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After physicalism, what’s next?
If physicalism is fading, what next? How might science, our cultural drivers, and our everyday lives be changed if physicalism erodes as our culture’s primary answer to the big questions?
I wrote a post recently that suggested metaphysical physicalism (metaphysicalism?) may be fading. Matthew Whitely on Medium recently wrote a post titled The Scientific Reformation is Over. The subtitle asked a question that I have pondered since: What next?
The search for answers, and ultimately, truth
We don’t know when humans first began to ponder the big questions. Who are we? How did we get here? Why are we here? How did all this begin? Why is there anything at all? What’s it made of and how does it work? Does any of this mean anything? It’s a search for facts, for answers, but ultimately, it’s a search for truth.
Ancient peoples created many different stories, some of which we call myths, to answer these questions. The Greeks were most influential in developing ways of thinking philosophically and rationally about the big questions. These ideas and their process evolved into a religiously dominated system for finding and defending answers. That was eroded and the enforcement of these ideas largely eliminated by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.
