Ask A Genius 1423: From Materialism to Naturalism: Quantum-Ready Physicalism
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/09
Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner trace philosophy’s shift from classical materialism to modern physicalism and broad naturalism. Rosner defends a future quantum-informed physicalism, embraces emergent consciousness, and endorses strict naturalism while weighing simulation hypotheses. They argue coherent, rule-bound structure underlies existence, even in hypothetically simulated universes at every level.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re going to talk about materialism, then physicalism, then naturalism. So, materialism is an older philosophical view—the belief that everything that exists is matter and the interactions of matter. It has roots in ancient philosophy and gained particular prominence during the Enlightenment, when matter was considered the fundamental substrate of reality. What are your thoughts on materialism?
Rick Rosner: I support it—within the constraints of quantum mechanics. Though not current quantum mechanics. I mean future quantum mechanics that can fully contextualize information. We are not there yet. Our present quantum mechanics is not universally complete.
Matter is a kind of conspiracy of the entire universe to allow things to exist. Objects do not exist independently—they exist by the universe having an incredibly long history, a vast spatial extent, and an enormous amount of information and particle interactions. These interactions form an extensive network—a system-wide collaboration to support the persistence of entities. Everything is part of the same whole. It is a conspiracy for existence.
In a smaller universe with fewer particles, reality would be less well-defined. It would be fuzzier. You can see this in quantum terms—take the de Broglie wavelength. In a sparse, low-energy universe, quantum fuzziness dominates. You get more uncertainty, more spread in position and momentum.
What is the technical term again? Oh, right—Planck’s constant, ℏ (h-bar). I should think about this more often. Planck’s constant defines the scale at which quantum effects become significant. And effectively, the fewer the particles, the more prominent that quantum fuzziness becomes.
So, if you compare the wavelength or uncertainty radius of a proton to the average distance between protons, you see that in a dense universe, particles interact more clearly—they “exist” more robustly. In a sparser universe, existence becomes smeary. Semi-existence. A low-resolution cosmos.
Jacobsen: That’s helpful. Let’s move on to the next concept. Now, physicalism is considered the more modern version. It holds that everything is physical—or at least reducible to the physical. It is an updated materialism. The difference is that physicalism is more inclusive—it’s a framework that’s been adjusted to accommodate things like consciousness and information, which older forms of materialism often ignore or dismiss as epiphenomena.
Rosner: Physicalism reflects the fact that we’ve squeezed a lot of the traditional “woo” out of science. But consciousness is the last holdout. It’s still the most mysterious, the most “woo-like” aspect of reality that resists easy explanation. And physicalism is the modern way of saying, “Okay, everything—including consciousness—must somehow fit into the physical picture.”
If you had to write a high school essay defending physicalism, you could say something like: biology is reducible to chemistry, chemistry is reducible to physics, and physics is the bedrock. Based on that chain, you could argue that consciousness arises from the physical interactions in the brain—interactions that follow the laws of physics.
So yes, I’m okay with physicalism.
Jacobsen: One version of physicalism is reductive physicalism, where mental states are considered reducible to physical states. Another is non-reductive physicalism, where mental states depend on—but are not strictly reducible to—physical states. In other words, it allows for emergent properties arising from physical substrates.
Rosner: Yes, I’m okay with emergentism—if that’s what it’s called. I can get behind the idea that complex configurations of physical systems can give rise to phenomena—like consciousness—that aren’t apparent when looking only at the parts in isolation. Just because you accept emergentism, that does not mean you have to abandon physicalism. The two are compatible. Emergent properties can still be grounded in physical processes.
Oh—and by the way, I saw another article on astrocytes. You know, the “helper” cells in the brain. New research suggests that they might store or transmit information in ways we do not yet fully understand. I should send you the link to the paper. I’ve only just started reading it. It looks like it’s going to be a bit of a slog. I’ll probably need to focus to get through it. However, the idea is that astrocytes may help explain how the brain manages to contain and process such an enormous amount of information.
Anyway, yes, I’m fine with emergentism. Take something like “baseball-ism”: the property of being a baseball is an emergent property. It arises from specific physical arrangements of matter. If you clump matter together one way, you get a baseball. You clump it another way, you get a brain—and that brain behaves as if it has consciousness. It acts as if the person whose brain it is is conscious.
Jacobsen: Next concept: naturalism. This is a broader framework. It holds that everything that exists is natural and that explanations should involve natural properties and causes—excluding anything supernatural or spiritual.
Rosner: So basically, no magic?
Jacobsen: No metaphysical or spiritual interventions. No supernatural causes.
Rosner: Well—there is metaphysics, but it is a kind of metaphysics that hugs the boundary with physics. It is metaphysics that can be expressed in mathematical terms. But yes—as far as supernatural claims go, or anything that violates the known principles of the universe—I do not buy into any of that.
I think it is entirely plausible that we live in a fully naturalistic universe. And more than that—I think it is possible to simulate a naturalistic universe. You could build a toy universe that obeys physical laws. Sort of like The Matrix, right? In that film, people live in a simulated version of the 1980s—even though it’s far in the future.
The creators of the simulation, who are harvesting people for their mind energy or whatever, chose the ’80s for aesthetic reasons. But crucially, they didn’t simulate the entire universe in detail. They probably didn’t bother simulating life on planets 150 light-years away because the people in the simulation had no way of observing that anyway.
So it’s an abridged world—a limited simulation. They could have made it deluxe, of course, but they only needed to simulate what was necessary for the system to function and appear consistent to the people inside it. Yes, in a simulation like that, you could allow for “magic”—as long as the programmers decided to manipulate the underlying code. You could allow specific individuals to have special powers or for bullets to bend in midair. But in our world, it seems likely that we are not in a simulation.
Even if we were—though the probability is infinitesimally small—the simulation would have to be good. That means the apparent physical laws would be consistent. Even in a simulated universe, violations of naturalism would be unlikely because that would break the coherence of the system.
Jacobsen: So, to what degree would you consider yourself a naturalist?
Rosner: I don’t know. Probably 100%.
Even if we are not living in a natural universe, you can still try to trace your existence back to a natural origin. Maybe that’s not always possible—maybe there’s some unpleasant principle at work. Suppose the structure of reality is infinite regress: every universe is contained within another. In that case, perhaps the odds of none of those universes being simulated are effectively zero.
But even then—even if a simulated universe is always lurking in the background—you can still conceive of an entirely natural universe. I’d also argue that the principles of existence allow for natural universes. The rules that govern universes must permit the emergence of altogether physical, lawful, unsimulated realities.
It might be that simulated universes are inevitable at some level, but that still does not invalidate naturalism. Simulated universes are built from natural physics and grounded in existential principles. Even a simulation has to function according to some internally coherent, naturalistic laws.
Though now that I say it, maybe not. You could imagine someone building a deliberately chaotic universe that violates known principles at every level—some surreal mess where nothing behaves predictably. But even then, I think it would still require some internal rules. Rules and structure—those are fundamental to the very idea of a working system. And structure, by definition, pulls you back into naturalism.
So, could there be a form of existence that is pure, rule-breaking chaos? I do not think so. Total disorder collapses even with the possibility of observation or experience. You need consistency for anything—thought, perception, memory—to even occur.
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