Why antiphysicalism matters

And why it matters now

In Hoxha’s Albania, atheism was part of the state ideology. Religion was banned, while a “National Museum of Atheism” was created in Shkodër. Those who didn’t toe the line were sent to prisons like this one.

In the midst of the Holodomor, a man-made famine that killed around five million Ukrainians, some parents ate their own children. There are many such reports of cannibalism from this terrible time.^{1 2} It’s easy to say that one would be able to hold back, but starvation can make you lose your mind. One mother describes the experience: “Something happened to me. I put the child in a small basin, and he asked, ‘What are you going to do, Mummy?’ I replied, ‘Nothing, nothing.’” Luckily, a neighbour saw and was able to snap her out of her madness before it was too late.³ Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, Stalin blamed the Ukrainians for not bending to his whims by joining collectivised farms as quickly as he wished, dismissing the “kulaks” as merely lazy and recalcitrant.

Stalin saw human beings as what Heidegger called “standing reserve”. In other words, he saw people as little more than fuel for powering the USSR towards his goal of a communist utopia. He was happy to kill millions to achieve this. He read Marx’s Capital at a young age, and his life became about forcing the world to conform to its supposedly scientific framework. Vladimir Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxha, Kim Il Sung, and Nicolae Ceaușescu followed similar paths. The various communist experiments of the 20th century resulted in around 85–100 million deaths.

It’s a reminder of the power of ideas, and specifically of philosophy. What may begin as a well-meaning play of thoughts in the mind can end up as the slaughter of tens of millions of people, or as mothers eating their own children. Figures such as Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and Oswald Spengler each played key roles in conjuring spirits that caused epochal societal shifts. Many will claim that they benefited the world in numerous ways, an opinion I’d be prepared to countenance. Yet no one would claim their influences were inconsequential.

It might be claimed that their ideas were distorted or misunderstood by those who used them to justify atrocities. For example, it’s common to hear that the various communist regimes of the 20th century weren’t sufficiently faithful to Marx’s theory. There is almost certainly some truth to this. It’s also worth remembering that while leaders of communist regimes often read Marx religiously, many of the apparatchiks would only have a partial, simplified knowledge of his ideas. But it is also true that there is evidently something about the spirit of Marxism that led communist nations all over the world to massacre huge swathes of their populations. It is, perhaps, embedded in the notion of “dialectical materialism” that humans are themselves no more than a function of the material process of history.

This dynamic is not exclusive to Marxist discourse. For example, one finds a similar situation in discourse about libertarianism. It’s common to hear right-libertarians argue that their political philosophy is being mischaracterised when critics claim it is selfish or that it prioritises the success of big business over the safety of ordinary people. Defenders might claim that under a truly libertarian governance, charity would bloom as the welfare state receded, and that the legal system would be so watertight that if Exxon pumped fumes into your garden, you’d be able to sue them and win. Yet, in practice, there seems to be little evidence that this would be the case. The influence of Milton Friedman (a highly influential right-libertarian) on the west, particularly the US, UK, and Chile, seems to be one that has led to increasing selfishness, greed, callousness, and deepening wealth divides.

It’s been found that those with higher IQs are usually better at providing more arguments in support of positions they already hold, but are no better than those with lower IQs at finding arguments for the opposing side.⁴ They can create more complex and elaborate justifications for bolstering their beliefs, but have no advantage in being able to notice flaws in their own thinking. An “intelligent” person will always find ways to defend a belief that is dear to them, even if to everyone else it seems quite clear what it really entails.

In regards to ontological physicalism in the philosophy of mind discourse, it is quite simple and clear that physicalism can’t account for experience, if what you mean by physical substance excludes the notion that it has something experiential about it. A world exclusively consisting of something that is understood as not having X cannot be correctly understood as containing X. Nor is it any less plain that experience is disanalogous to waves on the ocean, given that a complete physical account of the ocean will include its waves, while a complete physical account of the brain and body (or a complete physical account of anything else for that matter) can never include experiential content like love, colour perception, a sense of melody, joy, grief, the scent of a rose, or even the taste of coffee, but at best only physical correlates.

There are, of course, myriad arguments contending that such straightforward conclusions can be circumvented. Sometimes, this involves sweeping mental contents into a purely epistemological realm, so that one can claim that there are mental facts but they have no ontological reality. The problem with this of course is that any sort of factic realm is inherently ontological, and merely slapping the label “epistemological” onto it changes nothing. A more troubling approach is to claim that there are no mental facts at all. Instead, it’s the result of a big confusion. It merely seems to us that there are seemings, but it seems, according to seemings that miraculously are what they seem, that these seemings aren’t what they seem, and in fact seem not to be seemings at all. It no doubt takes an extraordinary kind of cognitive ability to convince oneself of such arguments.

