 Most people are too comfortable with their worldview. They're unaware of the implications and presuppositions for their own beliefs. Everybody from the Christian to the atheist, the rationalist to the empiricist, the physicalist to the idealist. They're all quick to point out the absurd conclusions in other people's worldviews, but they often overlook the absurdities in their own. Frankly, I don't think that any worldview can escape absurdity. Given the peculiarity of the universe that we inhabit, there's no pristine belief system. Everyone comes with dirty and unsatisfactory conclusions. The most popular, superficially pristine worldview is physicalism, the idea that everything in existence is constituted by states of the physical universe and that nothing exists outside of space-time. These beliefs are very frequently coupled with hard determinism, the idea that everything has a prior cause, stretching back indefinitely, and these chains of causality are never broken. This means that from the point after the Big Bang, everything had to unfold exactly as it did. There's no random chance or free will that can somehow change how events unfold. The universe to a physicalist is akin to a billiard table. The Big Bang was a gigantic break of the pool balls and we're simply witnessing how the balls scatter about and bump into each other. It would be a neat and tidy worldview, but there's one problem. Where does conscious awareness fit into the physicalist narrative? As far as I can tell, consciousness interjects the absurd into physicalism. Any attempt at explanation results in unsatisfactory conclusions, though of course that doesn't imply that physicalism is wrong. It's remarkable how quickly a very hard-nosed and skeptical physicalist will turn into a medieval mystic when consciousness is brought up. Indeed, there seems to be an entire genre of materialists who have their own form of spirituality, something akin to pantheism. They say woo-woo-sounding things like the universe is in the process of becoming aware of itself, or we are a way for the cosmos to learn about itself. Now that sounds like some Pocahontas-type stuff, but it actually makes a great deal of sense. Follow this line of reasoning. Let's say that every part of the universe is constituted by the same type of physical stuff. We, humans, are part of the universe. We are also aware of things in the universe. Therefore, we humans are ultimately one small part of the universe that's becoming aware of itself. It's a remarkable idea. The universe is filled with mindless matter that's whirling about, crashing and exploding into other clumps of matter. But remarkably, way off in a distant galaxy, the matter bumped into itself just right and out popped self-aware, volitional clumps of matter that are walking and talking to themselves and writing about all the other clumps of matter that they interact with. It's a mindless universe creating little minds out of itself, a fact that only the little minds can comprehend. Now, if that doesn't sound outrageous or even spiritual, I don't know what does. Yet, given the premises involved with physicalism, that's the conclusion that follows. Some people see an even deeper connection with the universe through physicalism. Not only is the universe becoming conscious of itself through humans, but the entire universe plays an integral part in our daily life. Consider the implications of hard determinism. At any given moment, things are a certain way and they certainly couldn't have been otherwise. Meaning, every single moment of your life and every moment in the future was destined to be as part of a grandiose unfolding of the entire universe. Nothing happens. Nothing moves or is moved in isolation. It's all intimately connected with everything else, ultimately resulting from the Big Bang. That means when you go to the post office, every part of your trip is another effect of the same root cause. Every explosion in your car engine, every flower that you see on the street, every person that you interact with, they are all little impressions of the Big Bang. Every word you say, every feeling you feel, it was all destined to happen at that specific time and place. Thus, it shouldn't be surprising when pleasant things happen to spiritually inclined physicalists. They often attribute it to the universe. They say things like, just ask the universe and it will help you. The entire universe has created you and everything in it. So when you find a quarter on the ground or when you accidentally stub your toe, it's the story of the universe unfolding within you in a very literal way. No part of your life, conscious or otherwise, exists outside the universe and therefore it is the universe. You might even say your existence is equally as necessary as the universe's existence. After all, when we reference the universe, you are inescapably part of it and result from it. Now, I am very uncomfortable with these conclusions and they kind of struck me as absurd a few days ago. So every so often I go to the local masseuse and get a deep massage from my back because I grew too fast as a kid and now I have back problems. As I was lying there on the table with her elbows digging into my back, it struck me. What am I feeling and how can I explain it? Now, superficially I would say, well, I feel these ladies elbows massaging my back muscles. Such an explanation requires a definition for lady, elbows, massaging back muscles and even myself. And it also requires some theory of possession, i.e. I was referencing my back muscles. So without trying to define all these things, I could say much more simply, I feel forces. And this brings up the central question, where do these forces come from? From a physical standpoint, we cannot be satisfied by answering, well, the forces come from the masseuse because the chains of causality stretch back much farther. The masseuse is simply a collection of matter that's responding to external stimuli. There's no room for free will or psychological decisions. Nobody ultimately decided to be there at the moment. I was destined to lie down and she was destined to elbow me. So the only truly consistent answer is to say, the forces I feel come directly from the Big Bang. In effect, I wasn't feeling some ladies elbows. I was feeling the cosmic forces that happen to manifest themselves in that ladies elbows. In other words, the entire universe was giving me a back massage. Or maybe I should say more precisely, the entire universe was giving itself a back massage. Not only that, but it was a nearly miraculous event. Every previous state of the universe was destined to lead up to that moment. Thus it shouldn't be surprising that the spiritualist physicalists see the profound in the mundane. The entire universe leaves little impressions of itself everywhere, from the flower to the human to the gigantic galaxy a trillion light years away. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is absurd and therefore it's false. Like I said earlier, I think absurdity is inescapable. So cosmic back massages might seem a little ridiculous, but what's the alternative? Did my massage instead come from a conscious self-aware being who can mentally control parts of the universe? Well that doesn't seem particularly satisfactory either. Now I am not a physicalist, and I am drawn to appeals to common sense. In my opinion, the reason my massage wasn't cosmic is because humans aren't billiard balls, nor are we causally determined. My experience with humans makes much more sense when I can say that event happened, but it could have happened otherwise. The masseuse and I made a series of decisions, we expressed our individual conscious wills, and the universe was only a part of the equation. In other words, I find the physicalist worldview unpersuasive, because it leaves out all the mental phenomena that's involved with getting a back massage. Our experience of the world incorporates both the physical and the mental, and we can't satisfactorily eliminate one category or the other, at least to me. However, this position too comes with its own set of absurdities. Non-physicalism isn't pristine either, but that will be a topic for another time.