Abstract

If the mind of a sentient being would be reducible to its structure, any identical structure should be equally sentient. Based on physics, I prove that this thesis has two unexpected consequences: 1) There would be an inflation of minds, living in apparently different worlds. 2) The content of the mind would be independent of the properties of the external world. That is, minds would be unable to know anything about the world. Since this contradicts empirical observations, structure alone is insufficient for sentient experience. This excludes the purely physicalist approaches to physics and consciousness. For physics to be as we know it, all physical properties have to be grounded in something sentiential.