Arguments Against Reductive Physicalism

Reductive physicalism is the belief that “the only objects, properties, and events in the world” are ones of a physical nature (Ravenscroft 2005: 193), so everything in the world can explained by physical processes. Although this belief has become significantly more popular with the advancement of neuroscience. As Papineau highlights “we find it very difficult to absorb this lesson” (Papineau 2010: 5). One argument against this belief is the ‘philosophical zombies argument’ which purports to cause problems for reductive physicalism. In this essay, I will argue against this counterargument.
Reductive physicalism tries to solve the what Chalmers calls, “the hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers 2010). This tries to answer the question as
However, this is metaphysically impossible because mathematical truths are necessarily true, which means that they are true in all possible worlds. Another way of looking at it is saying that it is conceivable that ‘water is not H2O’ (Chalmers 2002) however this is not possible. This is because water is H2O is an analytic statement which means that it is necessarily true and therefore it is true in all possible worlds. These two examples reveal how even when a statement is conceivable it may be metaphysically impossible. For the ‘philosophical zombie’ argument this would mean that you can accept that philosophical zombies are conceivable but this does not mean that they are metaphysically
This means that by following the claim a self-contradiction occurs (Rescher no date). This argument as put forward by Mizrahi, M. and Morrow, D. R. (2014) highlights a problem with this type of logical jump. The argument is as follows: if it is conceivable that (a) is false then it is possible that (a) is false. This means by the axiom “if something is possibly true, then it is necessary that it is possibly true p” (Mizrahi and Morrow 2014) means that it is necessarily possible that (a) is false. (S1) Therefore, if this is true then conceivability doesn’t entail possibility. (S2) “but if…[(a)] is true, then conceivability is conclusive evidence for possibility” (Mizrahi and Morrow 2014). Therefore, by taking the statements, S1 and S2, “conceivability is and is not conclusive evidence for possibility” (Mizrahi and Morrow 2014). This conclusion is a contradiction and it is therefore the case that the philosophical zombie argument is