Abstract

The physical world, as Ted Honderich points out in his book Actual Consciousness, is almost invariably thought of as necessarily objective. What exactly this means is controversial. However, the rough idea is that there is no aspect of the physical world that can, in principle, be experienced by only one person. As such, physicalism would be refuted by irreducible subjective facts—facts, for example, about what my conscious experience of seeing red is like that cannot be fully conveyed in objective terms about light reflectances, the physiology of color vision and so forth. Athough Honderich pushes against the conception of the physical as inhospitable to private, subjective experience, I argue that he does not go far enough.