Physicalism

Overview

Physicalism is the view that everything that exists is physical, or is wholly determined by the physical: there are no substances, properties, or events beyond those that physics (completed, not current) describes or that depend on them. Applied to the mind, it is the claim that mental states are physical states of the brain or are fully fixed by them. It is the modern successor of materialism, renamed because physics turned out to contain more than matter.

Notes

I am a physicalist about the mind (see Consciousness and Mind-body dualism) and a naturalist about everything else. The two views overlap but are not identical: naturalism denies the supernatural; physicalism makes the stronger claim that the physical is all there is.
The standard arguments against physicalism about the mind are Mary’s Room, Philosophical zombies, and the Hard problem of consciousness. In each case I think the argument establishes a limit on what we can currently imagine, not a limit on what is the case.
Physicalism does not entail that every meaningful description must be given in the language of physics. That love is "chemicals in the brain" is true and uninteresting; see Love for why the physical basis of a thing does not exhaust what can be said about it.

Also see

Linked from

Substrate Independence

Physicalism

Functionalism

Physicalism

Love

It can on occasion cause confusion, since most atheists, or at least many of them, hold to one extent or another a fundamentally physicalist position, and so in some sense love is indeed "mainly chemicals in the brain". But the moment this…

Metaphysics

My metaphysical commitments are few and modest: an external reality exists (Solipsism), it is physical (Physicalism, Philosophical naturalism), minds are what some physical systems do (Consciousness, Mind-body dualism), and events have cau…

Multiple realisability

The thesis cuts against strong reduction but not against physicalism. Every realisation is physical; what it denies is that there is only one.

Qualia

Qualia are the subject matter of the Hard problem of consciousness and the thing Mary’s Room and Philosophical zombies are meant to isolate. If there are qualia over and above the physical facts, physicalism is false.

Brian Cox - The quantum roots of reality -Full Interview

Relevant to Physicalism and Emergence: the classical world emerges from the quantum one without anything extra being added, which is the pattern I expect Consciousness to follow.

Bernardo Kastrup

Bernardo Kastrup (born 1974), Dutch-Brazilian computer engineer and philosopher, the leading contemporary defender of analytic idealism: the view that consciousness is fundamental and that the physical world is how mental processes appear…

Frank Jackson

Frank Jackson (born 1943), Australian philosopher who devised Mary’s Room in 1982 as an argument against Physicalism. He later changed his mind and became a physicalist, which is more than most authors of famous thought experiments manage.

Mary’s Room

Mary’s Room is a thought experiment by philosopher Frank Jackson (1982) to challenge physicalism—the belief that all knowledge is physical knowledge. Mary is a brilliant scientist who knows everything about the science of colour (wavelengt…

Philosophical zombies

Used in arguments (notably by David Chalmers) to challenge physicalism—the idea that all aspects of the mind can be explained by physical processes. If zombies are conceivable, then it’s possible that consciousness is something extra beyon…