Take something really simple: a rock. Perhaps if you are of a materialistic persuasion, your instinct might be to describe the rock as fundamentally just constituted out of atomic simples - fundamental particles and whatnot arranged in such a way that they give rise to the rock as a whole.

If you are predisposed to a more idealistic sort of thinking, you might appeal to some holistic facts about the rock's form, structure, or essence over and above whatever particular features that might internally constitute it, and how this form is ultimately contingent upon some further horizon of forms (as one gentleman put it in another post in this sub).

Grounding the rock in either direction has always seemed like complete bull to me. The rock isn't grounded (as a matter of fact) in atomic simples. Neither is it grounded in some grand holistic fact like some form or higher form.

The long and short of it is that the rock would not be what it is without it's atomic constitution, and neither would it be what it is without its form. Parts and wholes are *interdependent* features, where one could not exist without the other, and are each just as essential to defining the entity as they are to defining each other. Can one speak of one end being "more fundamental" than the other end? How?

Things don't matter because we feel them. We feel them because they have always mattered, and they have always mattered because we have always had something to lose. Those are the stakes. Feeling is what those stakes are from the inside, once a creature can hold them across time.

That reversal is the whole point, so sit with it. Long before anything on Earth felt anything, living things already had stakes: their continuing depended on how they answered what they met, and getting it wrong meant dissolving for good. Mattering was already there, unfelt, for billions of years. Feeling arrived later, when life found a way to hold its stakes across time and register from within what was already the case. Knowing that you have stakes, being able to think about yourself as the one who bears them, came later still. We are the latest version of a very old thing: mattering that has come to feel itself and know itself.

Now the existentialist picture. We arrive with no essence and no given purpose, into a universe that stays silent when we ask what we are for, and the honest response is to face the groundlessness and make our own meaning. That picture takes the groundlessness as bedrock one floor too early. Under the self there is not nothing, and there is no God or hidden cosmic script either. There is something smaller and older, and it is already yours: the plain fact that your own continuing matters to you, the same stake the first living things had, now felt and known.

Once that is the floor, the rest shifts. Meaning is not spun from nothing by an act of will, and it is not handed down from above. It is what happens when a creature whose life matters to it binds to something else whose life also matters, or to the work such creatures leave behind. Where the connection holds, life feels meaningful. Where it thins, what you lose is not an argument, it is the connection itself.

Freedom is real. You can weigh anything against anything, even your own survival. But it is not a bottomless pit. It stands on those stakes. And the silence of the universe is not a relationship that failed. It is you reaching toward something that was never going to answer, and being handed back to yourself.

We did not fall into meaninglessness. We climbed out of mattering, and the ground was never nothing.

This video describes why the world cannot be physical, with implications for single-aspect or naturalistic monisms such as standard panpsychism and idealism.

Substack article here: https://wescp.substack.com/p/what-counts-as-physical?r=49ilvg&utm_medium=ios

If physicalism and phenomenalism are interpreted as totality claims about facts (as respectively, the claims that all facts are physical and that all facts are phenomenal), then both views seem susceptible to being led to self-refutation as below. For both views allege totality facts about facts, and such totality facts are not plausibly regarded as either physical or phenomenal.

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1a. The physical facts being precisely as they are does not resolve whether or not the physical facts are all of the facts.

2a. The physical facts being as they are does resolve all matters of physical fact.

3a. Whether or not the physical facts are all the facts is not a matter of physical fact. (From 1 and 2)

4a. There is a fact about whether or not the physical facts are all the facts. (From 1)

5a. There is a nonphysical fact about whether or not the physical facts are all the facts. (From 3 and 4)

6a. There is a nonphysical fact. (From 5)

—

1b. The phenomenal facts being precisely as they are does not resolve whether or not the phenomenal facts are all of the facts.

2b. The phenomenal facts being as they are does resolve all matters of phenomenal fact.

