When we began this series seven weeks ago with Alfred North Whitehead, we started with a radical rejection of “dead matter.” Whitehead famously argued that both traditional materialism and idealism suffer from the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”—the mistake of treating abstract concepts like “matter” or “mind” as if they were the fundamental, concrete reality. To be honest, much like Process Philosophy, this week’s view is hard for me to get my mind around. It challenges every instinct we have about the “solidity” of the floor beneath our feet. Yet, the logic is so tight that it has remained unrefuted for centuries.

Whitehead chose a “middle path” known as Process Philosophy. He was a Provisional Realist: he believed the physical world is real and exists independently of human perception, but he redefined that “physicality.”

Whitehead’s Organic Reality

To understand why we are moving into Idealism, we have to look closer at what Whitehead rejected. He was primarily concerned with the “Bifurcation of Nature”—the idea that the world is split into two unrelated piles: the “hard” world of physics and the “soft” world of our feelings. To Whitehead, the idea that a “colorless, soundless” world of atoms could somehow produce a “vibrant, noisy” world of human experience was a logical dead end.

Whitehead replaced the idea of static, “simple location” with “Actual Entities.” He viewed what we call “matter” as a series of energetic events or “throbs of experience.” For him, nothing exists in isolation. Every “piece” of matter is actually a “prehension”—a grasping or taking account—of the entire rest of the universe from its specific perspective. He wanted to preserve the “hardness” of the physical world while acknowledging that the world is alive with value and purpose at every level. It is a world of Organic Realism.

Today, however, we explore a perspective that pushes even further than Whitehead’s living organism. Idealism suggests that the physical world—the rocks, the stars, and even your own brain—is not just “alive” with experience, but is fundamentally mental in nature. As the physicist Sir James Jeans famously put it: “The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” To understand this view, we look to the man who set the logical trap: Bishop George Berkeley.

The Trap of the Senses: Berkeley’s “Deletion” of Matter

In the early 1700s, George Berkeley saw a logical error in the science of his day. Thinkers like John Locke were describing a world of “Primary Qualities”—size, shape, and motion—that supposedly existed in “matter” even when no one was looking.

Berkeley pointed out that this is a leap of faith. We are, quite literally, trapped behind our own faces. Imagine you are holding an apple. You see Red. You feel Firmness. You taste Sweetness. You hear a Crunch. Berkeley’s “gotcha” question is simple: If you take away the red, the firmness, the sweetness, and the crunch, what is left of the apple?

The materialist says, “The matter is left! The physical substance that causes those feelings.” But Berkeley argues that “matter” is a useless, abstract word. You have never seen “matter”; you have only ever seen colors. You have never touched “matter”; you’ve only ever felt textures. To say something exists “unperceived” is a contradiction. How can you describe a tree that has no color, no shape, and no sound? You can’t. If you remove every sensory quality, the object doesn’t just become invisible; it ceases to be anything at all. Berkeley’s conclusion: Esse est percipi—”To be is to be perceived.”

The Brain Paradox: The Image vs. The Source

This leads to a question that often arises: If the world is mental, why do we see a physical organ when we open a skull? If my mind is the “creator” of my world, how can it be “inside” a brain?

In the Idealist framework, the brain is not the source of consciousness; it is what consciousness looks like from a specific perspective. Imagine you are watching a live stream of a concert on your phone. You see pixels moving on a screen. Those pixels aren’t the “cause” of the music, and the music isn’t “inside” the pixels. The pixels are simply the representation of the music.

Berkeley argues that the physical body is an idea in the mind, not a “provisional reality” outside of it. When a neuroscientist looks at your brain, they aren’t looking at the “thing” that makes your thoughts; they are looking at the visual representation of your thoughts. It is the “icon” that represents the processing power of the soul. Whitehead would agree to an extent—he viewed “matter” as a series of energetic events—but Berkeley goes further by denying that there is any “non-mental” substance at all.

The Mirage: A Glitch in the “Mental Movie”

A common objection to Idealism is the Mirage. Critics ask: “If everything is just a perception, why can’t I just ‘think’ a mirage into a real drink of water? Why is a ‘real’ oasis different from a ‘hallucination’?”

Berkeley handles this with the logic of Consistency. He argues that “Reality” isn’t defined by “Physical Stuff,” but by Order. He suggests that our perceptions come in two flavors: those we conjure up ourselves (imagination) and those that are forced upon us by a higher source (the “Laws of Nature”).