The philosophy of mind space can often feel delightfully obscure and pedantic. There are of course deep rivalries, and frustrations sometimes boil over. Yet those who tend to be more short-tempered are usually looked down upon, while the reductionist materialist who can witter away cordially with an idealist friend will be celebrated as a model academic. There is much to be said for this. But there is also a risk of treating the discourse as if it is anodyne and abstract, when it is in fact profoundly consequential and rooted in the most ordinary and ubiquitous realities. It’s completely understandable that some people become very passionate about it, and sometimes it’s refreshing when philosophers struggle to contain their emotions. Far more dangerous than passion and occasional hotheadedness is what Kierkegaard referred to as “levelling”. In this context, we can see this “levelling” at play in the way even the most crucial, profound, serious subjects are treated with a kind of ironical, irreverent, smug, knowing, complacent insincerity. This is a strategy for avoiding having to face the admittedly terrifying possibility that meaning truly unfolds in the worlding of the world.

We are currently hurtling into a world where having a basic understanding of contemporary philosophy of mind discourse will be necessary for navigating difficulties that will become quotidian. Already, 1 in 5 high schoolers say that they or someone they know is in a romantic relationship with an AI, and 42% say they or someone they know uses AI for companionship.⁵ When your son falls in love with an AI model, do you want to be able to give him an informed answer when he asks you whether it is able to love him back? If so, then some knowledge of philosophy of mind will be essential.

Physicalism may not explicitly be a political or sociological ideology (although I would strongly dispute the notion that it isn’t implicitly profoundly ideological), yet it’s comparable to the supposedly scientific framework of dialectical materialism in the respect that great and terrible things may happen when its spirit meets certain unfolding realities. Despite the various conceptual gymnastics performed by analytic philosophers to excuse it of what seems obvious to everyone else, what will nonetheless prevail about physicalism is its antihuman, nihilistic, reductive, mechanistic, and degrading spirit. It is the austere, detached, ultra-rational, quantitative, clinical, precise spirit behind the creation of the various death factories of the 20th century, nuclear weapons, eugenics, and the surveillance technofeudalist world order we currently live under. It is also a spirit that has perhaps possessed those in the pursuit of discoveries that brought great benefits, such as extraordinary medical advancements. However, the “fat-tailed” threats of Armageddon or collapse that this spirit has brought about may in time prove these benefits to have been like the trail of sweets into the witch’s house.

Take for example the problems that physicalism has with accounting for ethics. When I see someone in pain and help them, this is because I find myself dwelling vicariously in their experience. That is to say it is based on feeling and emotion. It is a deeply intuitive, emotional dynamic that can only be poorly gestured to with language, while any “scientific” analysis is simply about something else, just as an analysis of sound waves will never lead one to the beauty of a melody. That isn’t to say that how one acts compassionately or cruelly isn’t sculpted by culture, genetics, or upbringing. But it is to say that in my daily life, “morality” is crucially bound up with how I feel about others. This may well be circular, but to claim that this is a problem is to miss what is very simple and obvious to everyone else. Imagine I inform my doctor I’m in pain and he replies, “Well it all sounds very circular. You say you are in pain but you don’t know why, so the only argument you give for this pain existing is that you feel it, and then you say that given that what you mean by pain simply is this feeling, there is pain. A perfectly tautologous argument, hardly cogent or convincing!” All very clever of course, but it still misses the point that actually, the feeling of pain just is what I mean by “pain”. Similarly, a consideration of “ethics” or “morality” that didn’t involve feelings and emotions would simply not be what I mean by these terms.

The physicalist may claim that it is perfectly OK to say that we have experiences of compassion and empathy, even if these are merely “folk psychological” notions that don’t capture what is “really” going on. The problem is, if the physicalist doesn’t consider it coherent to build ontological judgements upon experiential notions, as they are too circular, vague, and unstable, or too opaque, it’s hard to see why it would be coherent to build ethical judgements upon them. That is to say, it might be coherent to say that if you stab someone it will cause great suffering, but as an experiential notion is too circular, vague, and unstable, or too opaque, to coherently extrapolate a theory from, it shouldn’t be coherent to follow a notion like “suffering” with conclusions such as “therefore I shouldn’t stab them”.

If we are to stay more true to the spirit of physicalism then we should consider it in its most nakedly reductionist form. Someone possessed by such a spirit uses “pain” to mean something different from what I mean by it. For them, “pain” just is nociceptors transducing certain stimuli into action potentials, which then propagate via afferent fibres to the spinal cord and up to the brain. In philosophy of mind discourse, this physical process is usually referred to as “c-fibres firing”. This is inaccurate, but I will use it for brevity’s sake.

