Resistance is Futile

Such argument is hardly worthy of serious refutal.

— John Harvey Kellogg

Like the Borg, "physicalist" philosophers are a hard-nosed bunch.

Physicalists hold that there's absolutely nothing that's supernatural: the only real substance is physical, and everything that's real is nothing more than its physical properties—the mind included.

By extension, one day the mind will be explained fully by neuroscience, according to physicalists.

For a century, physicalists have dominated debates about the 2,500-year-old "mind/body problem" in philosophy.

But—despite a century of vaulting advances in neuroscience—the tide of opinion is turning.

More and more philosophers today resemble Hegelians, the philosophers who dominated the mind/body debate in the 19th century. (Hegel believed that "All that is real is rational and all that is rational is real.")

One example is Galen Strawson. He believes everything is mind—that electrons are conscious.

Strawson is a new breed of physicalist, one who holds that, while everything is indeed physical, mind pervades it, a view known as panpsychism.

Strawson arrived at his opinion by realizing four truths:

1. Each of us knows for certain that he, she or they exists—that minds exist.

2. There's only one kind of substance—physical substance. 

3. Therefore, mind must be physical.

4. But there actually is no "substance," according to contemporary physics; there are only "vibratory patterns in fields." Mind must reside therein. It is latent in the energy that composes electrons—every electron, everywhere. Mind is everywhere.

Strawson's argument has merit because, like Hegel's, it's simple, positing neither all-natural nor supernatural substances. Everything is a unified one. 

And there's no longer any cause to debate where body ends and mind originates. Body ends nowhere. Mind originates everywhere. 

Debate over.

If panpsychism sounds whacky, it's not. It's mainstream.

Resistance is futile.