The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation - Chapter 4: The Incoherence of Materialism
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For non-materialists it can seem obvious that minds cannot be reduced to matter, equated with brain activity or denied any existence at all. For materialists, clearly, it is not. It is not that they cannot see the problem at all – anybody who is acquainted with this area of philosophy can certainly see a problem. As materialists see it, the problem is that our scientific understanding of consciousness is nowhere near good enough. However, most materialists also believe that the cumulative weight of evidence delivered by the whole of science, rationalism and the last four centuries of human progress – the undeniable and thoroughly deserved dominance of that paradigm – is ample justification for believing that this problem must have a materialistic solution. If it seems impossible then we must be thinking about it wrong, but this does not warrant taking seriously the idea that materialism should be rejected. Materialists believe theirs is the position most closely aligned with science and reason, for it is an expression of allegiance to the worldview which has been associated with those things since the scientific revolution (scientific materialism). It therefore seems thoroughly unreasonable to conclude that the dominant paradigm is itself unscientific or irrational.
For paradigm shifts to actually happen, rather than just threaten to, at least two things are required. The first is a clear idea of what the old paradigm is and what is wrong with it, and the second is an alternative capable of attracting a consensus and sustaining the shift – a new paradigm waiting to take over. In this specific case the first condition has been satisfied. The old paradigm is metaphysical materialism, and its most prominent defenders include the late Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Paul and Patricia Churchland. There is a growing recognition that materialism is conceptually incoherent: that it does not make senseand cannot be fixed. Many philosophers have explained this incoherence in various different ways, but all these accounts reduce to a single underlying problem. The second condition has not been satisfied – even though the number of people who understand why materialism should be rejected continues to grow, no consensus has emerged in favour of an alternative.
What materialism leaves out
Because arguments against materialism tend to boil down to the same thing, it is not necessary to cover all of them in great detail. I will be focusing primarily on the work of Thomas Nagel, but first I will take a brief look at how some other people have approached this subject, starting with Australian Philosopher Frank Jackson’s“ knowledge argument” (or “Mary’s room” thought experiment).
Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who knows everything there is to know about the physical processes involved in human colour vision. She understands all the physical facts, including the wavelengths of light, the structure of the eye, and the neural pathways in the brain that process colour. However, Mary has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room, where she has never seen any colour. She learns about the world only through black-and-white media. One day Mary leaves her monochrome room and sees a red rose for the first time. Does Mary learn something new when she experiences the colour red for the first time? Before leaving the room Mary had complete knowledge of all physical facts about colour and human colour vision. Upon seeing red for the first timeMary gains a new understanding – what it feels like to see red – the “qualia” of red. Therefore not all knowledge about human experience can be captured by physical facts, which implies that there are non-physical aspects of consciousness – specifically, subjective experiences or qualia – that cannot be fully explained by physicalism.
This thought experiment challenges physicalism by arguing that consciousness is not reducible to physical facts; the existence of qualia implies a more comprehensive reality than physicalism allows. It has sparked extensive debates in philosophy of mind, with critics arguing that it might conflate knowing about a phenomenon with experiencing it, or that Mary doesn’t actually gain new propositional knowledge but rather a new ability (e.g. the ability to recognise or imagine red). Nonetheless, it remains a powerful challenge to the idea that physical facts are sufficient to explain consciousness. American philosopher Joseph Levine (1905-1987) made the same point in terms of what he called the “explanatory gap” – a significant gap between physical processes and the subjective experience of consciousness, which materialist explanations will never be able to bridge.
British physicist Sir Roger Penrose has argued that consciousness cannot be explained by conventional physical theories. He suggests that quantum mechanics might play a crucial role in understanding consciousness, a view he developed in collaboration with Stuart Hameroff. Penrose’s own metaphysical position is not entirely clear, although he is certainly a naturalist. He says he’s a materialist who doesn’t like the word “materialism” because he doesn’t know what material is. Penrose recognises that something is seriously wrong with the old paradigm, but appears to be unsure of exactly what. He is willing to consider unconventional theories, but is also committed to some elements of the old paradigm (he’s confident that the mystical can’t be real, for example). Footnote: For more on this see the 2020 interview between Lex Fridman and Roger Penrose, entitled 'Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe'.
