Consciousness and Fundamental Reality

A core philosophical project is the attempt to uncover the fundamental nature of reality, the limited set of facts upon which all other facts depend. Perhaps the most popular theory of fundamental reality in contemporary analytic philosophy is physicalism: the view that the world is fundamentally physical in nature. The first half of this book argues that physicalist views cannot account for the evident reality of conscious experience and hence that physicalism cannot be true. However, the book also tries to show that familiar arguments to this conclusion—Frank Jackson’s form of the knowledge argument and David Chalmers’ two-dimensional conceivability argument—are not wholly adequate. The second half of the…