“Core properties invoked in physicalist or materialist metaphysics, including mass, time, momentum, and color, cannot be ontologically reduced to an underlying substrate that would count as traditionally physical under Newtonian or pre-quantum-mechanical standards.”

Drawing on the views of both Weyl and Wigner, quantum objects are here understood as ontologically constituted, group theoretically, in terms of sets of invariants, such as rest mass, charge, spin, and so on (Castellani 1998a).

On another version of the view that the complete-knowledge claim is false, Mary’s science lectures allow her to deduce the truths involving structural-dynamical properties of physical phenomena, but not their intrinsic properties. … The knowledge argument is also consistent with Russellian monism, on which phenomenal properties (or protophenomenal properties) are the categorical, intrinsic bases of physical properties, which are at bottom dispositional and relational.

The properties that constitute the colors, for Color Primitivism, are “physical” in one good sense of the term.

In ontology, there is the question as to whether it gives reason to favour one or more theories of color over others, and/or to reject one or more. Some Color Physicalists have thought that it gives weight to their position, e.g, Hilbert 2005.

The philosophical discussion of reduction-relations in the sciences was inspired by cases such as the alleged reduction of Newtonian mechanics to relativity theory, of chemistry to atomic physics, and of gas laws to statistical mechanics.

The second controversy has to do with the category of the physical. What exactly is it for something to be physical? What is included and what is not? If you don’t have an answer to this question, at least in outline, it is hard to formulate physicalism or assess whether it is true or false (Hempel, 1969; Montero, 1999).

The distinctions between absolute and relative time, space and motion are drawn in the first of these, following his introduction of the concept of mass and definitions pertaining to quantity of motion and force.

In fact, at least prima facie, state-independent properties cannot possibly be regarded as relational as required by (P), since to be relational is defined here as ‘depending on the state of a certain (distinct) physical system’.

According to the thesis of Humean Supervenience (HS), the world is “a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact” (Lewis 1986b: ix). That is, all there is in the world are distinct point-sized objects, which instantiate perfectly natural intrinsic properties and which are related by spatiotemporal relations.

One key technical change was the shift from the numbers used in classical mechanics to describe properties of physical systems to the associated operators or matrices used to describe related actions. … It is worth noting that the physically described aspect of the theory has lost its character of being a “substance”, both in the philosophical sense that it is no longer self-sufficient, being intrinsically and dynamically linked to the mental, and also in the colloquial sense of no longer being material. It is stripped of materiality by its character of being merely a potentiality or possibility for a future event.

The strategy that I will employ to show that GMENA is not an adequate account of disease is indeed that of disproving the selected effects theory, which is at the core of GMENA itself. … In Sect.4 and Sect.5, I will respectively delve into the relationship between the selected effects theory and these two evolutionary phenomena. … The result of this analysis will be that the selected effects theory cannot characterise certain adaptive effects in the context of scenarios involving phenotypic plasticity or negativefrequency-dependent selection as selected effects functions.

I describe how relativistic field theory generalizes the paradigm property of material systems, the possession of mass, to the requirement that they have a mass–energy–momentum density tensor T µassociated with them. … Accordingly, since g µrepresents the geometry of spacetime itself, the properties of mass, stress, energy, and momentum should not be seen as intrinsic properties of matter, but as relational properties that material systems have only in virtue of their relation to spacetime structure

Democritus, perhaps the first eliminativist, famously writes that "by convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void." … Galileo's argument is not compelling. Assuming that we can imagine a colorless world, it hardly follows that the world is colorless. From the mere fact that we would only believe something because it is reported by the senses is hardly reason to deny what our senses report. But what Galileo seems to have his sights on, and perhaps Democritus as well, is the thought that a completed scientific story of the universe will find no place for colors. … A completed physics will not mention automobiles or tables, we assume. It likely will not mention humans, either. Is there a special problem for colors? Many philosophers, most philosophers, have thought so.

There are two standard ways to interpret the ontological status of mass: it can be the measure of the quantity of matter or an intrinsic property of particles.

It is often stated that relativity theory reduces to Newtonian theory, but supposed demonstrations of this fact are almost always narrowly focused, not coming close to the level of generality to which an account of reduction aspires, which is to describe the relationship between the collec tions of all possibilities each theories allows.

Interestingly, in the ontological phenomenon of emergence, while some properties from the lower level continue in the higher level (for instance, mass, present in atoms, molecules, cells, individuals, and social systems), other lower properties are lost.

Primary qualities, such as shape, size, motion, and number, in contrast, seemed necessary and sufficient to explain the behavior of physical objects and were thereby countenanced by the new physics as the truly real. … From the perspective of physics, secondary qualities such as color were deemed explanatorily idle, and thus at best were said to be present in bodies only as complex structures of primary qualities, and so do not resemble our ideas of them.

The world as perceived by human beings is full of colour. The world as described by physical scientists is composed of colourless particles and fields.

The approach is usually characterized by the assumption that bodies carry an inherent mass and well-defined positions and velocities.

The only fundamental state parameter of the model is acceleration (kinematic quantity), which is accepted as the starting point of dynamics. The concepts of mass (dynamic characteristic of the material particle) and force (dynamic characteristic of the surroundings impact on the material particle) are derivative quantities in the model.

Throughout the 20 th century, quantum mechanics was celebrated as the ultimate proof that modern science is leaving behind deterministic mechanical materialism and admitted that it is dealing with non-material entities; moreover, the notion that our reality takes place through being observed opens up to a subjectivist denial of objective reality.

What the “new philosophers” of the seventeenth century essentially did was to reinterpret substantial form exclusively as that physical, causal entity (i.e. shape and/or texture), but to do so savaged its traditional conception that in essence substantial form was not retained at all.

Newton’s natural philosophy has to answer a third question: How do the physical objects and their properties explain the observable phenomena? As the quotation above shows, Newton answers this question by maintaining that (a) all macrophysical objects are composed of microphysical particles and that (b) all differences in macrophysical objects can be traced back to the position (arrangement) and the change of position (motion) of the microphysical particles.

Many proposals aim at drawing the funda mental ontology of the world from quantum mechanics, even though they often focus on a non fundamental theory such as nonrelativistic quantum particle mechanics.

The revolution in physics that brought us to a quantum picture of the world was so radical that it does not merely force a rethinking of physics, but metaphysics as well.

While physicalism is a dominant force in contemporary analytic philosophy, we mentioned at the outset that colour has been a persistent source for resistance by the non-physicalist.

One reason is that ordinary perception (uninformed by philosophical theory or scientific experiment) seems not to mark any distinction between colors and other properties that we take to be intrinsic, such as mass.

The central issue of Consciousness in the Physical World is Russellian monism, which claims that consciousness could be ontologically reduced to intrinsic properties of physical objects.