The objection arises: "physical universe" as opposed to what? Although the masses still subscribe to religion and spirituality, among a certain subset of the intellectual elite the concept of metaphysics, or even worse a spiritual or invisible realm, has lost its credentials and respectability: they refuse to acknowledge living in what one of their ranks described as a "demon haunted world." To them, all that is left to the universe is the "physical" universe, and so it seems redundant to specify.
Not to thrash the dead horse (although why the hell not - the horse doesn't care)... I can go so far with science as to accept the possibility that life is merely the extreme example of physical matter engaged in patterned reciprocal feedback behaviors (even though science has yet to display proof of this assumption). I cannot go so far as to ignore my own consciousness or my constant perception that I am posessed of free will if I wrote this today I would have to add many exceptions to "free". It is not simply that science has not yet worked out an explanation for these qualities. It is quite simply that these qualities do not even remotely fit in the current paradigm of the physical sciences. Only in the last few decades have scientists (and scientasters) even put forth some tentative and controversial theories on the possible agency of free will, in identifying structures in the brain where it might possibly be that the fundamental indeterminacy of quantum particles could be captured. But that's either cutting edge or pure bullshit (too soon to tell) and anyway, even if it's so, it doesn't explain anything any more than the discovery of neurons did. We've always known that the mind was the agency by which most of cognition ocurred. Knowing how the mind might be able to "choose" one electrochemical pathway over another is fascinating, but it is far and gone from understanding why it might do so, and what it might imply that it is aware of itself doing so.
So, until science provides me with a better explanation of what's going on within the boundaries of my skull, I will continue to consider science to be merely a model of an aspect of reality, and I will continue to distinguish between physical reality - loosely translated, what science can talk about, and plain old reality - the world the rest of us live in every day. which is just chock full of stuff science doesn't know anything about.
I also hearby declare my apologies for talking about "science" as if it were an entity with a will and desires, and promise only to do it occasionally in the future.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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