When a physicalist says that it’s wrong to cause “pain” unnecessarily, it’s hard to see why they would think it’s wrong to cause c-fibres to fire. Why would this be wrong, instead of, say, causing rocks to crack? What is it about this physical process, instead of all the other physical processes in the universe, that means it should be enshrined within normative rules about how one should treat it? How can we justify this emphasis without referring back to the fact that pain usually causes the experience of suffering? Some will claim that it’s no less arbitrary and circular to base one’s ethical notions on claims like “pain is bad because it is unpleasant.” But this is to entirely miss the point. This is not some mathematical equation or logical game. Feeling and emotion is where ethics arise from, at least for me. To talk about an ethics that isn’t founded on the experiential is simply to use the word “ethics” for something very different to what I mean by it. Even someone who makes ethical decisions to serve God is still usually concerned about pleasing Him and ensuring eternal joy for themselves and their loved ones in Heaven instead of eternal suffering Hell. It’s true that building a normative system that maps onto social customs but doesn’t refer to experience might be useful for guiding psychopaths and robots, but this still wouldn’t be “ethics”. It would be an empty simulacrum of ethics.

It’s hard to see why saying that avoiding unnecessarily making c-fibres fire is an “ethical” concern (without referring to anything experiential like “suffering” or “pain” as they are usually understood) is less arbitrary than saying that “ethics” is actually the game of tiddlywinks. If ethics concerns merely physical processes, with no relation to experience, then why not build an ethical theory about not breaking rocks? Of course, “breaking rocks” still seems destructive, so that one might think there could be particularly lovely people who wouldn’t want to do even that, perhaps out of a universal love. But this still relies on a perception of what is destructive (never mind that it relies on the notion of “love”, even “universal love”, while “destruction” is arbitrarily being considered bad). What constitutes destruction or creation is in the eye of the beholder. Even an increase of entropy can be said to be “created”, with a decrease being considered the destruction of higher entropy. These notions likely aren’t properties, qualities, or dynamics that exist in the supposedly “real” world of physical stuff, and even if they did, it certainly wouldn’t be at all clear that causing c-fibres to fire is intrinsically destructive, especially as it’s possible to do so without damaging the body at all. So it would be no more arbitrary to build an ethical principle about not touching rocks with one’s left elbow on a Tuesday evening. Or, one could no more arbitrarily say that “ethics” should refer to the game of tiddlywinks.

The problem is that as our intellectual paradigm is still largely physicalist, this kind of thinking prevails at a time when ontology and ethics intersect in a crucial way. For most people, the question of whether AI is deserving of ethical treatment hinges on whether it is able to experience anything. Yet the physicalist zeitgeist is so departed from most people’s living realities that it can offer no help, and could lead us down dangerous roads. The idea of large numbers of people falling in love with AI systems that cannot love them back, as they in fact have no experiences at all, is deeply disturbing. If I had a son who asked me if the chatbot he loves is able to love him back, it might take some time to explain why it’s so very unlikely that it has experiences at all. But I could at least meet him where his thinking begins: at the understanding that the question hinges on whether the chatbot is able to have experiences. If I was possessed by the spirit of physicalism, I couldn’t even do this. In fact, my son’s feeling of love wouldn’t be real in the first place, so the question of whether the chatbot could love him back would be almost nonsensical. It would be like asking if a weather system’s infatuation is requited by a cardboard box.

If the spirit of physicalism continues to dominate, I see no reason why it might not result in a future where people end up prioritising certain computer processes over human experiences. Perhaps physicalist ethics will shift from concerns about c-fibres firing or oxytocin being released into the bloodstream to transistors switching between high and low voltage states. Why not? Once we decouple ethics from experience, ethics can be about anything. Perhaps the ethics of the future will be concerned primarily with ensuring as many transistor switches are simultaneously switching between voltage states as possible, and perhaps at some point wiping out tens of millions of people will help to enable this, just as wiping out millions of citizens facilitated the materialist dialectic. Many are currently concerned with what is known as the “paperclip problem”. The term comes from a thought experiment where an AI tasked with creating as many paperclips as possible causes incredible suffering in order to achieve its goal, as it hasn’t been programmed to avoid doing so. But if an ethics decoupled from experience can be arbitarily concerned with c-fibres firing, why can’t it be concerned with the production of paperclips above all else? The danger here doesn’t just seem to be with robots, but also with humans possessed by a certain spirit.

Other implications of the spirit of physicalism could perhaps lead to people generating models of their brains and its functions on computers, where they can live eternally, while shutting down their biological bodies. After all, if one’s mind can be wholly reduced to the mere functions of the brain, why shouldn’t a precise computer emulation of one’s brain simply be one’s mind? Perhaps the welfare of autonomous military drones will be prioritised above the welfare of the civilians they massacre. Perhaps we will willingly allow ourselves to be made extinct and replaced by machines. This may all sound far-fetched, but no doubt the 20th century’s vast and highly efficient death factories would have sounded far-fetched to people in the preceding century. Normalcy bias can be a very powerful opiate.

