Sunday 12 February 2023

Psychophysical Harmony

I wanted to write about the argument from psychophysical harmony against naturalism, even though it has no force for those like me who think that talk of qualia and phenomenality in general is confused. For the argument to make any sense at all, we will first have to assume that such considerations as the Knowledge Argument (i.e. the Mary's Room thought experiment from Frank Jackson) have persuaded us that physicalism is inadequate for the task of accounting for phenomenal experience. The argument from psychophysical harmony then goes farther, suggesting that there cannot be any sort of neutral natural explanation at all for the mysterious appropriateness of our experience in representing the physical world. Instead we might need to invoke God, or if not God then perhaps some other benevolent purposeful force or principle such as John Leslie's axiarchism.