Human Rationality, Consciousness, and Cosmology

In this final chapter, I return to where I began in Chap. 2, with the metaphysical continuity of mind and life, and show how human rationality, consciousness, and free agency are not only (i) metaphysically continuous with organismic life and with non-living uncomputable, negentropic, irreversible, processual, purposive, self-organizing, and time-unidirectional or time-asymmetric, non-equilibrium thermodynamic organic systems, from the Big Bang forward, but also (ii) primitive, irreducible facts about the natural universe, just like the four fundamental forces—gravitation, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force. Indeed, I even claim that consciousness is a fifth fundamental force. Then I conclude the book by showing how the neo-organicist approach to cosmology has an essential elective affinity with what Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog call top-down cosmology.