British philosopher Colin McGinn has argued that materialist approaches may be fundamentally unable to explain the nature of subjective experience, and believes that human cognitive limitations will prevent us from ever fully understanding consciousness. McGinn calls this “mysterianism”.
Australian philosopher David Chalmers is one of the best known opponents of materialism, and frames the debate in terms of what he calls the “Hard Problem”. He contrasts this with the so-called “easy problems” of consciousness. The easy problems involve the challenging work of understanding how brain processes correlate with mental states, and they are considered “easy” only because they are, in principle, solvable. The hard problem is more fundamental: how can consciousness exist at all if materialism is true? Here, “hard” suggests a problem that may be insurmountable, while “easy” means merely difficult.
Chalmers’ argument involves the conceivability of his now famous “philosophical zombies.” A p-zombie is something that looks and behaves exactly like a normal human at all times, but which isn’t conscious. Chalmers argues the mere fact that we can conceive of such a thing demonstrates that consciousness cannot be brain activity. It must be something over and above it. His conclusion is that physicalism cannot be true.
I often hear it claimed that the hard problem of consciousness is not specific to materialism/physicalism – that it is a general problem. This claim is made almost exclusively by social media materialists/physicalists, and they follow it up with something like “Since all of the ontological positions struggle to make sense of consciousness, there’s no reason to abandon materialism/physicalism.” In fact, the hard problem is very specific to materialism/physicalism. Dualists and idealists consider consciousness to be a primary constituent of reality, and neutral monism is a conceptual structure deliberately constructed so as not to leave it out, so none of those positions have to deal with the hard problem of consciousness. Just as materialists don’t feel any need to explain the existence of matter, idealists, dualists and neutral monists aren’t required to explain the existence of mind. All explanations have to start (or end) somewhere.
Though I agree with Chalmers’ conclusion, I have an objection to his argument. I can’t conceive of a p-zombie because by definition they behave like ordinary humans at all times, which means that if you asked one whether it is conscious it would reply “Of course I am! Why are you even asking me that?” I can’t imagine a zombie that believes it is conscious. It might be convincingly human in many ways, but it would not be capable of understanding consciousness or anything that depends upon it, or at least not like a conscious being understands those things. I think it would actually say something like “Consciousness? I have never been able to understand what that word is supposed to mean”, which means it wouldn’t be a p-zombie, because that is not how humans normally talk.
Similar reasoning lies behind the near-universal rejection of the most extreme version of materialism: eliminativism. Eliminative materialists (such as the Churchlands) evade the hard problem by denying that subjective vocabulary like “consciousness” refers to anything that actually exists. Eliminativists reject the possibility of a private ostensive definition of consciousness: “Consciousness? That kind of talk is folk psychology!” A p-zombie would be a naturally perfect eliminative materialist. Unlike the real ones, it would have no trouble at all in actually abstaining from the use of unscientific subjective vocabulary.
These arguments all revolve around the same basic problem – that the materialistic model of reality necessarily leaves something out. And the reason why this matters is that the thing it leaves out could scarcely be more important to us, because it is what it is like to be a human.
The view from somewhere
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher who has worked mostly in the fields of political philosophy and ethics, and philosophy of mind. He is a rare example of a naturalist who is not a materialist, and there is no ambiguity about either of these things: he strongly rejects materialism and is unwaveringly committed to naturalism in general and atheism in particular.
Nagel’s classic 1986 book The View from Nowhere is a philosophical exploration of the tension between subjective experience and objective understanding. He examines how humans attempt to reconcile the personal, subjective perspective of their inner lives (“the view from somewhere”) with the impersonal, detached stance of objective reasoning (“the view from nowhere”). While objectivity is essential for science, rationality and morality, it cannot fully capture the richness of subjective experience, such as emotions and values. Nagel argues that a purely objective worldview neglects the significance of individual, lived experiences. Consciousness resists full explanation through objective frameworks like physicalism because it necessarily involves subjective qualities (what it’s like to be a conscious being). He examines morality from subjective and objective perspectives, highlighting how ethical principles aim to balance personal interests with universal standards of fairness. He advocates for ethical objectivity but acknowledges the difficulty of fully detaching from subjective bias.The tension between subjectivity and objectivity extends to questions of free will and personal identity. He explores how we view ourselves both as agents acting in the world (subjectively) and as parts of a causal, objective system (objectively), and frames this tension as an inherent part of the human condition. We aspire to transcend our limited perspective but are always anchored to it in some way. He suggests that embracing this duality – without fully resolving it – can lead to a richer understanding of ourselves and the world.