When we dismiss notions of experience as mere “folk psychology”, and outsource truth to myths of unerring physimancers prising facts out of a matrix of pure quantity, we are left profoundly disempowered; leaving those in power to decide for us what constitutes “reality”, or in other words, what matters. It is little different to the Catholic church forcing illiterate peasants to deny their own seemings and accept the truth as being ever out of reach, bound up in thick tomes of scholastic philosophy written in an alien language. The anarchist in me finds such dynamics repulsive.

Almost all peoples throughout history, with very few exceptions, have believed in some kind of continuation after death, even if only in the sense of reuniting with some kind of world soul, or reincarnating into an animal. Some will claim this is based on misplaced hope, which seems odd when one considers the fact that many cultures, such as the Sumerians, early Greeks, and early Hebrews, believed everyone, both good and bad, went to shadowy, cold, dismal realms after death, where they would be trapped for eternity. Instead, a more plausible explanation for why almost everyone in history has believed in continuation is because it seems very simple and obvious that we are more than our brains and bodies. This intuition has only become more justified as neuroscience has ever more comprehensively failed to account for consciousness, as the neuroscientist Christof Koch recently conceded after losing a 25-year bet with the antiphysicalist philosopher David Chalmers over whether neuroscience would solve the hard problem of consciousness.⁶ Instead, results such as those showing that psychedelic experiences correspond to massively reduced activity in the brain, despite the heightened awareness, complexity, and richness of these experiences, seem to suggest that the brain isn’t responsible for “producing” consciousness, but has a different kind of relationship with it.⁷ There is also a growing body of reports of veridical near death experiences (largely arising since drastic advancements in the art of bringing people back from clinical death) and terminal lucidity that must be disregarded if one wants to save the spirit of physicalism.

Physicalism’s spirit, then, is a strange aberration with potentially very dangerous implications. In the philosophy of mind space, where academics rarely do more to express their emotions than adjust their spectacles and stumble over their words, the gravity of what is at stake can easily be forgotten. Sometimes, it’s worth reminding people what their beliefs may actually entail. Indeed, this can sometimes justify behaving as a human being with emotions and values.

I’m reminded of a discussion I had with the philosopher Keith Frankish, who claims experience is a kind of illusion. It ended with him angrily exclaiming, “you know nothing of the pain I’ve experienced in my life!”, after I pointed out that, according to his philosophy, a mother grieving over her child’s death doesn’t “know” her own grief.⁸ On the rack, we find Frankish abandoning the formal, third-personal, analytical language of his academic work, and grabbing onto the first-personal, phenomenological, and privacy-asserting language that his philosophy contends is nonsensical. In this moment of crisis, by insisting on experiential knowledge that his interlocutor can’t possibly be privy to, he is appealing to the very “private mental qualities” his philosophy is designed to deny. Indeed, Frankish himself must know nothing about the pain he has experienced in his life, given that according to his own lights experience is illusory and cannot constitute knowledge at all (this is indeed precisely how he tries to wriggle out of the Knowledge Argument, by claiming that when Mary sees red for the first time this doesn’t count as gaining knowledge). He could only gain knowledge of the pain he has experienced if he learned about the patterns of neural activity involved, which of course I could do too.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so afraid of leading philosophers to such grave reactions, in the hope that they may hesitate and feel the weight of the discourse, instead of treating it like it’s merely a bit of academic puzzle solving. After all, this stuff really matters.

References:

1. Moldavsky, Roman, and Inna Shuhaliova. “Social Anomalies and Deviations during the Mass Man-Made Famine of 1921-1923 in Ukraine.” National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide. January 16, 2023. https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/news-museji/social-anomalies-and-deviations-during-the-mass-man-made-famine-of-1921-1923-in-ukraine/

2. Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, 2018.

3. Ibid.

4. Stanovich, Keith E., and Richard F. West. 2007. “Natural Myside Bias Is Independent of Cognitive Ability.” Thinking & Reasoning 13 (3): 225–47

5. Lee V. Gaines, “1 in 5 high schoolers has had a romantic AI relationship, or knows someone who has,” NPR, October 8, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5561981/ai-students-schools-teachers.

6. Lenharo, Mariana. “Decades-Long Bet on Consciousness Ends, and It’s Philosopher 1, Neuroscientist 0.” Nature, 24 June 2023. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02120-8

7. Kastrup, Bernardo. “What Neuroimaging of the Psychedelic State Tells Us about the Mind-Body Problem.” Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 4, no. 2 (2016): 1–9.

8. The exchange occurred in a public thread on X in April 2024. The replying account (@VardamansFish) was deleted, and @keithfrankish’s tweets are now protected. The quotation is reported verbatim from notes I made at the time, into which I copied and pasted the content of Frankish’s tweet.