• The Real Oasis: You see the water, you touch it, and it feels wet. Your perceptions (sight, touch, taste) all “handshake” and agree. This consistency is what we mean by “reality.”
• The Mirage: You see the water, but when you reach down, you feel only dry sand.

In Berkeley’s view, a mirage isn’t a “fake thing” vs. a “real thing.” It is a disconnected perception. When you see a mirage, you are seeing a “sensory typo” in the mental movie. It reminds us that we are navigating a representation, not a cold world of atoms. The “real” oasis is simply a more stable, shared, and complex set of ideas.

Two Paths to the Mental Universe: The Theist vs. The Atheist

While Berkeley provided the logical foundation, modern philosophers have taken the theory in very different directions. This split shows how flexible Idealism can be as a map for the universe.

George Berkeley was a devout Theist. For him, Idealism was the ultimate proof of God. If a tree in a deserted forest continues to exist even when no human is there to see it, Berkeley argued it must be because it is being perceived by an Infinite Mind. In this view, the universe is a constant, orderly “conversation” between the mind of God and the minds of humans.

James Tartaglia, by contrast, is a modern atheist. He arrives at Idealism through a secular, existential lens. He doesn’t posit a Divine Mind to hold the world together. Instead, he sees the mental nature of reality as a brute fact of the universe’s structure. For Tartaglia, there is no “Grand Author”; there is only the Transcendent Reality that our brains represent to us as “matter.” He argues that we can live in a mental universe without needing a religious framework, finding meaning in our role as the observers who turn raw “transcendental” data into a world.

The Modern Interface: Donald Hoffman’s “Desktop”

To bridge these views to the modern day, we look to thinkers like Donald Hoffman. Hoffman uses the metaphor of a computer’s User Interface to explain why we “see” matter even if it isn’t there.

When you look at your computer screen, you see a blue folder icon. Is the “real” folder actually blue and square? No. The reality is a chaotic mess of electrons and silicon. The blue icon is a helpful delusion. It hides the complex reality so you can interact with it.

Idealism suggests that Space, Time, and Physical Objects are our “Desktop.” Evolution didn’t prime us to see “The Truth”—the raw, overwhelming mental complexity of the universe; it primed us to survive. Seeing a “solid rock” is a shortcut—an icon that tells us “don’t walk here.” We assume the icons are the truth, but they are symbols for a deeper mental reality. This explains why science gets so weird at the quantum level—it’s like zooming in on a digital photo until it breaks into pixels. We’ve reached the edge of our biological interface.

James Tartaglia and the Transcendent Meaning

James Tartaglia takes this “interface” idea and applies it to the human condition. He argues that the “Materialist” worldview—the idea that we are just biological robots in a dead, accidental universe—has led to a modern crisis of meaninglessness.

Tartaglia suggests that our physical life is a “Representation.” Think of a VR headset. While the headset is on, the mountains look real. You take them seriously, but you know your “real self” is outside the game. Tartaglia argues that our entire physical universe is a mental representation of a Transcendent Reality.

We aren’t biological accidents; we are localized “windows” through which a much deeper consciousness is looking at itself. By shifting to Idealism, Tartaglia suggests that meaning is found in the fact that we are the Observers—the subjects who allow the “movie” of the universe to happen. It restores the “Mind” to the center of the story.

Summary Comparison: Whitehead vs. The Field

Viewpoint	Materialism	Idealism	Whitehead (Process)
Fundamental Reality	Dead, inert “stuff”	Ideas or Mind	Creative “Events”
Relationship	Things exist separately	Things exist in the mind	Everything is “internally related”
Nature of World	A machine	A dream or thought	A living organism

Conclusion

Idealism allows us to keep the rigor of science—which maps the patterns of our experiences—while restoring a mental depth that Materialism often strips away. It suggests that we are not accidents of chemistry, but the foundation upon which the world is built.

Whether we view our experience as a flowing process of events, a clever illusion of a biological machine, or a representation of a transcendent mental reality, each theory offers a different way to account for the fact of our own awareness. While Berkeley’s logic challenges the very existence of matter, it leaves us with the question of what exactly is being represented by our senses—a question we will continue to explore as we look at Thomas Nagel’s famous perspective next week.