Nagel has not expressed a firm conclusion on the subject of free will, though he thinks it is one of the most important philosophical questions. InThe View from Nowhere (p112) he writes that he changes his mind every time he thinks about it, but he is sympathetic to the idea that we might need to reconsider our understanding of causality when it comes to human agency. Some philosophers advocate for agent-causal theories, which posit that agents themselves can be the originators of their actions in a way that is not fully determined by prior events. Nagel acknowledges the appeal of this idea, but also the difficulties in making it coherent within a naturalistic worldview.
What is it like to be a bat?
The whole of the next chapter examines Nagel’s later work, but as a preliminary I will outline the argument in his seminal article: What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974). It goes like this:
1: Consciousness exists – and not just human consciousness but completely unimaginable versions of it, such as bat consciousness. Bat consciousness is essentially “alien” to us, and if there really are any aliens out there, perhaps their consciousness could be even more alien than that of the bat.
2: It is impossible to imagine how humans could reduce all of the facts about consciousness to purely physical descriptions. There are facts that are completely impossible to state in any human language, even though we have no problem understanding why they can and must exist. These are facts about the subjective point of view. Only a Martian could understand facts about what it is like to be a Martian.
3: We need to think about objectivity and subjectivity as directions the understanding can travel. We can understand things like lightning or rainbows from a purely physical point of view – the objective facts that even an alien scientist could understand. Or we can understand them from our own subjective point of view, but not that of a bat or a Martian. But what we absolutely cannot do istravel in both directions at the same time – we cannot reach an understanding of something as essentially subjective as what it is like to be a bat by reducing it to something objective. What would be left of what it is like to be a bat if one removes the viewpoint of the bat? We might as well try to find the top of a mountain by burrowing into the ground.
“[I]f experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes that were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes that were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?”
If we are trying to understand lightning, rainbows or any other obviously physical phenomena, then the scientific method of doing so is to systematically remove the subjective aspects in order to reveal the underlying objective, physical facts. However, in this case the thing we are trying to understand is the subjective aspect itself, so the idea of moving from appearance to reality makes no sense.
“In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction; for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced....The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint is omitted from what is to be reduced.”
Nagel concludes that psycho-physical reduction is therefore impossible, so we must rule out the reductive form of materialism. But there are other forms – identity theory claims something different. Instead of trying to reduce consciousness to brain activity, identity theory claims that consciousness is brain activity. It then runs into major problems trying to explain what the word “is” is supposed to mean in such a statement. What does it mean to say “consciousness is brain activity”? The identity theorist might reply “What could be clearer than the word 'is'? What exactly is the problem?”
“But I believe it is precisely this apparent clarity of the word 'is' that is deceptive. Usually, when we are told that X is r we know how it is supposed to be true, but that depends on a conceptual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by the 'is' alone. We know how both 'X' and 'r' refer, and the kinds of things to which they refer, and we have a rough idea how the two referential paths might converge on a single thing, be it an object, a person, a process, an event, or whatever. But when the two terms of the identification are very disparate it may not be so clear how it could be true. We may not have even a rough idea of how the two referential paths could converge, or what kind of things they might converge on, and a theoretical framework may have to be supplied to enable us to understand this. Without the framework, an air of mysticism surrounds the identification.”
People without the theoretical background can’t understand how matter can “be” energy, but they are justified in believing that people who do have the theoretical background do understand it. This is not the case with the identity theory of consciousness – in this case the people who say “consciousness is brain activity” do not have the faintest idea how the statement could possibly be true. If psycho-physical reductionism is impossible and identity theory depends on a currently incomprehensible usage of the word “is”, then “...[a]t the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true.”
The article ends with a reminder of where it began: our confusion about the relationship between subjective and objective.
