In the planned talk I aim to argue for the legitimacy and prima facie plausibility of a broadly physicalist position in the mind-body problem which I call one-term physicalism, and which is almost entirely missing from the relevant literature.. The argumentation starts with showing a close resemblance of two famous philosophical arguments, namely Moore’s open question argument and the so-called zombie or absent qualia argument. Then I present Nicholas Sturgeon’s sharp criticism of the open question argument, and then show how one can develop from this criticism a widely discussed legitimate metaethical view, namely one-term naturalism which states that moral properties are already natural, irrespective of any possible description of them in nonevaluative terms. I aim to argue that the same criticism can be made of the zombie argument, and therefore we could define a similar theoretical position in the philosophy of mind, which I call one-term physicalism and which states phenomenal properties are already physical properties, irrespective of any possible relationships between them and other physical properties.

 

After all these, I would like to speak about the main motivation for endorsing one-term naturalism, namely the so-called Causal Criterion strategy and show that the same motivation is present also in the case of one-term physicalism. Moreover, I argue that in the latter case the motivation is even stronger, since we have stronger intuitions for the causal efficacy of phenomenal than of moral properties. As a conclusion, I aim to show that one-term physicalism, thus defined, has three main argumentative advances over other kind of physicalist theories about conscious mental states: a) it is immune to the zombie or all other similar antiphysicalists arguments; b) it supplies a physicalist solution to the exclusion argument which does not commit one to any reductive account; c) it is compatible with the very plausible thesis of the transparent and revelatory nature of phenomenally conscious states.