A Rational Cosmology: Life as a Purely Physical Process

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:

"An organism is not just a piece of complex matter with a process running on or in it. An organism is an integration of physical substance and a process that maintains it as an organism. All that an organism does, as an organism, it does because it is living. The life process, as a process of the organism, is a purely physical process, obeying all the laws of physics, and requires the physical organism to function. One of the requirements of the life process (determined by its nature) is it must maintain the integrity of the physical organism it is the life of."

If the life process is a purely physical process, then life must be purely physical! The very phrase, "Life is a physical process" implies two things; the concept, "life," is a subcategory of the concept "process," and the concept "life" possesses the attribute, "physical." Just as inevitable would be the conclusion drawn from the phrase, "Spike is a black dog," that Spike possesses the attribute, "black."

Furthermore, some of Mr. Firehammer's other accurate observations are fully reconcilable with the physicalist worldview, provided a certain clarification of terms:

"Life does not exist independently of the organism, but it is the life, the self-generated and self-sustained process that creates (grows) and sustains the organisms as a living entity. An organism is not just a physical entity that behaves in an unusual way. An organism is a unique kind of existent. An organism not only ceases to be an organism if the life process ceases, it begins immediately to change physically in response to the physical laws that govern the behavior of the merely physical."

This is another way of stating that an organism possesses a level of organization capable of resisting the external forces that would cause the organism to break down. Once this level of organization is somehow disrupted or destroyed, what was formerly the organism now becomes inert matter and is capable of being affected by those destructive forces without exhibiting an appropriate response to them.

Why this fact precludes the organism from being "just a physical entity," however, is not proved by Mr. Firehammer. His definition of the "physical" seems to encompass only the outside processes that work to impose themselves on the organism, and not the processes of the organism that work to counter this imposition and thus maintain the organism. Yet this same distinction is contradicted by Mr. Firehammer's own admission that life is a "purely physical process."

Read other parts of "A Rational Cosmology" by clicking here.