No, it isn’t just saying that. That understates the case for both physicalism and illusionism that I outlined.
We have good independent reasons to believe physicalism and against alternatives, and I mentioned this, but didn’t give examples. Here are some:
There’s the good empirical track record of physicalism generally and specifically in giving adequate explanations for the seemingly nonphysical.
There are the questions of where, when, how and why nonphysical properties arise, whether that’s from or with a collection of particles in a system, over a human’s development from conception, or in our evolutionary history, that nonphysicalist theories struggle to give sensible answers to. If the nonphysical is fundamental and there at all levels (panpsychism), then we have the combination problem: how does the nonphysical combine to make minds like ours?
There’s the expansion of the physical to include what’s empirically reliable and testable to very high precision and for which we have precise fundamental accounts, including interactions with other fundamental physical properties (although not necessarily all such interactions, e.g. we don’t yet have a good theory of quantum gravity). For example, gravity, quantum superposition and quantum entanglement might have seemed unphysical before, but they’ve become part of our physical ontology because of their reliability and our very good (but incomplete) understanding of them and their relationships with other things. Of course, maybe the seemingly nonphysical properties of minds will eventually come to gain the same status, but it’s nowhere close to that now. We shouldn’t be hasty to assume the existence of things that don’t meet this bar, because the evidence for them is far weaker.
The illusionist also argues (or would want to, but currently lacks the details to make it very convincing) that there’s a specific adequate (physicalist) explanation for the appearance of X that doesn’t require the existence of X. If the appearance of X doesn’t depend on its existence, then the appearance of X isn’t reliable evidence for its existence. Without any other independent argument for the existence of X (as seems to be the case for phenomenality and classic qualia), then it becomes like any other verified illusion, and our reasons to believe in X become very weak.
The argument is basically saying that if X can’t be explained by physicalism, then X is an illusion. That’s treating physicalism as unfalsifable.
No, it isn’t just saying that. That understates the case for both physicalism and illusionism that I outlined.
We have good independent reasons to believe physicalism and against alternatives, and I mentioned this, but didn’t give examples. Here are some:
There’s the good empirical track record of physicalism generally and specifically in giving adequate explanations for the seemingly nonphysical.
There are the questions of where, when, how and why nonphysical properties arise, whether that’s from or with a collection of particles in a system, over a human’s development from conception, or in our evolutionary history, that nonphysicalist theories struggle to give sensible answers to. If the nonphysical is fundamental and there at all levels (panpsychism), then we have the combination problem: how does the nonphysical combine to make minds like ours?
There’s the expansion of the physical to include what’s empirically reliable and testable to very high precision and for which we have precise fundamental accounts, including interactions with other fundamental physical properties (although not necessarily all such interactions, e.g. we don’t yet have a good theory of quantum gravity). For example, gravity, quantum superposition and quantum entanglement might have seemed unphysical before, but they’ve become part of our physical ontology because of their reliability and our very good (but incomplete) understanding of them and their relationships with other things. Of course, maybe the seemingly nonphysical properties of minds will eventually come to gain the same status, but it’s nowhere close to that now. We shouldn’t be hasty to assume the existence of things that don’t meet this bar, because the evidence for them is far weaker.
The illusionist also argues (or would want to, but currently lacks the details to make it very convincing) that there’s a specific adequate (physicalist) explanation for the appearance of X that doesn’t require the existence of X. If the appearance of X doesn’t depend on its existence, then the appearance of X isn’t reliable evidence for its existence. Without any other independent argument for the existence of X (as seems to be the case for phenomenality and classic qualia), then it becomes like any other verified illusion, and our reasons to believe in X become very weak.