A Rational Cosmology: Why Physicalism is Not Mysticism

This is Essay LXXXIV 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 "Consciousness Itself," Mr. Reginald Firehammer levels an accusation against the physicalist worldview that, as paradoxical as this might seem, equates it to mysticism:

"The physicalist argument that the conscious experience is an 'attribute' that just 'emerges' from physical events ignores the most important question of all, 'how?' If they answer at all, it is the same as all mystic's answer, 'somehow!' They do not know how it happens, but are sure it does. It is really an odd kind of faith and is based on a kind of paranoid fear of admitting that reality might have attributes other than those of the merely physical. It falsely equates 'objectivity' and 'physics,' as though anything physics cannot explain cannot be objectively true. It is the same mistake the Pythagoreans made in claiming the same kind of universal power of explanation for mathematics (until they discovered incommensurables which drove some of them to suicide.) It is itself a kind of mysticism -- a stubborn insistence that no evidence will be allowed that does not fit the physicalist dogma. Once accepted, it apparently makes one blind to the nature of their own consciousness (which is the only one they can know)."

What Mr. Firehammer fails to realize, however, is the division of labor between the philosopher and the scientist. The physicalist is the philosopher. His job is not to show how a given system can be explained in terms of physical phenomena, but only that it can be explained in such terms. Then, it is the job of the physicist, chemist, and biologist, i.e., the scientists, to discover the precise mechanisms, knowing, from the philosopher's reasoning, that they can and do exist.