“....it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it.”
Materialism vs physicalism
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? describes a logical-conceptual problem that emerges from the essential nature of the attempt to explain consciousness in terms of the material world, although Nagel uses the term “physicalism” rather than “materialism”. Many people use them interchangeably, but their origins and meanings are not the same.
“Materialism” unambiguously refers to a worldview associated with classical Newtonian physics, and arguably also to Einstein’s theories of relativity. “Physicalism” refers to whatever our best physical theories currently are, and at the present time that means quantum theory. “Physicalism”, in a general sense, should therefore currently refer to whatever quantum theory tells us about what reality is made of, and we have already established that this could be any of several very different things. At least according to one of the available metaphysical interpretations (von Neumann/Stapp), a complete description of what quantum mechanics is telling us about includes “the consciousness of the observer” (von Neumann) or “the Participating Observer” (Stapp). Does this mean that such things have a place in physicalism? Most physicalists would say no. Physicalism, therefore, either suffers from the same conceptual problems as materialism, or it refers to something that the majority of physicalists don’t believe in. British philosopher Galen Strawson takes this reasoning to its natural conclusion: that physicalism entails panpsychism. Footnote: 'Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism', Galen Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies, January 2009, 13 (10-11). As things stand, this term functions as an obstacle to a proper understanding of the conceptual problem we are dealing with, because it provides a hiding place for precisely the logical problem that needs to be fully exposed. “I’m not a materialist”, the physicalist can say. “That’s old Newtonian stuff. Physicalism is a much more modern thing.” Unfortunately, it is not clear what this more modern thing actually is.
Why “emergentism” can’t be materialism
There is a metaphysical claim that is sometimes mistaken for materialism which Nagel doesn’t address in What Is It Like to Be a Bat? This is the claim that consciousness “emerges” from material entities.
Emergentism suggests that consciousness arises from complex systems, such as the brain, but is not reducible to the properties of the system’s individual components. This view is incompatible with materialism for a simple reason: if consciousness emerges from brain activity then something new and distinct has become part of reality. If one argues that whatever emerges is still “material” then we end up with two very different types of materiality. This results in epiphenomenalism – a dualistic view where consciousness “emerges” from brain activity but has no causal influence on it. Epiphenomenalism suffers from two serious problems. Firstly it renders consciousness an extension of the material world which is both inexplicable and meaningless, and secondly it makes it theoretically impossible that the brain could know about consciousness. And if you try to fix these problems by making consciousness causally efficacious then you’ve got full-blown interactive dualism, even though consciousness is claimed to originally have emerged from matter. Something is very wrong here too.
Necessity and sufficiency
There is one particular objection to the conclusion that materialism is false which I encounter so frequently that it is worth mentioning here. This objection is not a serious philosophical objection – it is not made by professional philosophers – but it is ubiquitous among people who discuss these things on social media. The objection is that we have a vast amount of relevant scientific evidence: we know a great deal about the effects on consciousness of a wide variety of mind-altering drugs and different ways that brains can be damaged. This is scientific evidence; why isn’t it relevant? Why isn’t this scientific justification for the belief that minds are nothing but brain processes?
The answer is that this evidence only establishes that brains are (or appear to be) necessary for consciousness. It does not follow that they are sufficient. The impossibility of psycho-physical reduction suggests that something else is also necessary. An analogy makes this easier to understand. It involves an old-fashioned reel of film and the movie that is projected when the film is played. The correlation between the film and the movie resembles that between brain and mind: if you damage the film, then corresponding damage appears when you play the movie. However, it does not follow that the movie can be reduced to the film, or that the movie is the film. Neither does it follow that the movie “emerges” from the film, although perhaps that is closer to the truth than the other two proposals. The proper description of the situation is that the film is necessary for the movie (without the film there can be no movie) but it is not sufficient (something else is needed, in this case a projector).
This kind of scientific knowledge does not provide a defence for materialism – it is relevant to the easy problems, but the hard problem remains untouched. It brings us no closer to an explanation of the missing internal viewpoint. If we can account for that internal viewpoint then we can start to imagine how the contents of consciousness might be derived from the brain, or maybe from the brain and other parts of the physical world to which it is connected. But this missing thing cannot “be” anything material. The subjective viewpoint is missing from the materialistic conception of reality and there’s no way to introduce it without the resulting system ceasing to be a coherent version of materialism.
