Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 57, 2018

Philosophy of Mind

Russellian Physicalism and the Causal Relevance of Consciousness

Conscious experiences are those that have a special feel, or in Thomas Nagel’s words: ‘It is something it is like to have them’. One version of the mind-body problem is to explain how physical-functional states can generate conscious experiences. In this paper, I present a type of theory called ‘Russellian physicalism’ that proposes that we cannot solve the mind-body problem (bridge the explanatory gap between mental and physical states) because natural science cannot tell us about the categorical properties of physical entities which are necessary to know in order to explain qualia. I will argue that in order to avoid epiphenomenalism Russellian physicalism should adopt the Heil-Martin theory of dispositions. This theory claims that every disposition is identical to a categorical property. However, our conception of a property as a disposition does not describe it as it is in itself, that is, as a categorical property. Since we cannot know the dispositions considered as categorical properties, we cannot explain consciousness.