And then Drescher explores some of the most important consequences of all this, and how it all makes sense not only of our lives but even within its own framework. Reading all three books (and then, of course, my own Sense and Goodnes!) will leave you as well armed to understand and defend (and work with and build on) physicalism as anyone. If you then dive into Bunge, you’ll be a guru of physicalism. But Kim, Melnyk, and Drescher are really good starting points and will get you up to speed quickly on a lot of advanced matters in the debate over physicalism and the nature of reality.