Montero’s Incomplete Post-Physicalism

Philosopher Barbara Montero argues that “it is time to come to terms with the difficulty of understanding what it means to be physical and start thinking about the mind–body problem from a new perspective. Instead of construing it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally nonmental world, a world that is at its most fundamental level entirely nonmental.” The mind–body problem, she says, “is the problem of determining whether mentality can be accounted for in terms of nonmental phenomena” (Montero, 2001).

Montero takes a nuanced and realist approach to consciousness, emphasizing the physicality of the mental while remaining critical of reductive physicalism. Her “post-physicalism” view combines elements of realist physicalism with a non-reductive stance on consciousness, which acknowledges the reality and irreducibility of conscious experience while insisting it is part of the physical world. She argues that conscious experience is physical, even if our current physical theories are not yet capable of fully explaining it. She says, “Physicalism need not deny the reality or distinctiveness of experience—it just claims that experience is ultimately physical” (Montero, 2001).

Physicalism and the Reality of Experience

Nonetheless, she remains skeptical that consciousness can be reduced to physical processes, such as brain states or functional roles. “Consciousness may be physical without being reducible to the concepts of current physics” (Montero, 2009). She argues that perhaps the reason consciousness seems mysterious is not that it's non-physical, but that our concept of the physical is incomplete or impoverished. She opposes the idea that consciousness is epiphenomenal (i.e., without causal power), maintaining that experience has causal efficacy even if it’s difficult to articulate within current science. She basically aligns with non-reductive physicalists and even with Russellian monists (though she rejects panpsychism).

The Body Problem and the Limits of Science

Montero coined the term "the body problem", analogizing it to the hard problem of consciousness. It refers to our limited understanding of what the physical truly is. “The problem is not with consciousness being physical, but with our grasp of the physical itself” (Montero, 1999).

Overall, Montero’s approach to consciousness is that “focusing on such questions as whether mentality is a natural phenomenon, a physical phenomenon, or a spatial phenomenon sidesteps the hard question that lies at the heart of the debate.” It is time to confront this question head-on, she asserts: “Is mentality a fundamental feature of the world? Physicalists will then need to make a decision: they can uphold deferential naturalism, the view, as Sellars put it, that science is the measure of all things, or they can put forth a substantive hypothesis about the general nature of the mind. To choose naturalism is to follow the course of science wherever it may lead, which is, perhaps, not to abandon the mind–body problem, but to hand it over to someone else.”

But there is another option, she says: “take a stance and think of the mind–body problem as the problem of whether mentality is fundamentally nonmental. And without the cloak of naturalism, physicalists can do this openly and with a clear conscience. As such, they will not be naturalists in the sense that they will not simply be deferring to science to tell us what is and what is not. But, nevertheless, this does not mean that in putting forth their hypotheses they are necessarily being anti-scientific. To put forth a view, to state a hypothesis is to work hand in hand with science; to leave the mind–body problem up to someone else is not.”

Montero’s position is clear: She asserts that “looking at the mind–body problem in terms of the distinction between the mental and the nonmental rather than the distinction between the physical and the nonphysical will not only relieve the conflict between naturalism and ontological significance (basically by giving each its own territory) but also pave the way for what I hope will be a clearer, more interesting, and potentially even terminable debate about the fundamental nature of the mind” (Montero, 2001).