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Deepen Your Journey: Suggested Reading

Transparency Note: I am an Amazon Associate, which means I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made through the links below. This helps support the research and writing of this series at no extra cost to you!

• Philosophy in a Meaningless Life by James Tartaglia
  • A modern masterpiece that tackles the “existential anxiety” of our scientific age. Tartaglia explains how a return to the idea of a transcendent reality can give our lives a sense of purpose that materialism simply cannot provide. (This book is expensive, but  it was funded by Knowledge Unlatched, meaning it is available as Open Access. You can read or download the full text for free through the Bloomsbury Collections or the OAPEN Library).
• A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley
  • The 300-year-old foundational text for Idealism. Despite its age, Berkeley’s writing is sharp and accessible, leading the reader step-by-step through the logical “trap” that proves matter may not exist at all.
• The Idea of the World by Bernardo Kastrup
  • A rigorous, contemporary defense of Idealism. Kastrup uses analytical philosophy and modern neuroscience to argue that the universe is “transpersonal mind,” providing a scientific-leaning alternative to physicalism.
• The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman
  • A fascinating crossover between evolutionary biology and philosophy. Hoffman argues that our senses did not evolve to show us the truth, but rather to act as a “desktop interface” that hides the true complexity of reality.
• Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead
  • The quintessential text for those who want to understand the “middle path.” Whitehead examines how the history of science led to our current dead-end views of matter and offers his “Philosophy of Organism” as the solution.

Over the last few weeks, we have navigated the busy streets of physicalism. We saw Daniel Dennett argue that the mind is a clever trick of the brain—a “user-illusion.” We saw Galen Strawson argue for a “Real Physicalism,” suggesting that matter itself is inherently conscious. Despite their differences, they both shared a common boundary: they believed that, at the end of the day, there is only one kind of “stuff” in the universe.

Today, we cross that boundary into Substance Dualism—the idea that the mind is not just a property of the brain, but a separate substance entirely.

To the modern ear, “Substance Dualism” sounds like a relic of a pre-scientific age. If you ask a modern neuroscientist, they will likely tell you it is a “medieval” superstition—a desperate attempt to preserve a religious ego. But Richard Swinburne, Emeritus Professor at Oxford, has spent a lifetime proving that the case for the soul is built on cold, hard logic rather than mere sentiment. He doesn’t ask us to believe in ghosts; he asks us to look at the logical requirements of being a “self.”

Defining the Terms: What is a “Substance”?

Before we dive into his arguments, we must clarify what Swinburne means by a “substance.” In philosophy, a substance is not a liquid or a chemical; it is something that can exist on its own—a “thing” that carries properties. A “property” is a characteristic (like the color red), but a “substance” is the entity that is red (like an apple).

Physicalism claims that the only substance in the universe is matter, and the mind is just a property of that matter—like the “fastness” of a car or the “wetness” of water. Swinburne turns this on its head. He argues that the “I” is its own substance. You don’t have a soul; you are a soul, and you possess a body. This distinction is the foundation of everything that follows.

The Problem of Personal Identity: The Ship of Theseus

Swinburne’s strongest entry point is the question of what makes you “you” over time. Physically, you are a walking Ship of Theseus. In this ancient Greek paradox, a ship is repaired plank by plank until not a single original piece of wood remains. Is it still the same ship?

Biologically, you are in a state of constant flux. Your cells are dying and being replaced; the atoms in your brain today are almost entirely different from those you had ten years ago. If you are purely a physical object, your identity is just a “pattern”—like a wave moving through water. As long as the memories and personality traits remain stable, a physicalist says “you” exist.

But Swinburne argues that a “pattern” is a description, not a person. To illustrate this, he uses a provocative thought experiment: The Brain Bisection.

Imagine a scientist removes your brain and splits it into two equal halves, transplanting each half into a different identical body. Both people wake up with your memories and your habits. Physics can track every atom during this surgery, providing a 100% complete physical map. However, physics cannot answer the most important question: Which one is you? Are you the person in the left bed, the right bed, or have you ceased to exist? A physicalist must say that because all the physical facts are accounted for, there is no “real” answer—you are simply both or neither. But from the perspective of the subject, this is impossible. You cannot “be” two separate streams of consciousness simultaneously. Swinburne argues that because there is a factual, “yes or no” answer to the question of your survival—an answer that a complete physical map cannot see—there must be a non-physical truth about your identity. This “thisness” (or haecceity) is what he defines as the soul.

