Current Paper

Abstract
I want to argue that a reductive physicalist approach to mind and consciousness will be unable to sufficiently answer such difficulties as first-person subjective experience and feeling, viz., why we have experience along with our cognitive and neurological functions at all. My position is not an appeal to the limited understanding of the brain, but that consciousness is simply not the kind of thing we ought to expect empirical science to be able to give an account of, that is, if it is not reducible to anything physical, then it must be taken as altogether separate from the physical. I hope to show that reductive physicalist approaches cannot account for subjective experiences,or that which is involved in the formation of concepts, thoughts, beliefs and ideas. Charges have been made that such a position is an appeal to mystery or some sort of God-of-the-gaps fallacy in the lack of a better explanation, but I will show that no such motivation need lie behind the argument. What is evident will be not a failure of any specific empirical science but a phenomenon which merely lies beyond what investigation into the natural world will reveal. Such a thing should hardly be surprising or inflammatory, and only a dogmatic and unwarranted faith in physical science would rule out a non-physical explanation a priori.