The Subjective Grounds the Physical

the view from nowhere is nonsense

TLDR: Physicalism has been smuggled into philosophical discourse, resting on the mistaken belief that reality can be described from a perspective independent of experience. However, this view ignores the independent truths of experience that cannot be explained physically. Moreover, there is no view from nowhere: all facts, including physical facts, are only intelligible through subjective experience, and its this experience that our model of reality is grounded on (not the physical). Thought experiments such as Mary’s Room and the Chinese Room show that experience is not reducible to its physical causes and that subjective facts form a distinct and irreducible class of truths. Once this priority of the subjective is recognized, reductive physicalism loses its claim to be a foundational explanation of reality.

Physicalism is an Assumption, Not an Argument

Physicalism is often assumed rather than argued. It aligns with our basic intuitions and serves as a practical way to navigate the world. But philosophy demands that we question our assumptions. And once we do, we find that there are few compelling arguments for physicalism itself.

Many beliefs may themselves be grounded in physicalism, but that doesn’t mean that reductive physicalism itself is grounded.

If philosophy has any strength, it lies in questioning the foundations on which physicalism rests. Thought experiments like the “Chinese Room” and the “Brain in a Vat” challenge our trust in experience and urge skepticism toward the seemingly obvious.

Broadly speaking, philosophy offers two paths: physicalism and non-physicalism. Physicalism seeks to interpret philosophical concepts, such as truth, consciousness, justice, reality, and knowledge, through naturalistic and often biological frameworks. It reduces metaphysics to science, aiming to explain the mind entirely in terms of the brain.

In contrast, non-physicalism allows us to understand experience on its own terms, using reason without necessarily appealing to scientific explanation.

Once we are clear on the priority of the subjective, we can build philosophy on this basis, without being misled by the false assumptions of naive physicalism.

The Physical Is Grounded in the Subjective

Mary’s Room is often (wrongly) presented as an argument against physicalism. Physicalists can rightly point out that the thought experiment does not necessarily imply a separate ontology, since subjective experience could simply be a different mode of presentation of fundamentally physical events.

But as I’ve argued, this response fails to recognize the priority and independence of subjectivity, which has its own truths and truth-makers, independent of any physical causes or correlates. Physicalists attempt to understand the subjective through the tools of science. But reducing experience to physical is failing to recognize the autonomous truth of experience.

In the thought experiment, Mary knows every physical fact about color, particularly red. But because she is in a black and white room, she has never actually seen red. When she leaves and sees red for the first time, she learns what it is like to see red.

Physicalists can respond that Mary does not learn a new fact but merely acquires a new ability or a new way to look at color. But even this reply already attributes some existence to red itself as an independent experience.

Redness is not some detached decoration to an otherwise complete physical account of red; redness is red. Something is red if and only if it generates the experience of red. If you subtract the experience, you haven’t described red at all. You can describe wavelengths, neural processes, and behavioral dispositions, but not the actual phenomenon that those facts generate.

The experience is constitutive of the fact, with its truth being independent of its causes.

Subjective Facts Are a Distinct and Irreducible Class of Facts

When we analyze fine art (whether a film, poem, or painting), we don’t look at its physical causes or the materials used. Rather, we examine the experience of engaging with it.

We don’t view movies as illusions of some physical filmmaking process but as experiences that present their own facts. The truths of The Godfather have nothing to do with the actors’ biology, the technology used, or other physical aspects of production. Nor can The Godfather be reduced to neuroscience.

To understand The Godfather, we don’t need to look at the biology of the actors, the physical mechanics of the film’s production, or the pixels on whatever screen we’re looking at. In fact, doing so would be irrelevant to understanding the film as a film.

Rather, The Godfather is a story about family, loyalty, and retributive justice set within New York City’s criminal underworld. None of this is revealed by examining the particles of its original film reel.

The movie could have been completed through a different process, even if it was fully animated or AI-generated, and still convey the same powerful story with the same deep themes. What we analyze in film is the experience it evokes, not the mechanics of its production. It’s this experience that we analyze to appreciate art, which focuses on the art’s meaning, not its material substrate.

Experiences are not private illusions or indirect data caused by physical events. They provide their own set of facts.

That someone is in pain, that something appears red, that an experience has a particular phenomenal character—these are all facts. We can speak of their quantity, intensity, duration, and so on. And these experiential facts can be determined solely by reference to the experience itself.

They are not reducible to third-person descriptions without remainder, because third-person descriptions presuppose the very experiential framework they attempt to replace.

The physicalist is not wrong in claiming that experiences have physical causes. But their error is in treating subjective facts as epistemically secondary or ontologically derivative from such physical facts, failing to recognize their independence.

Mary’s Room shows that this ordering is backwards. “Redness” is only red because of the subjective experience of red, without any regard given to wavelengths or optics. The subjective is not explained away by the physical; it is what makes physical explanation possible in the first place.

