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