The Privacy of the Mental: The Patient and the Doctor

The second pillar of Swinburne’s defense is the Argument from Privileged Access. This is the idea that mental life is private in a way that physical facts are not.

Consider a man who goes to his doctor claiming he is experiencing vivid hallucinations of a mountain range. The doctor can use the most advanced technology available—fMRIs and EEGs—to monitor the man’s brain. The doctor might see a surge of activity in the visual cortex. These are “public” facts. Any trained professional with the right equipment can observe them, measure them, and verify them.

However, the doctor is ultimately “blind” to the most important part of the event. No amount of machinery can tell the doctor exactly what the man is seeing—the specific jaggedness of the peaks or the subjective quality of the light. The doctor must rely entirely on the man to report the content of his vision.

Swinburne argues that if the world were purely physical, everything would be publicly observable in principle. If I know the position and velocity of every molecule in a steam engine, I know everything there is to know about that engine. But I can know everything about the atoms in your brain and still not know what it feels like to be you. This suggests that the “mind” is a different kind of substance than the “brain.”

The Piano and the Pianist: The Logic of Interaction

The most common objection to dualism is the Dependency Argument: “If we have a soul, why do we lose our personality when the brain is damaged?” If the soul is separate, why does a glass of wine or a head injury change who we are?

Swinburne’s response involves a crucial distinction between existence and functioning. He views the soul as the musician and the brain as the piano.

A world-class pianist has the skill and the intent to play a masterpiece. However, if the piano has broken keys, out-of-tune strings, or a cracked soundboard, the music produced will be distorted or silent. In this model, the soul is the “player.” While we are embodied, the soul depends on the physical brain to “write” and “read” data from the physical world. Memories, in this life, are stored physically in the synapses—they are the “sheet music” the pianist uses to navigate reality.

When the brain is damaged, the soul isn’t being “deleted”; rather, the instrument is failing. This explains why we are so heavily influenced by our biology without requiring us to be identical to our biology. The musician is not the music; the player is not the piano.

The Simplicity of the “I”: The Binding Problem

Neuroscience shows us that the brain is a collection of trillions of moving parts firing in parallel. There is no “center” of the brain where everything comes together in a single point. This creates The Binding Problem: How do trillions of separate physical events result in a single, unified “I”?

When you see a red ball bouncing, one part of your brain processes “red,” another processes “circularity,” and another processes “motion.” Physically, these are disparate events occurring in different “zip codes” of the cortex. Yet, your experience is not a fragmented list of data; it is a single, unified perception.

Swinburne argues it is “simpler” (invoking Occam’s Razor) to posit that the subject of experience is a Simple Substance. In science, we accept fundamental units like quarks that cannot be broken down further. Swinburne suggests the “Subject” is one of these fundamental units. You feel like a unified thing because you are a unified thing—a non-composite substance that “owns” the experiences of the complex brain.

The Modal Argument: The Logic of the Possible

Finally, Swinburne leans on what is known as the Modal Argument, which deals with the logic of possibility and necessity. He asks us to consider what is “logically possible.”

It is logically impossible to imagine a “square circle” because the definition of a square contradicts the definition of a circle. However, it is perfectly “thinkable” to imagine yourself existing without a body. You can imagine waking up as a floating consciousness with no limbs, no brain, and no physical presence—much like a dream.

Swinburne’s logical move is this: If it is even possible for you to exist without your body, then you cannot be identical to your body. If A is identical to B, then A cannot exist without B. For example, you cannot have water without H2O; they are the exact same thing. But if I can logically conceive of “Me” existing without “My Brain” (even as a thought experiment), it follows that “Me” and “My Brain” are two different things. Even if they are currently joined together like a driver in a car, they remain separate entities.

Conclusion: The Driver and the Car

Substance Dualism explains why you feel like a single “I” in a world of moving parts. It suggests that even if we can map every atom in the brain, the most important part of reality remains the “Pianist” who is making the music.

This isn’t just an academic exercise. If we are just “brain-states,” then we are determined by the laws of physics—meaning free will is a myth. But if the soul is a separate substance, then the “I” has the room to act upon the brain, making us the authors of our own stories rather than just spectators of our own biology. We are the drivers, not just the cars.

But if we are willing to accept that the soul is a separate substance, we must eventually ask an even more radical question: What if the physical world isn’t the primary reality at all?