There Is No “View from Nowhere”

There is a misconception that physicalists assume that there is a stance-independent “view from nowhere,”¹ which reveals a true, objective reality. But a view from nowhere is a contradiction, and therefore meaningless.

Proponents of reductive physicalism claim that their standard of reality mirrors this mind-independent framework (revealing a lack of self-awareness for the mind’s role in constructing reality). But nothing can be said about an objective, mind-independent reality without presupposing a mind doing the saying.

Whatever can be understood can only be understood through the mind. This inversion becomes clearer once we abandon the fiction of a perspective-free description of reality.

All knowledge is mediated by experience. There is no access to “pure” physical facts that bypass subjective interpretation. Every physical fact we understand is ultimately grounded in conscious experience.

The notion that we could first describe the world objectively, subtracting all subjectivity, is itself nonsense. It’s like seeing without eyes, touching without skin. There is no detection of reality without a detector.

There is no view from nowhere. There is only a world as encountered, structured, and interpreted by subjects. It is the subjective that is the true grounds of our reality. We don’t have direct access to the territory, but we have direct access to the map.

Confusing Causes for Events

An especially naive physicalist would sometimes bite the bullet and equate the subjective with the physical. Color is just wavelengths. Pain just is C-fibers. Math is just neural firings correlated with math-like thoughts. They begin with the belief that all events must be grounded in something physical, so they dismiss experience and focus solely on the physical.

But confusing pain with C-fibers is like confusing the meaning of these words with just the pixels on the screen. Sure, the pixels represent words. But I could convey the same meaning in print, handwriting, or even spoken aloud. The meaning of these words carries a meaning independent of their physical manifestations.

The same applies to all mental events. This argument is known as “multiple realizability,” and it’s the primary reason why so many philosophers abandon identity theory, a naive view that equates physical tokens of a concept with the type of concept it is. A naive version of physicalism says a concept or experience is nothing more than its physical causes.

There is, in principle, no reason that the same experience, like seeing red, must always have the same physical basis. In fact, every experience of red has different physical causes. No one could ever have the exact same brain state as someone else, even though they both could be experiencing the same phenomena.

Again, the causes of a phenomenon should not be confused with the phenomenon itself.

To ignore the experiential aspect in favor of the physical is to throw out the baby to keep the bathwater. It dismisses the fundamental for something arbitrary.

Yet identity theory still persists as a kind of naive zombie belief among those who take physicalism too literally.

The Chinese Room Thought Experiment

There is nothing inherent in physical explanation that grants it the power to explain mental phenomena. The same physical behavior can admit of fundamentally different explanations depending on the presence or absence of mentality. This point is illustrated by John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, where an operator in a room is manipulating symbols pursuant to rules to express Chinese, without at all knowing Chinese.

A fluent speaker of Chinese and an operator mechanically manipulating symbols according to rules may exhibit indistinguishable outward behavior, yet their actions are explained in different ways. In the first case, the behavior is explained by understanding; in the second, by syntactic rule-following alone. Same behavior, different explanations—distinguished by the presence (or absence) of genuine mental grasp.

Hopefully, this also shows why the behavioral competence of LLMs does not at all establish the existence of understanding or mentality.

Objective Facts Must Be Explained Through Subjective Evidence

Once we acknowledge the autonomy of the mental and how it grounds the physical, the explanatory grounding direction reverses. Physical facts are not self-justifying, but only become so through experience. Such experience is then measured, analyzed, and compartmentalized to provide a map of reality. And while we have true direct access to this map (we made it), this map is not reality, but our conceptual organization of it.

This does not collapse objectivity into relativism. It only means that we cannot say anything about reality except through the medium of experience. The best we can do is structure and map our experience in ways that allow for shared understanding and agreement, what we call “objectivity.”

This is relatively straightforward in the physical sciences, which can standardize experience under the scientific method to give it universal comprehensibility. Any scientific theory that passes a sufficient number of tests is eventually placed into the map of reality, at least until a competitor is able to take its place.

But not even science has been able to fully escape subjectivity, as Niels Bohr emphasized in his interpretation of quantum mechanics. Scientific explanation cannot be divorced from an observer.

“Mary’s Room” and the “Chinese Room” show that experience itself isn’t necessarily its physical causes or manifestations. Experience is the self-evident, autonomous starting point, and it is through experience that we come to understand the physical world at all.

Conclusion

Physicalism has been wrongly smuggled into philosophical discourse. While seemingly self-evident, its premises are flawed, and it fails to do the explanatory work that its proponents claim. Once we recognize this, reductive physicalism can be disqualified as an explanation for ultimate reality.

The subjective is not a problem for our picture of the world. In fact, the subjective is the only way in which any picture of the world is possible at all.

1. See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford Univ. Press 1986), for a discussion of this supposed ideal of a “view from nowhere.”