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Natural laws and the closure of physics
... For defenses of each of these three standard forms of dualism by a physicalist, see Lycan (2009). 12 Others who have challenged Closure's empirical credentials or the use to which physicalists put it include Bishop (2006), Cartwright (2010), Chalmers (2010: Ch. 5, fn24, fn26), Dimitrijević (2020), Garcia (2014), Gibb (2015), Koons and Bealer (2010), Lowe (2000), Montero (2003), Ney (2016), Saad (2018), and Tiehen (2015). For a proposal concerning how to run the causal argument with a weaker and more easily defended closure premise than is typically assumed, see Saad (forthcomingb). ...
Dualism holds that experiences somehow arise from physical states, despite being neither identical with nor grounded in such states. This paper motivates a stringent set of constraints on constructing a dualist theory of experience. To meet the constraints, a dualist theory must: (1) construe experiences as causes of physical effects, (2) ensure that experiences do not cause observable violations of the causal closure of the physical domain, (3) avoid overdetermination, (4) specify a set of psychophysical laws that yield experiences as a function of physical states, and (5) ensure that functional duplication preserves phenomenology. After motivating these constraints and explaining why existing dualist theories satisfy only some of them, I construct a dualist theory that satisfies all of them. On the resulting theory—which I call delegatory dualism—experiences uphold causal responsibilities “delegated” to them by physical states.
Physicalism, if it is to be a significant thesis, should differentiate itself from key metaphysical contenders which endorse the existence of platonic entities, emergent properties, Cartesian souls, angels, and God. Phy-sicalism can never be true in worlds where things of these kinds exist. David Papineau, David Spurrett, and Barbara Montero have recently developed and defended two influential conceptions of physicalism. One is derived from a conception of the physical as the non-mentally-and-non-biologically identifiable. The other is derived from a conception of the physical as the non-sui-generis-mental. The paper looks at the resources available to those conceptions, but argues that each is insufficient to yield a conception of physicalism that differentiates it from key anti-physicalist positions. According to these conceptions, if we lived in a world full of things that clearly cannot be physical, we would still live in a physical world. Thus, such conceptions of physicalism are of little theoretical interest.
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