Water is wet. But is it really? A philosophical exploration

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:25:00 +0530

The title of the article might seem silly or like a clickbait. But, it's not.

I am not being facetious. Asking whether water is wet is akin to asking whether conscious experiences like wetness are real, and if they are, are they features of the thing experienced (in this case, water), or something created in your head. Such questions are worth asking, in my view, because it takes us closer to reality and truth - and I care about these things. In this pursuit, I'd like to present two contrasting philosophical views about the nature of reality and explore its core arguments, without getting too academic, while sharing my two cents about each. Let me begin.

Materialism / Physicalism

Physicalism is the philosophical view that the universe is ultimately physical in nature, meaning that it is made of things that can be ultimately measured. There is nothing over or above the physical world, and all aspects of reality are made or 'emerge' from physical stuff. Matter is the primary substance of the universe, and it can be described in quantitative terms such as spin, charge, angular momentum, mass etc (you get the point). The scientific enterprise is an offshoot of this metaphysical view!

Now, according to physicalism, matter does not contain subjective qualia like wetness or sweetness. It is meaningless to attribute qualia to matter. Reason? because it can not be measured anyways. Ascribing qualia to matter would be akin to saying that an electron is conscious or a single atom of Hydrogen contains wetness. This can never be measured. Hence, physicalists maintain that matter is quantitative and does not posses qualia.

Note: The notion that matter contains subjective qualia is a panpsychist view

But drinking water obviously gives us the "experience" of wetness (what it feels like) and

conscious experiences like pain, pleasure, taste, wetness, sweetness etc conspicuously seem to be non-physical from a physicalist standpoint - in the sense, you can't measure the length of taste, or mass of sweetness, or the angular momentum of wetness etc. So, where is wetness? In other words..........

How do materialists/physicalists account for consciousness?

By arguing that consciousness is "produced" or "caused" by the brain. In other words, many materialists claim that consciousness 'emerges' from organic matter, evidenced by the fact that the brain is correlated in conscious experiences. So, the brain must be the seat of consciousness.

The popular argument is to account for consciousness in terms of complexity and emergence. A single atom of hydrogen or oxygen may not contain wetness, but wetness emerges as an experience in your brain when water molecules sufficiently become complex.

Here are some of my observations about materialism.

A. The claim that consciousness emerges from matter is, in many ways, similar to claiming that matter emerges from consciousness. If I were to say that merely thinking intensely about a tennis ball could cause a real tennis ball to come into existence, I'll be laughed at. Yet materialism asks us to accept things in reverse - that a sufficiently complex arrangement of unconscious matter can somehow cause subjective conscious experience. Neurons are unconscious. Synapses are unconscious. Molecules are unconscious. But when billions of neurons interact in the right way. Subjective experience emerges. BOOM!

Materialists do not provide any evidence for this claim. So, this must be taken on 'FAITH'.

B. The implication of materialism is that wetness is not a property of water. I am not joking. If the brain "generates" wetness, then it implies that the quality is not innate to the thing. It's in your brain.

If your argument is,

"Vikram, you've misunderstood emergence. Wetness is an emergent property, but it's not produced in the brain. It's the property of the matter or rather, the property of the system. When the system becomes complex, the whole has properties that none of its parts possess individually and your brain just helps you experience it."

I have 2 observations about the above argument.

1. How can a system possess properties of the kind that none of its individual components possess? For example, if I stack ten books, each 5 cm tall (h), the total height of the collection (H) is 50 cm. The system has acquired a new value of the same property, height, but not a new kind of property. Height exists both in the individual books and in the collection; only its magnitude has changed.

A single atom of Hydrogen isn't liquid. A single atom of Oxygen isn't liquid. A single H₂O molecule isn't liquid. But many molecules coming together make it liquid. However, liquidity is not a new property of a different kind. It's a label we use to describe a certain state of water, which is perfectly explainable in scientific terms w.r.t the arrangement of particles. This is referred to as the weak emergence.

But the same can't be said of wetness - because it's a property of a different kind, certainly from a physicalist standpoint (because it's impossible to measure wetness quantitatively. It's an intuitive experience.)

2. Granted that wetness is indeed the property of the matter or the system (when matter becomes sufficiently complex), then it defeats physicalism in the first place as physicalism holds that matter can be described only in quantitative terms.

It also indicates that consciousness is independent of matter (wetness is already existing as a latent potential to be experienced).

Note: I am not arguing that wetness is not a property of water here. I am only arguing that this notion is inconsistent in a physicalist framework.

C. If consciousness emerges from matter, then we must technically be able to bring the dead back to life. In the dead, the matter is still present in all its glory and complexity. Yet, we have not managed to bring the dead back to life. There is a point of failure always.

