A Rational Cosmology: Life as a Purely Physical Process

Essay LXXIV

This is Essay LXXIV of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

In his essay, "Life," Mr. Reginald Firehammer tries the following approach to disprove the physicalist worldview regarding life, consciousness, and volition:

"The mistake made by those who are physicalists for that reason is the assumption that if we cannot be directly conscious of a thing, it cannot be. The danger of this mistake is that it leaves the door open to mysticism, because it is obvious to everyone that there are phenomena which we cannot directly perceive, but know, if no other way, at least from introspection."

The issue here is whom the pronoun "we" refers to. If "we" means any given single individual, then there are indeed things that that individual cannot be conscious of, such as the entirety of another person's life, consciousness, and direct experiences.

However, if "we" means all of the human beings who exist and have existed, then no such experience has ever been inherently barred from being fathomed by the sum of those people's knowledge. Person A is aware of his own consciousness, Person B is aware of his own consciousness, and each of them can harness this knowledge in useful ways.

The physicalist view does not state that anybody can directly perceive everything (even the time limitations on this alone make this impossible), but rather that for anything that exists, there is the potential for somebody to perceive it directly.

I would challenge the opponents of this view to name anything that they consider exclusive of such a designation, and I will be happy to demonstrate how it in fact fits it quite well.

Furthermore, Mr. Firehammer actually concedes the physicalist point in a correct statement of his, as I will endeavor to show by logical extrapolation therefrom: