Many people find physicalism an inhumane, philistine view. I wish I could dispel that idea. What underlies it, I suspect, is the ‘nothing but’ thought: If we are nothing but matter, then where is our specialness, our value, our subjectivity?
But why does it matter what we are made of? Suppose we were immaterial souls instead of physical beings. Would that make us special? Why? Couldn’t we still worry that we were nothing but soul stuff?
So where does our specialness come from? Perhaps our physical bodies are infused with a nonphysical essence that confers subjectivity and value? But that suggestion explains nothing at all. It’s just saying that are special because we possess an intrinsic specialness.
I think there’s a better way of looking at it. It’s not the stuff we’re made of that matters, nor some essence within it. It’s the way the stuff is organized. Is Michelangelo’s David ‘nothing but marble’? Yes; there’s no extra ingredient or special essence. But it’s marble shaped in a meaningful way by the hands of a great creative artist. And we are matter shaped in a meaningful way by billions of years of natural experimentation and selection.
It’s this billion-year heritage of natural design that has endowed us with the sensitivities and reactive dispositions that underpin our sense of value and subjectivity. We’re matter that nature has made special — and we’re beginning to understand how nature did it.