Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

It could also be said that a lot of our experiences — especially conscious, subjective experiences — are transcendent. They add up to more than what can be fully described in a purely objective physical level. Does it matter then, if they are ‘reduced’ (by science, or by some other means) to the level of just interactions within a purely material world? Or does it remain important to us that our thoughts and feelings are not thus reduced — that they remain somehow transcendent? Physicalism, and reductionism in general, seems determined to find material explanations.

Another thought is that when we map the world (such as by way of devising abstract truths) then we are, in a sense, creating a transcendent realm of truth, even if none had existed before. There are maps and there are maps! So we have to ask, just what does correspondence mean when it comes to our map-making? A phenomenological view of the world is on the verge of suggesting that map-making is really not possible — that there is only experience.

Should we then follow the ways of the physicalist and renounce the search for anything other than basic objective reality? At the moment our worlds of consciousness and mysterianism seem to be resisting! We still acknowledge other types of truth-seeking — beyond the empirical and the rational — that we call upon to make sense of those fundamental questions about what grounds the world of experience.

Consciousness emerges, perhaps, because we

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