thesis

entity, but it doesn’t explain reproduction,” we would have little patience—for that is all that
“reproduction” means. In general, a reductive explanation of a phenomenon is accompanied by
some rough-and-ready analysis of the phenomenon in question, whether implicit or explicit.
Therefore, in considering whether consciousness can be reductively explained by any
particular cognitive or neuroscientific theory, we must constantly return to the question of
what exactly we mean by ‘consciousness’ – the what it is like to be.
Against Materialism
Different meanings are attached to the term materialism and we must clarify which form
of materialism Chalmers’ arguments are aimed at. He has no objection to materialism con-
strued as a monism of substance. Rather, the materialism he attacks is that which claims that
“all the positive facts about the world are… logically supervenient on the physical facts”
(41). Chalmers defines physical properties 6 as (33)
the fundamental properties that are invoked by a completed theory of physics. Perhaps these
will include mass, charge, spatio-temporal position; properties characterising the distribution
of various spatio-temporal fields, the exertion of various forces, and the forms of various
waves; and so on. The precise nature of these properties is not important. If physics changes
radically, the relevant class of properties may be quite different from those I mention, but the
arguments will go through all the same.
In producing an argument for physical properties in general (as opposed only to those of
which we are currently aware), Chalmers is advancing a strong claim. What all such prop-
erties (present and future) have in common is that they are concerned only with structure
and function (1996, 106–7), not with any intrinsic quality which cannot be seen or detected
from the outside.
6 A fact for Chalmers is simply the instantiation of a particular property.
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