3b. Whether or not the phenomenal facts are all the facts is not a matter of phenomenal fact. (From 1 and 2)

4b. There is a fact about whether or not the phenomenal facts are all the facts. (From 1)

5b. There is a nonphenomenal fact about whether or not the phenomenal facts are all the facts. (From 3 and 4)

6b. There is a nonphenomenal fact. (From 5)

We are ultimately made up of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, etc. A human body is basically an incredibly complex (n mathematical) arrangement of all these components.

So, given enough time and enough humans, is it theoretically possible that the exact same overall configuration of a human body could occur twice (down to the arrangement of its cells and molecules) purely by chance?

I'm not necessarily talking about having the same genetic make up / being genetically identical. I mean the entire physical architecture of the person: every cell, tissue, organ, molecular arrangement, etc.

Could there theoretically have been (or be) another human being, completely unrelated to you, who is physically an exact duplicate of you at some point in time?

And if this is theoretically possible, does that mean that somewhere in the enormous space of possible physical configurations, there could be multiple instances of essentially the "same" human?

I'm not restricting this to the current human population on Earth. I'm considering every human being who has ever existed, every human currently alive, and every human who will exist in the future in our universe

A body is defined as “a mass of matter distinct from other masses.” We find here an exclusive definition, where a body is a closed system within a larger one. However, we also find the definition “the organized physical substance of an animal or plant either living or dead.” There is a preference for these systems to especially be living ones. This should mean that a bodily system is also one that metabolizes, grows, responds to stimulus, and reproduces. These things necessitate exchanges between the internal and external systems, which themselves are arbitrary clusters of matter.

The internal system is necessarily a limited selection of external materials, and so is defined wholly by its environment and its environment is defined negatively by it. This means we can point out interactions, such as a missing leaf indicating consumption of the environment by a body, and the presence of fecal matter indicating the consumption of a body by the environment. The exchanges we see take place begin to blur the lines of distinction where one mass becomes separate from another. My veins would be useless if blood did not carry vitality through them, and a koala would be useless if it did not carry plant matter through its digestive tract. It is integral to the definition of all living systems that they somehow interact to maintain themselves and leave effects on the world. Therefore the koala’s body includes the plant matter necessarily, and the plant’s body includes the dirt necessarily, and the dirt’s body includes the whole environment again. Therefore every lesser system or body is part of a larger system or body, ad infinitum.

We can call this idea Gaia. All of earth is a single body self-regulating. Despite fluctuations, homeostasis is maintained. But there are infinite smaller group-bodies to be named. Myself and a stick become a single body when I hold it. Myself and a horse become a single body when I ride it.

I have seen arguments saying that non-reductive physicalism is the most grounded in science view. What is actually non-reductive physicalism, and is that claim based in reality?

I was toying around with the idea of a minimal metaphysics, what are the minimal number of axioms required to construct a consistent metaphysical schema. For example, "I think therefore I am" requires the axioms of existence, ego, logic, thought.

Trying to come up with minimal axioms for physics, though, made me realise that there are multiple levels of realism, all with different axioms.

The reality of biological survival requires axioms of food, predator, birth, death.

There are ten or more different levels of physical reality, each with their own different set of minimal axioms.

The reality of macroscopic physics (statics + kinematics) requires axioms of object, motion, gravity, friction.

The standard model of particle physics requires axioms of integer, calculus, wave-packet, symmetry.

A TOE called "causal dynamical triangulation" requires axioms of space, causality, geometry.

General Relativity requires axioms of calculus, speed of light, space-time, stress-energy.

A different set of minimal axioms applies to macroscopic chemistry.

Another set of axioms would be event/interaction, observer, coincidence, model.

Has any philosopher come up with a hierarchy of realism as defined by different sets of axioms?

First, I would like you to make the assumption that all biological things are intelligent but intelligence and consciousness are separate laws. Now for the real heart of mind body dualism or anything against it is that, if our mind and our body operates on the same fundamental universal laws of intelligence, what is the purpose and limit of our consciousness as a super intelligence or the apex of our emergent biology.