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Consciousness And Physicalism, Brian Mcgowan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Physicalism is a philosophy of mind which attempts to explain consciousness as resulting from physical causes. The lack of a complete and consistent mathematical theory to explain physical causation has led other philosophers of mind to propose that consciousness is a nonphysical essence, property, or substance. However, the idea that physics can be defined atomically and/or deterministically leads to explanatory problems for consciousness, as well as for the dualisms which explain consciousness under these assumptions. This thesis advances a position called “continuous physicalism” which takes all material to result from deformations in the physical medium of space, and any changes …