Beyond Physicalism
To assume that the world which we see around us and can investigate, by scientific methods or otherwise, is all that exists is surely the height of hubris. The history of human knowledge is always one of finding more and more. Any answer we find generates more questions.
It would be surprising indeed if some creatures on a small speck of dust in the spiral arm of an ordinary galaxy should be able to completely understand life, the Universe and everything. One thing which seems certain is that however much we discover and think we know, there is always something more that we do not know and maybe are not capable of knowing.
Many people believe in Physicalism which has the attraction of simplicity but which offers no explanation for consciousness and denies the existence of free will. Despite the fact that the former is our direct experience and the latter is our clear perception. Without either, life itself is just a blip in the outworking of a vast and meaningless Universe.
Yet Physicalists would rather accept this pessimistic and counter-intuitive conclusion than affirm that there may be more to the Universe than we can, or will be able to, understand. They spend much time and energy trying to find reasons why life can be meaningful despite the clear implication of their beliefs that it is not.
Nevertheless, despite it being currently unfashionable, there are people who do affirm and have affirmed that there is a greater reality beyond the world we can perceive.
Plato compared our situation with someone in a cave who couldn’t see the outside world directly but could only infer what was there by seeing shadows on the wall. The world of Ideas was inaccessible other than by rational thought and philosophical enquiry.
Immanuel Kant said that as well as the phenomenal world which we experience there is a noumenal world beyond it which cannot be known at all. We can find out all we like about the phenomenal world, by science or otherwise, but we cannot know what things are in themselves or what else might exist in the noumenal world.
Rene Descartes said that there are two kinds of stuff in the Universe, mind and matter. According to this view the brain is the part of us which helps us survive, navigate the world we are in and enables us to think. But we are not identical to our brain even though we are closely connected to it. As persons, we have freedom which is not determined by the laws of physics even if our options are limited by them. The main unanswered question in this view is how mind and material can interact.
David Chalmers shows that it is not difficult to envisage a situation where our knowledge has hard and yet invisible boundaries. For instance a person living in a virtual word would have no way of knowing, or finding out about, the outer world in which the virtual world was situated.
While these dualist and idealist views all lead to mysteries, they do not have to ignore some of our observations in order to produce a comprehensible model.
There is also a framework called “Neutral Monism” which tries to avoid the difficulties both of Dualism and Physicalism but it is unclear whether it succeeds.
There are also some, sometimes called Mysterians, who say that we simply do not have the capacity to understand consciousness.
Is it really surprising that there are things in the Cosmos that we cannot find out about?
So, how do we proceed?