Bottom-Up Physicalism’s Impact and Rising Questions

Physicalism, the belief that the universe is only physical, is deterministic. This has profound implications for society.

Jean-Paul Sartre observed that life loses its meaning when you have lost the illusion of being eternal. That illusion is lost in the common understanding of physicalist bottom-up thinking. The impacts are profound. But, does today’s science support this view or presupposition? Image: wikimedia.

This is the third article in a series called Top-Down versus Bottom-Up on Medium.

Article 1: Introduction

Article 2: Pauli-Jung Collaboration

Jean-Paul Sartre mused through a fictional character in his novel “The Wall” that life loses its meaning “when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.” The sense that we are eternal and should be eternal is a near universal human experience transcending vast differences in time and culture. Today, scientists have become the primary authorities on what is real and what is true. Standing on the authoritative pedestal of remarkably successful science, some go beyond science to make pronouncements on concerns that lay outside of the bounds of science including whether there is meaning to it all. They teach that the universe is an inexplicable wonder that popped into existence with no apparent purpose or cause. That the laws that make our universe work have combined into an inexplicably fortunate series of connected coincidences that made the inexplicable emergence of life from bits of exploded stars possible. And that life had the inexplicable innate capability to transform itself into intelligent beings with the…