Attacking Physicalism

Paper Summary:

The paper explains that physicalism or materialism holds that everything that exists is physical. The paper relates that the three major versions of physicalism are logical behaviourism, identity theory and functionalism. The paper shows that all three are problematic and are not consistent with common sense. Thus, the paper discusses that while physicalism adequately explains the activities of computers, it does not suffice to explain human beings.

From the Paper:

"Physicalism may be better understood by contrast with Cartesian dualism. Descartes saw reality as divided into two parts - the physical and the mental. While this fits comfortably with most people's intuition about the world, it had some fundamental problems. The most important was: how do we explain the connection between the mental world and the physical world? For example, if my mind is a mental entity, and my body is a physical entity, why does taking anti-depressants make me feel better?"

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