In my view, materialism/physicalism is an incoherent view of reality. It's a useful enterprise that helps us understand and navigate the physical world.
This makes me wonder if consciousness and not matter is the primary. With this in mind, let us now turn to the second philosophy.

Analytic Idealism

Idealism as a philosophical doctrine is far from new. Over the centuries, it has taken many forms, from George Berkeley's subjective idealism to German idealism (as developed by Kant, Hegel etc), and more recently, analytic idealism. While each tradition offers its account of the relationship between mind and matter, I find myself particularly drawn to analytic idealism. I've been listening to a great deal of Dr. Bernardo Kastrup lately, who is the foremost proponent of analytic idealism.

Analytic idealism holds that phenomenal consciousness, as an ontological category, is fundamental not matter. Their argument goes along the following lines:

The world we inhabit is the one of colours, smells, tastes, wetness. In other words, it’s a world of experience. Anything that can be known about the world can be known only in consciousness. So, the analytic idealists argue that consciousness is the fundamental ontological primitive (The primary type of the universe) and matter is simply an appearance in it.

Now, appearance does not imply that matter is a mental construct. Some clarifications,

1. Analytic idealists don't deny the existence of an objective world.
2. They don't deny what appears to perception as matter.
3. They value the scientific enterprise. Evolution, quantum physics, neuroscience etc

However, they reject the primacy of matter over mind. They argue for a universal field of consciousness as the primary thing of the universe. [Bernardo does not attribute characteristics of a god to this field, let alone a personal God]. This is similar to how physicists argue for the existence of 17 quantum fields according to the QFT. According to QFT, the sub atomic particles are ripples of excitation in the spatially unbound quantum fields, whereas individual lives are localised consciousness fields separated by a dissociative boundary according to analytic idealists.

In this worldview, matter is just an extrinsic appearance of mental states. So, in the case of wetness, the patterns of brain activity that correlate to the feeling of wetness is how the matter (brain in this case) appears from the outside of a dissociative boundary (outside our localised field of consciousness. Someone else observing us) when one experiences wetness.

In a nutshell, your brain does not produce wetness. Nor does wetness emerge from the pattern of brain activities in your head. Instead, the pattern of brain activities is simply what a conscious internal state looks like from the outside. There is no mind-matter dualism in this perspective. (Consciousness is impossible to explain in a physicalist framework, precisely because of the mind-matter dualism.) In analytic idealism, there is just one thing - consciousness and matter is what consciousness looks like from the outside.

Naturally, one could ask

"What about the objective world when no one is around?" After all, humans evolved only some 300 thousand years ago. What about the material world then?

Acc to analytic idealism, the external world does not depend on the existence of conscious beings such as humans. While it does not depend on our existence, the external world is also ultimately an appearance in the universal field of consciousness.
Bernardo describes this field of consciousness as spontaneous, impersonal (not with a self-reflective mind attributed to god).

My thoughts about Analytic idealism

While there are multiple questions one can pose - for instance, how do we know that the universal mind is spontaneous, non-interventionist, and impersonal? Does the mind not have a body? How does dissociation create localised consciousness etc, analytic idealism, as a philosophical doctrine, is far more appealing to me than the materialist account of reality, because it recognises consciousness as the ontological primitive. Any philosophy that does not keep consciousness at the centre is doomed to give an incoherent view of reality, because it cannot, in principle, explain the hard problem of consciousness - how inert matter gives rise to conscious experience and yet, as Rene Descartes mentioned, that's the one thing we can ever be sure about.

Another aspect of analytic idealism that appeals to me is that it doesn't reject science. It simply reinterprets its findings within a consciousness-first ontological framework by reimagining the relationship between mind and matter.

Conclusion

Now, no one can truly know the ultimate nature of reality. Every worldview begins with certain ontological assumptions. For instance, the steady-state theory of the universe posited that the universe had no beginning or end, and this was accepted for generations. Today, we accept Big Bang cosmology as the prevailing account of the universe's origin. There is no guarantee that this, too, will not change in the future, because every scientific theory is ultimately our best explanation—an approximation of reality. Newton's conception of space and time, in which events unfolded against a fixed backdrop, gave way to Einstein's view of spacetime as a dynamic fabric.

The same applies to philosophy. Materialism, as a metaphysical framework, makes certain ontological assumptions about the nature of reality by placing matter at its core. But this opens a Pandora's box of problems when it comes to explaining consciousness. Analytic idealism, I am confident, has its fair share of problems as well, and I am by no means asserting that it is the best account of reality.

But I believe it's a lot more parsimonious and elegant than materialism, although it makes other ontological assumptions, just that these assumptions seem more plausible to me (consciousness being fundamental) than materialist assumptions (that inert matter giving rise to consciousness).

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