PHIL 346 Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Materialism

• School: University of Arizona
• Department: Philosophy Main
• Course: PHIL 346
• Professor: All

Document Summary

Any physical state which might be identified with a corresponding mental state. The trouble is that the identity theorist does not hold that the physical state merely produces the mental state, rather he wishes the two to be identical and thus a fortiori necessarily co-occurrent. If any phenomenon is picked out in exactly the same way that we pick out pain, then that phenomenon is pain. If the identity thesis were correct, the element of contingency would not lie in the relation between the mental and physical states. Have been emphasizing the possibility, or apparent possibility, of a physical state without the corresponding mental state. Materialism must hold that a physical description of the world is a complete description of it, that any mental facts are ontologically dependent" on physical facts in the straightforward sense of following from them by necessity. Functionalism as solution to the mind/body problem.