Next week, we step into the world of Idealism. We will explore the thinkers who argue that mind isn’t just part of the universe—it is the very fabric the universe is made of.

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Deepen Your Journey: Suggested Reading

If this logical defense of the soul has sparked your curiosity, these resources are the best places to explore the analytical side of the debate.

Transparency Note: The links below are affiliate links. If you choose to purchase through them, I earn a small commission from Amazon at no extra cost to you. This helps support the research and writing of this series!

• The Evolution of the Soul by Richard Swinburne: The definitive modern text for dualism. A rigorous defense of why the “Subject” cannot be reduced to the brain.
• Mind, Brain, and Free Will by Richard Swinburne: Addresses how the soul might interact with physical laws and quantum physics.
• The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism edited by Loose, Menuge, and Moreland: A massive collection of essays covering modern dualist thought.
• The Self and Its Brain by Karl Popper and John Eccles: A landmark collaboration between a philosopher of science and a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist. While Popper’s “Three Worlds” theory differs slightly from Swinburne’s theological dualism, this remains the most famous scientific defense of the idea that the mind and brain are distinct entities.

Over the last few weeks, we have navigated two very different maps of the mind: Daniel Dennett’s world, where consciousness is an evolutionary user-illusion, and David Chalmers’ Hard Problem, which suggests a universe split between physical facts and mental properties.

However, as we move deeper into the mystery, we encounter a thinker who suggests that both are working with a faulty definition of the world. Galen Strawson is a Real Physicalist. He doesn’t believe in ghosts or souls, but he has arrived at a conclusion that flips our understanding of reality: If physicalism is true, then matter itself must be conscious.

The Realization: Not on the Same Team

I’ll be honest: when I first started reading Chalmers and Strawson, I was convinced they were on the same team. Both argue that subjective experience is a fundamental part of the universe. I had them both labeled as Property Dualists, assuming they both believed that in addition to physical properties like mass, mental properties also exist. They both stood in opposition to Dennett, who views those mental properties as an illusion.

But Strawson and Chalmers are actually in a heated debate. Strawson is a vocal critic of Dualism. He believes that if physicalism is true, we shouldn’t be adding extra layers to the world; we should be redefining what physical means from the ground up.

The Myth of Dead Matter

Strawson’s starting point is an attack on what he calls PhysicSalism—the common assumption that physical stuff is exactly and only what we see in a high school physics textbook: mathematical points and dead billiard balls clacking in a void. Most of us assume that matter is inherently non-conscious “gray meat” that somehow begins to feel once sparked with electricity.

Strawson argues that we actually have no idea what the intrinsic nature of matter is. Physics is brilliant at telling us how an electron behaves—its mass, charge, and spin—but it is silent on what the electron is in and of itself.

The Detective Story: The Silence of Physics

Physics is like a world-class detective who has found the fingerprints of matter but has never actually seen the culprit. Think of a game of chess. Physics is the grandmaster who has mapped every rule of the game. He can tell you exactly how the Knight moves, but if you ask what the pieces are actually made of—wood, plastic, or pure energy—the rules are silent.

Physics describes matter using dispositions—what it does to other things. But matter cannot just be a set of behaviors; there must be something doing the behaving. The physicist Arthur Eddington famously agreed, noting that physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little. We know its mathematical structure, but we are silent on its inner nature. Strawson’s genius is realizing that because physics is silent about the internal nature of matter, it has no right to claim that matter is dead.

The Law of No-Emergence: Something from Nothing?

In science, we see emergence all the time, like liquidity. But liquidity is just a new way for molecules to behave in space. Strawson’s No-Emergence argument states that it is logically impossible for feeling to emerge from non-feeling stuff. You can’t get wetness if you don’t have molecules, and you can’t get redness if the building blocks of the universe are void of experiential quality.

If there is no experience in the fundamental constituents of the universe, Strawson argues, then no amount of complex arrangement can ever bring it into being. If you want a conscious brain, you must start with conscious building blocks. Otherwise, consciousness is a miracle—something appearing out of thin air once matter gets complex enough.

How to Build a Subject: Strawson vs. Chalmers

If both men agree that an electron might be conscious, how do they view the Subject differently? For David Chalmers, the subject is a Result. He looks at the world through the lens of Information and Psychophysical Laws. In his view, matter carries information, and when processed a certain way, the laws of the universe switch on the light of experience. To Chalmers, the electron carries raw data that, under the right laws, becomes a subject. The subject is the result of an equation.

For Galen Strawson, the subject is a Nature. He thinks Chalmers’ idea of laws switching on a light is still too close to magic. He argues that you don’t need a law to turn matter into a subject because matter is a subject. The electron doesn’t carry information that then becomes a subject; the electron is a tiny, primitive subject of experience. The glow is what the electron is made of. The subject is the fundamental reality of the physical world.

The Conscious Electron: A Tale of Two Panpsychisms

While Strawson insists consciousness is the nature of matter, Chalmers is more interested in the laws connecting matter to mind. Chalmers flirted with the idea that electrons might have a flicker of experience, but for him, it’s Matter + Laws = Mind. Strawson thinks this is a dualist myth. He believes the electron’s consciousness is its very identity. For him, it’s Matter = Mind.

The Subtle Divide: The Plus vs. The Is

It comes down to how you define Matter. Chalmers takes the Plus View (Property Dualism). He accepts the standard definition of matter as dead, so if the universe is conscious, it must be because there are extra properties—physical properties plus mental properties.

Strawson takes the Is View (Real Physicalism). He thinks adding extra laws is an unnecessary complication. We don’t need extra properties because we’ve been wrong about the physical ones all along. The mental property is the physical property. For Strawson, the insideness of an atom is its experience.

Why Philosophical Zombies Are Impossible

This distinction explains why Strawson thinks Chalmers’ Philosophical Zombie argument is flawed. To Chalmers, a Zombie is possible because you could imagine a world where the matter is the same, but God forgot the consciousness laws. The hardware is there, but the software isn’t running.

To Strawson, a Zombie is a contradiction. If you have the matter, you already have the experience. They are the same thing. Asking for a physical brain without consciousness is like asking for a circle that isn’t round. If you built a perfect physical duplicate of a human, that being would have to be conscious, because consciousness is what those atoms are.

The Science of the Inside

Strawson looks at the only piece of matter whose internal nature we actually know: the human brain. When a neuroscientist looks at a brain, they see the outside—the firing neurons. But because you are a brain, you see it from the inside as a symphony of colors and thoughts. Strawson suggests that consciousness is what the inside of matter looks like. There is no mystery of how the brain produces the mind because they are just two ways of describing the same physical event. Experience is the physical reality of the brain experienced from the first-person perspective.

Evolution: Organizing the Wakefulness

In Strawson’s view, evolution didn’t produce consciousness as a new feature. Instead, it organized pre-existing, conscious building blocks into complex structures. We didn’t evolve a mind; we are matter that has become complex enough to have a unified perspective. Consciousness was there from the Big Bang; evolution just gave it a voice.

Conclusion: A Foundation of Experience

While Chalmers is adding a new floor to the house of science to make room for the mind, Strawson is telling us that the mind was already part of the foundation. Strawson doesn’t make the mind a miracle; he makes matter extraordinary. He allows us to keep the rigor of physical science without having to deny the reality of our own inner lives. By redefining matter as inherently experiential, Strawson offers a version of physicalism that is actually real.

But what if even Real Physicalism isn’t enough? What if the mind isn’t just a part of matter, but a separate substance that exists alongside it? Next week, we’ll step away from the physicalist camp entirely to look at the modern defenders of Substance Dualism—the thinkers who believe the ghost in the machine is very real, and very separate.

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Deepen Your Journey: Suggested Reading

If Strawson’s argument for Real Physicalism has sparked your curiosity, these resources are the best places to start. Please note that the links below are affiliate links; if you choose to purchase through them, I earn a small commission from Amazon at no extra cost to you, which helps support the continued research and writing of this series.

• Real Materialism by Galen Strawson: This is the definitive collection of Strawson’s essays. It’s dense, but it is the most complete defense of the idea that a truly physicalist world must be a conscious one.
• The Consciousness Paradox by Galen Strawson: A more accessible entry point for those interested in his specific critique of why we misunderstand the word physical.
• Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. by Galen Strawson: A collection of more personal and accessible essays. It’s a great way to get a feel for his writing style and his broader views on the self and experience.
• The Character of Consciousness by David Chalmers: To truly understand the rivalry discussed today, you have to read the other side. This is Chalmers’ masterpiece on why he believes extra laws are necessary to explain the mind.