Against Materialism
The Waning of Materialism March 25, 2010 Laurence BonJour
There are no compelling arguments for materialism in the philosophy of mind, and powerful, seemingly unanswerable objections against it. Arguments for materialism that appeal to causal closure or naturalism rest on undefended assumptions. The central objection is that materialist views fail to explain the experienced character of conscious states, illustrated by Frank Jackson's example of Mary, the color-experience-deprived neurophysiologist, and by the problem of conscious intentional content. None of the available responses to the Mary example succeed, and a parallel argument applies to conscious intentional content. Materialist views are false, but no positive account of conscious content is presently available.