Consciousness and Fundamental Reality [Paperback]

InConsciousness and Fundamental Reality, Philip Goff argues that physicalist views cannot account for the evident reality of conscious experience, and hence that physicalism cannot be true. He argues that there are big problems with the most well-known arguments against physicalism and proposes significant modifications. He then explores and defends a theory of fundamental reality known as 'Russellian monism.' Russell argued that physics, for all its virtues, gives us a radically incomplete picture of the world and tells us only about the extrinsic, mathematical features of material entities, and not how they are in and of themselves. Following Russell, Goff's version of Russellian monism argues that it is this hidden intrinsic nature of matter that explains human and animal consciousness.A core philosophical project is the attempt to uncover the fundamental nature of reality, the limited set of facts upon which all other facts depend. Perhaps the most popular theory of fundamental reality in contemporary analytic philosophy is physicalism, the view that the world is fundamentally physical in nature. The first half of this book argues that physicalist views cannot account for the evident reality of conscious experience, and hence that physicalism cannot be true. Unusually for an opponent of physicalism, Goff argues that there are big problems with the most well-known arguments against physicalismChalmers' zombie conceivability argument and Jackson's knowledge argumentand proposes significant modifications.The second half of the book explores and defends a recently rediscovered theory of fundamental realityor perhaps rather a grouping of such theoriesknown as 'Russellian monism.' Russellian monists draw inspiration from a couple of theses defended by Bertrand Russell inThe Analysis of Matterin 1927. Russell argued that physics, for all its virtues, gives us a radically incomplete picture of the world. It tells us only about the extrinsic, mathlsÁ