Ontological physicalism

Metaphysical physicalism could fail even if ontological physicalism is true. The phenomenal commonalities between different pain-feeling creatures could fail to have a physical ground even without any immaterial souls. Metaphysical physicalism could be true even if ontological physicalism is false if, for example, our material minds have an immaterial adjunct that is part of a communication network with angels rather than part of the ground of our mental properties. 

The story I have to tell about the views of Chalmers (1996) and Jackson (1994, 1998a) is much like that for Lewis — the physicalism that they are mainly concerned with (and that they are — were, in Jackson s case — mainly concerned to oppose) is ontological physicalism. 

I can explain vividly the difference between metaphysical physicalism and ontological physicalism by reference to a fictional character. Commander Data (Block, 2002, 2007b). The TV series Star Trek The Next Generation 16 February 1989) includes an episode ( The Measure of a Man ) in which there is a trial to decide whether a human-like android. Commander Data, may legally be turned off and taken apart by someone who does not know whether he can put the parts together again. (The... 

My defense of the importance ofwhat I am calling the metaphysical basis of mind is not meant to downgrade the importance of what I am calling the ontological basis of mind both are important. My point, however, is that even if ontological physicalism is true, if metaphysical physicalism is false, there is an important respect in which the reductive physicalist program has failed. 

Curry, Walter Clyde. Milton s ontology, cosmology and physics. Lexington (KY) Univ Kentucky P, 1966. 

Alex Rosenberg That s a critical question because there are at least some defenders of emergentism and anti-reductionism who have distinguished sharply between causation as an ontological phenomena and explanation as epistemological and say that though physicalism is true, that is, we are nothing but matter and motion, nevertheless, the best explanations of our behaviour will not be physical. Bob ... 

Responses to this further question appear to fall into two camps. One prominent metaphysician believes that the question needs to be approached independently of any theories of chemistry and of physics. Robin Le Poidevin has published an extensive article in which he argues in favor of the ontological reduction of chemistry to physics. He does this through what he has termed a combinatorial approach. 

Although Le Poidevin is trying to establish the ontological dependence of the chemical upon the physical, he is attempting to do this without appeal to... 

Models are broadly distinguished on the one hand into material or physical or concrete, and on the other hand into abstract or conceptual or symbolic. Symbolic models include mathematical formulas and equations. Gilbert et al. (42) classified models according to their ontological status as follows mental, expressed, consensus, scientific, historical, and hybrid. Consensus, scientific, and historical models specifically developed for education are distinguished into teaching, curricular, and models of pedagogy. 

The uncertainty relations have played a central role since the field of quantum mechanics has been created. Prior to the existence of this theory, experimentalist knew, from their work, that every concrete measurement would necessarily carry an associated error. Yet, it was generally believed that this error was of no fundamental nature, and that one could, in principle, approach the true value by filtering out from a huge amount of measurements. Errors were part of the experimental process. With the advent of quantum physics, the error of measurements assumes a new, ontological status, rooted in the very heart of the theory. The theory itself would be built on this unavoidable error process. 

Dybkaer, R. (2004), An ontology on property for physical, chemical, and biological systems. APMIS, 112 Blackwell Munksgaard 2004 (University of Copenhagen). 

Finally, there are computable properties tliat do not correspond to physical observables. One may legitimately ask about tlie utility of such ontologically indefensible constructs However, one should note that unmeasurable properties long predate computational chemistry - some examples include bond order, aromaticity, reaction concertedness, and isoelec-tronic, -steric, and -lobal behavior. These properties involve conceptual models that have proven sufficiently useful in furthering chemical understanding that they have overcome objections to their not being uniquely defined. 

In this paper we discuss a number of issues which manifest the theoretical particularity of quantum chemistry and which are usually not discussed in an explicit manner either in the historical or in the philosophical studies related to quantum chemistry. We shall focus on five issues the re-thinking of the problem of reductionism, the discourse of quantum chemistry as a confluence of the traditions of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, the role of textbooks in consolidating this discourse, the ontological status of resonance, and the more general problem of the status of the chemical bond. Finally, we shall briefly discuss the impact of large scale computing. 

To show that internal realism is indeed compatible with non-reductive physicalism, we have to consider the central theses of internal realism. Let us begin with (IR1), which asserts that the structure of the world is ontologically dependent... 

One might also worry about the ontological nature of the dependence. To recapitulate, x is ontologically dependent on y, if it depends on it for its existence, i. e. it could not exist in the absence of y. So (IR1) holds that the structure of the world could not exist without the mind. But physics does not tell us anything like that. Indeed, what physics describes is a completely mindless world, in the sense that the theories of basic physics do not imply that there must be certain physical structures which can be identified with minds. In fact, the best theories we have suggest that in the history of the universe there was a period in which no physical structures existed which could support minds. The universe was just too hot for a while, so there were no stable and sufficiently well-organized structures which could have mentality. Of course, if you describe the complete physical story of the universe, you have, in a way, also described minds, since all facts about mentality supervene on physical facts. But this does not change the fact that in physics there is no special provision for minds. 

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