Identity theorists, on the other hand, emphasize that the mind is the brain, and that’s all there is to it, says Starr.īut how do you get belief and thought out of a lump of brain? You can have the same thought processes happen in very different physical media an alien with an entirely different biology would still have the capacity for thought. Her current book project, “Making Things Up,” looks at the relations whereby more fundamental things determine or generate less fundamental things, and at what this fundamentality talk ultimately comes to.Įven among physicalists, there are two main schools of thought, says Assistant Professor of Philosophy William Starr.įunctionalists say that the mind is what the brain does, which is a procedural view. “The behavior of the chair is accounted for by the behavior of the tiny bits the existence of the chair depends on the existence of the smaller parts – the more fundamental level of reality,” she explains. For example, if physicalism is characterized as everything physical, what does “physical” mean? It can’t mean tangible, since gravity is a physical force but it can’t be touched rather, says philosophy professor Karen Bennett, it means that “everything is accounted for, or generated by, the kinds of things physicists talk about.” Physicists might not discuss chairs very often, but chairs are fully composed of the kinds of things physics talks about, like atoms and molecules. Even that simple statement, though, raises more questions. Most philosophers today still find the physicalist explanation more compelling: that mental phenomena have a physiological or a neurophysiological basis.

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