if this universe is a physical universe, and I submit that it is, then since a physical universe is nothing more and nothing less than the totality of all that exists, then all that exists must without exception likewise be physical
It further goes without saying that the material bits of this universe cannot rearrange or reconfigure themselves into something that does not exist
@rick , I do think that you are saying something that is interesting and worth taking up. I am more interested in the broader conversation these doubts are indexing vs. your actual position though.
What you are espousing here seems to be a kind of extreme physical monism that claims that all things which exist are physical. Are you on the same page as Richard in this respect (barring the position on feelings)?
For me the problem with a purely physicalist model (for one) is that it does not adequately capture and describe consciousness, states of mind and imaginary objects. These would include feeling fuelled states as well as other more conventional intangibles: mythical creatures, abstract concepts, imaginary numbers and the like.
The fictional detective I could make up right now and the unicorn I say I can visualise in my minds eye - in what way can they be said to exist in the universe? Yes, you could say they are accompanied by brain activity but that is not a substantive and sufficient explanation. Furthermore I would say that this explanation is reductive and co-relative and that makes a claim of false equivalence between mind and matter.
I’m not proposing the existence of a separate substance of mind or spirit of course. I just think the way things like feelings emerge from matter isn’t as clear as we would like to pretend it is.
Another thing to remember about feelings is that they don’t occur in isolation like the feeling of pain. Instead they create a ‘world’ a ‘reality’ of ‘me’ which one can roughly say is comparable to a dream-state. It is this dream state that one wakes up from in actual freedom and the feeling is roughly analogous to waking up from sleep. In what way is a dream-state on an equal footing physically with an awake state? Is the dreamer kicking a football the same as an awake person kicking a football? Knowing there is electrical activity in the brain tells us close to nothing as literally any experience a human being has is accompanied by electrical activity in the brain.
My position is monistic but without your extreme physicalism and one that leaves some room for a sort of duality as I don’t think consciousness, thoughts, memories and feelings and can be easily be reduced to matter. Furthermore I would say that ‘me’ and ‘feeling being’ does not exist in a way that is on par with consciousness sans feelings or an actually free consciousness - to say nothing of tables and chairs. A physicalist explanation might be more elegant in the sense one could say something either exists or does not exist (as you seem to be doing). Emotions did exist once, but now they don’t now and they arose from matter in a similar way to how consciousness and thought arose from it. But I think of this approach is mechanistic in other ways and is somewhat like taking a sledgehammer to existence (plus all my objections already mentioned). I can’t pretend that I know there is any one satisfactory answer that is correct - whether it comes from the AFT or not. In terms of ultimate knowability of this stuff will I change my tune after MOL AF? Maybe or maybe not.
Where I might agree with you is that in the elaboration of actual freedom and its implications there may be some explaining and fine-tuning to do. I would submit that the moment we seek to make claims about humanity at large and the cosmos beyond the purview of the PCE or the actual freedom experience, we are venturing into the territory of the sciences, metaphysics and philosophy (and other conventional disciplines) - whether we like it or not. Also when I read the AFT there seem to be many instances where in explicit and implicit ways these disciplines are invoked to explain AF, so it has definitely been done. Rather than these considerations being antithetical to actual freedom as Richard seems to suggest, I wonder whether they are inevitable if we are going to unpack all the implications of actual freedom and give an account that is coherent – especially to other feeling beings we would like to share our experience of the world with. This would need to be done without watering down actualism and actual freedom and without turning it into ‘a philosophy’ or without compromising what it is in essence.
My suggestion is that it would need to start with experience and everything needs to flow on from there. Actual freedom is truly amazing, magical and unprecedented. It’s astounding to me how ‘me’ along with ‘feelings’ just vanished just like Richard said, leaving me in this glorious, wondrous world, so pure and still. There is something irreducible about this. Something that just cannot be communicated adequately IMO. The answer is in the living of it.
As for all the other stuff - In how many ways can AF be explained? What are its implications for humanity and the cosmos? What can we say with certainty or be somewhat doubtful of based on this? These are all interesting questions and I don’t think the answers are all known and therefore closed for any further thinking about it.