The mind-trap: how assumptions shape the debate on consciousness
In the decades since Nagel’s famous article was published, a vast amount of literature has been produced regarding the mind-body problem and the status of materialism and physicalism. This might be taken as all the proof anyone needs that the situation is in fact extremely complex, and that you need to have a philosophy PhD to stand any chance of understanding it. An alternative explanation is that there are a lot of materialists, including plenty of influential people, and when they approach this debate they do so having already concluded that materialism must be true. I am intimately familiar with this way of thinking: I have been there, done it and bought the T-shirt (actually, as I explain in Chapter Eight, the T-shirt was free).
I approached the mind-body problem with my conclusion already decided in favour of materialism. I would not have framed it in those terms, but that is what was actually happening, and it is important to understand why. I felt my justification for believing materialism to be true was overwhelming. That consciousness is brain activity seemed to me the only reasonable option available. The only alternative I was aware of was to believe in souls, or that consciousness was something that had somehow been “hanging around” for over 12 billion years, waiting for the first conscious organisms to evolve. Having conclusively rejected this sort of nonsense when I was ten, there was no way I was going to let some philosophical argument suck me back towards that particular plughole.
For me, it wasn’t just the lack of a credible alternative that made materialism such a no-brainer. Part of the reason was that so many other people – including pretty much everybody I respected – believed the same thing (or so I assumed). Materialists are well aware of the perils of this sort of groupthink, because they see it all the time in their ideological opponents – believers in religion and other forms of woo: “How could all these people be wrong, especially about something so important?” Materialists assume that their own belief system is immune to this particular pitfall, precisely because it is directly opposed to woo. People don’t turn to scientific materialism because it offers any comforting God to look after them, or because it makes promises about an afterlife. They do it because they believe in the power of reason and in backing claims up with empirical evidence. Where is the evidence for souls, or some non-material consciousness? In fact, what does “non-material” even mean? On top of all that, sensible, intelligent, educated, enlightened people everywhere believe that materialism is true. If there really was some simple conceptual-logical problem with it, then we should reasonably expect that this particular group of people, committed as they are to cold, hard reason, would have spotted it aeons ago. Except, of course, any materialist who discovers a serious problem at the conceptual heart of materialism will swiftly cease to be a materialist, thus eliminating themselves from the group of people who materialists think qualify as sensible, intelligent, educated and enlightened. Ex-materialists are treated with suspicion: they may have recently become weak-minded for some reason, or they may be lying about having ever been materialists in the first place.
Materialism is a mind-trap. The problem, as alluded to in the previous chapter, lurks in the exact meaning of the word “material” itself. Materialists, and also many of their opponents, rarely even question what that word means, because it seems so obvious. Everybody knows what “the material world” means. In fact it is not so simple. The concept of a material world comes to us via consciousness – the only material world we have any direct knowledge of is the one we directly experience – the one that exists within consciousness. Materialism is the claim that only the material world exists, but in this case the concept of material is subtly but decisively different. The material world of materialism isn’t the one that exists within consciousness, and it isn’t a pre-philosophical and non-metaphysical concept of a material world either. It is specifically the material world that is presumed to exist beyond the veil of perception. No materialist believes that the Big Bang happened in any mind – human or divine. They believe it happened in a self-existing material realm that spent over 12 billion years unconsciously obeying the laws of physics before there was any such thing as a mind (assuming that conscious organisms didn’t evolve somewhere else first).
Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena
There is some relevant terminology that can be traced back to ancient Greece but is now associated with Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787) Kant divided reality into phenomena (things as they appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves, independent of appearances). He claimed that although we can infer the existence of a noumenal world, we can’t know anything about it – indeed we can’t even imagine it, because our cognitive equipment limits our capacity for understanding experience to spatio-temporality. He argued that space and time are the cognitive frame in which the phenomenal world exists. As a result, according to Kant, science is restricted to an investigation of phenomena, while noumena are forever out of its reach. He was not a scientific realist in the modern sense, although for Kant the phenomenal world was real enough. [Footnote: Kant called materialists “transcendental realists”, because they implicitly believe they can transcend the phenomenal world and have knowledge of a noumenal world that they assume to be very much like it. Kant’s position – that this sort of transcendence is impossible – is contrastingly called “transcendental idealism”. Kant was also an “empirical realist”, by which he meant science (i.e. empirical investigation) does indeed provide knowledge of reality – it’s just knowledge of reality as it appears to us rather than of reality as it is in itself. ]
This terminology can help us to understand why materialism is such a mind-trap. The concept “material world” is pre-philosophical, but we can add some metaphysical concepts to make two new concepts. The material world we directly experience can be called the “phenomenal material world” and the material world that (allegedly) self-existed for 12 billion years before conscious life appeared on Earth can be called the “noumenal material world”. This diverges from Kantian usage, because Kant’s noumena is neither material nor knowable, but the meaning is clear enough. Materialists don’t generally acknowledge this Kant-like distinction, and yet their own word usage suggests they ought to. Consider the rival metaphysical position of idealism. For idealists, the material world is only known to us within consciousness (this is a stage in the reasoning that led them to idealism in the first place). So for idealists the material world is the phenomenal material world. Contrastingly, the material world of materialism can only be the noumenal material world – an objective material world that exists independently of consciousness. Therefore, if materialism is the claim that only the material world exists, then it equates to the claim that only the noumenal material world exists. And if that is what materialism is, then how could it possibly account for the phenomenal world? If things as they are in themselves are all that exists, how do we account for things appearing to us? Who is the us that they appear to?
If we closely examine what the word “materialism” actually means then it implies that consciousness should not exist. This is the reason why eliminative materialists say that it cannot be real. Why else would people who consider themselves hard rationalists make such a wildly counter-intuitive claim if not compelled by reason? Eliminativism is the only form of materialism that is coherent, precisely because it makes no attempt to accommodate consciousness. However, since we have already established that abolishing subjective vocabulary is not acceptable, we must reject eliminative materialism too.
After materialism
From the materialistic point of view, consciousness is an awkward afterthought. Science has provided us with the most comprehensive, coherent, self-consistent and rational conception of reality we’ve ever had. Sure, it is impossible to explain how or why the cosmos exists, but theism offers no alternative worthy of serious consideration so that issue can just be kicked into the long grass. That just leaves the pesky little loose end of consciousness, but no matter how intractable that problem seems, there must be some answer that is consistent with science, and that leads materialists to conclude that materialism must be true...somehow.
The success of science is undeniable, which is why Hilary Putnam based his defence of scientific realism on it, and why I have based my own defence of realism on his. But science, materialism and realism are three different things. It is entirely possible to believe that materialism is incoherent while still basing your worldview on the idea that structural scientific realism is true. All this requires is that there is an objective, mind-external reality, about which we can have knowledge. It does not require that this objective reality is the only thing that exists, so we don’t have to deny consciousness, and neither does it require that this objective reality is material, or local, or exists in space and time. Even though they have been joined at the hip for the last four centuries, science does not need materialism. What changes if you reject materialism is the context in which scientific knowledge is situated, and if materialism is indeed false then a new context – one that actually makes sense – should improve science, rather than in any way degrading it.
What is far less clear, if you reject materialism, is the status of naturalism. Materialism brings with it (at least) three things: two logical problems and certainty that naturalism is true. Later in this book I will suggest that these two logical problems have a single solution – that in both cases something is missing, and that the something in question is the same in both cases. The question of what that something is, and what it does, is closely related to the question of whether naturalism can survive the death of materialism. Thomas Nagel thinks it can, or at least he hopes so, and in the next chapter I will take a detailed look at his thoughts about how that could happen. My own thoughts must wait until Chapter Seven.
We now have the fourth principle of the New Epistemic Deal:
4: Both materialism and physicalism should be rejected.
Materialism cannot account for consciousness. Physicalism either suffers from the same problem, or it implies things that most physicalists reject, in which case it is not much use as a piece of terminology. Both materialism and physicalism restrict our models of reality in such a way that they are never going to be able to satisfactorily account for everything we have justification for believing exists.