Alexander Pruss's Blog

Let strong physicalist supervenience (SPS) be the view that necessarily all truths supervene on first-order truth about the spatiotemporal a...

[Revised 11/21/2025 to fix a few issues.] Rasmussen and Bailey prove that under certain assumptions it follows that there are possible tho...

Here’s a valid argument: There is always an absolute fact about whether two conscious states are hosted simultaneously. If the mind is ph...

I’ve been toying with an argument for dualism along these lines: Octopuses are conscious. Technologically advanced aliens are or would be...

The causal exclusion argument requires us to deny that there is systematic overdetermination between mental and physical causes. But it is...

Epiphenomenalists think that there are non-physical qualia that are causally inert: all causes are physical. The main reason epiphenomenalis...

Here is an interesting special case of Ockham’s Razor: If we find that of nomic necessity whenever A occurs, so does B , then it is reaso...

All facts completely reducible to physics are first-order facts. All facts completely explained by first-order facts are themselves comple...

I’ve been thinking how best to define computationalism about the mind, while remaining fairly agnostic about how the brain computes. Here is...

For a while, I’ve been thinking of a teleological/normative account of representation. The basic idea is that: State S represents reality...

Suppose that Mary and Twin Mary live almost exactly duplicate lives in an almost black-and-white environment. The exception to the duplicati...

Here’s a fun variant of the black-and-white Mary thought experiment. Mary has been brought up in a black-and-white environment, but knows al...

In the philosophical literature, the main objection to physicalism about consciousness is the epistemic gap: the alleged fact that full know...

Here is a variant on the knowledge argument: All empirical facts a priori follow from the fundamental facts. The existence of consciousn...

Assuming physicalism, plausibly there are a number of fairly natural physical properties that occur when and only when I am having a phenome...

On typical functionalist views of mind, what mental states a physical system has depends on counterfactual connections between physical prop...

Here is something our old friend Mary, raised in a black and white world, cannot know simply by knowing all of physics: What are the neces...

Suppose Alice tells me: “My right hand is identical with the moon.” My first reaction will be to suppose that Alice is employing some sort ...

This argument is fairly well trodden, but I still have to say that I find it quite compelling: If physicalism is true, then there was no s...

I think we learn at least as much about ourselves as persons from literature as from science. This is surprising if physicalism is true.