Physicalism

• Everything can be explained in terms of matter
• Physicalism is reductionism:

  • The mind reduces to the brain
  • Consciousness is no more than electro-chemical occurrences in the brain
• There is no body-soul relationship because there is no soul
• Functionalism is one type of physicalism that sees the mind in terms of what it does:

  • It is a system that processes information inputted from sense experience and it then generates an appropriate outcome
  • There is no reason why in the future the mind could not be uploaded onto a different 'platform' from the human brain, e.g. a computer
• Physicalism= the hard materialist and reductionist view that the only substance is matter
• Functionalism= a form of physicalism that sees the mind in terms of a physical function