Physicalism And Physicalism

The nature of consciousness has been a subject of interest in philosophy since early times. There have been several ideas that have been proposed including dualism, behaviorism etc. One such approach to addressing consciousness and how the mind works is Physicalism. Physicalism is a way of describing mental states as physical manifestations of the Central Nervous System (Armstrong, 1980). As a result, the approach primarily adopts a more scientific worldview by attributing changes in the mind as a sign of chemical happenings in the brain. To a physicalist, the mind and its components are primarily matter and it is the interactions between them that facilitate the creation of behavior among people (Armstrong, 1980). However several critics have raised issue against this point of view including Thomas Nagel in “What is it like to be a bat?” Nagel argues that since one cannot truly understand the subjective experience of being another conscious thing, it is not possible to physically break down consciousness as a component of matter.

Nagel argues that the idea of breaking down consciousness into physical components establishes only the objective view of experiencing something. He supposes that taking such an approach removes the differences between conscious beings and establishes commonality as the primary goal. However, this view is misconceived since science, from which physicalism adopts most of its tenets, presents various examples that illustrate variation between species. In fact, the very idea of breaking down things has shown us how different we are as beings. For example, no persons except for identical twins in the world share the same piece of genetic information. Although there are several areas in the gene that may be ...

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...nged a lot over the past twenty years due to advances in technology.

Hence, in order to truly address the question of consciousness, we should be able to look at the problem through the mind of a physicalist because it is the only form of thinking that accounts for and keeps up with the development of new science. It allows one to understand consciousness with every new thing that we discover about the brain especially, the more recent advances in neuroscience. The example of the impossibility of imagining what it is to be a bat may be a misconstrued look at physicalism because it does not take into account future progress in the field of study of consciousness. This is not to say that physicalism is indeed the only answer to questions about the mind but it is most definitely one the stronger possibilities when it comes to discovery the secrets of consciousness.