Physicalism
The view that everything that exists — including minds and consciousness — is ultimately physical, or wholly dependent on the physical, per the picture given by physics.
Physicalism (or materialism) is the view that everything that exists is physical, or wholly dependent on the physical — matter, energy, and their interactions per the picture given by physics, with minds and mental states either identical to, or fully generated by, physical brain processes.
It is the default working assumption across much of contemporary science and analytic philosophy, and it has real explanatory successes: a great deal of what minds do (memory, perception, damage from injury) tracks physical brain states closely and predictably. Its best-known unresolved cost is what David Chalmers named the "hard problem of consciousness" — even a complete physical account of what a brain does when it processes red light does not by itself explain why there is any subjective experience of redness accompanying it at all, rather than the same information processing happening with nobody home.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Physicalism"
- David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996), on the hard problem of consciousness as physicalism's standing cost