Physicalism and consciousness

Physicalism is the philosophical theory that identifies mental states with physical states of the brain. Recently it has come under attack, both from critics who claim that it cannot account for the nature of our conscious experience, and from others who claim that it is a vacuous doctrine. In this thesis I elaborate and defend a version of physicalism against both charges. In the course of this I will make an extensive study of recent work in the philosophy and psychology of perception. I argue that we may accept the critics' claim that we need to acknowledge a special category of experiential fact ('qualia'), but physicalism can accommodate this. The implications of accepting qualia are metaphysical, and I will argue further that the consequences are that we should accept anti-realism