What is "physicalist"

Usage examples of "physicalist".

To take but one example, some professionals in this field have suggested that Christians can adopt modern scientific, physicalist theories of the mind and still hold to an orthodox Christian belief in eternal life.

Most Christians are understandably disinclined to accept this physicalist view of immortality, which they regard as incompatible with the Bible.

Given that 40 percent of American scientists today believe in a personal God to whom they can pray and that this figure has not changed significantly over the past century, it would seem that if the physicalist hypothesis has been proven empirically during the twentieth century, virtually half of the scientific community in the United States still refuses to acknowledge it.

Given the lack of explanatory power of physicalist interpretations of consciousness, why do virtually all contemporary cognitive scientists continue to regard all mental phenomena as functions or properties of the brain?

The question of the causal efficacy of the mind has plagued scientific materialism since the time of Descartes, and neither dualists nor physicalists have provided a compelling solution to this problem.

Since physicalists have been no more successful at explaining the causal interaction between the mind and body than the dualists, the only serious objection to considering the causal efficacy of a nonphysical mind in the physical world is the conservation principle.

Let us assume for the moment that these physicalists are right in asserting that scientists have empirically demonstrated that only physical things and events exist.