After Matter, What Is “Physical”? Non-Materialist Physicalism and Experiential Empiricism at the Final Subtraction

David Pearce’s non-materialist physicalism (NMP), or physicalistic idealism, is unusually close to Experiential Empiricism (EE). Both reject materialism, both take experience seriously as fundamental rather than emergent from intrinsically non-experiential matter, both preserve the mathematical and predictive apparatus of modern physics, and neither requires mathematical Platonism. The decisive difference appears only after these agreements are granted. NMP retains physicalism: reality is mind-independent, no element of reality is absent from the mathematical formalism of an adequate physics, and the intrinsic nature of the reality so described is experiential. EE stops one step earlier. Its sole axiom is “Experience is.” Physics is retained as extraordinarily successful mathematical abstraction over experiential regularities, but no further inference from predictive structure to mind-independent ontology is licensed without evidence. This paper argues that NMP therefore represents an exceptionally instructive final near-miss: it removes non-experiential matter while retaining the externalist reconstruction that generated many of the problems EE dissolves. An ontological ablation test makes the difference precise. Remove from NMP the claim that physical formalism describes a mind-independent reality while retaining every equation, observation, prediction, experiment, and phenomenal fact. If no empirical or explanatory capacity is lost, “physical” is ontologically idle. If something is lost, that loss must be identified. The comparison is especially revealing in phenomenal binding and the problem of other minds, where NMP seeks positive physical mechanisms for problems EE argues are generated by the additional ontology itself.