Wednesday Workshop 7: Physicalism in Practice

Physicalism holds that everything that exists or can be coherently discussed is physical, or depends entirely on the physical. There are no independent non-physical substances, forces, or realms.

In this framework, “magick” means the deliberate rearrangement of physical systems: neural, genetic, material, or social, to produce predictable effects. Evolution operates the same way with physical variation and selection acting on physical substrates over time.

Challenge: review the basic physical features that any coherent subject must involve, then tests whether it is possible to describe a subject that involves none of them.

Primary Physical Features

These features form the minimal set required for any description that can be reasoned about:

Spatiotemporal extent (location, duration, distance, interval)

Matter or energy (mass-energy, charge, spin, field states)

Motion or change (displacement, transformation of state)

Causation and interaction (forces, exchanges, correlations)

Structure and pattern (arrangement, symmetry, information in physical degrees of freedom)

Conservation and constraint (energy, momentum, charge; the limiting laws)

These features are not optional; they are the only vocabulary available for coherent description. Both evolutionary processes and any practical “magick” operate strictly within them.

Thought Experiment: The Non-Physical

Can anything truly be "non-physical?" What does this mean? Describe any possible subject such as an entity, process, property, experience, or idea that involves none of the primary physical features listed above. No motion, no transformation, no space, no time, no energy, no structure that could be realized physically.

Constraints

• The subject must be determinate enough that true or false statements can be made about it.
• Hidden physical placeholders (“pure form,” “abstract object,” “non-spatial qualia”) are disallowed unless shown to avoid every listed feature.
• Pure negation, silence, or “nothing” count only if they can still be reasoned about without invoking physical concepts.

Most subjects fail under examination. Example: mathematics requires sequential inference or physically instantiable patterns. Claims about consciousness unfold in time and are expressed in physical language. “Pure essences” either become indescribable (and therefore not subjects of reasoning) or acquire relational structure that maps onto physical relations. The exercise shows that any subject stable enough to be discussed already participates in the physical vocabulary even if only through the physical process of thinking about it. 

Application of Physicalist Practice

Select one ordinary intentional act (habit change, ritual sequence, intention-setting, self-modification). Rewrite every step so that only primary physical features appear:

• Which physical systems are rearranged?
• Which features (motion, transformation, structure, energy flow) are used?
• Where does evolutionary logic (variation → selection → retention) appear?

Anything that can be named, desired, evolved, or deliberately altered already operates inside the closed system of spacetime, matter-energy, and lawful transformation.

Over the next two days, note three moments when language suggests a non-physical subject. Re-describe each moment using only the primary physical features. Feel free to share your findings in The Commons.