Physicalists assert that the world is made up of only physical substances. Dualists assert that there exist physical substances as well as nonphysical substance like the soul.
Could universal access be a necessary criterion for a substance's physicality? My intuition tells me 'yes.' A rock is a physical object. It contains the property of having universal accessibility. What I mean by this is that any given person's physical body has the possibility of being in direct causal contact with the rock. Anybody could -- and this does not mean everybody does -- touch/see/hear/taste/smell the rock. Access to this causal contact is not denied to anyone.
If it is agreed that the possibility of universal access extends only to physical objects then it is easy to show how the dualists are correct. There do exist things where only a subset of persons (agents) have access. For example, my visual experience of the computer screen. Only a subset of persons (agents) have access to this thing, the subset containing only one member. The member happens to be me, Yonza the Barbarian.
It would be near impossible for a physicalist to deny that my experience is only accessible to me (to think that modern fMRI thought-reading techniques put this notion to the test is to misunderstand the notion of accessibility. It is conceivable that technology might allow us to rig a system where your experience is identical to my experience, but just like identical twins aren't the same person, identical experiences are not the same experience). The only point of attack would be that accessibility is not a necessary feature of physical objects. I cannot think off the top of my head how anyone could clearly deny it, although, admittedly, I have not given a rigorous argument for it, and have relied merely on intuition. I suspect most people will have similar intuitions.
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