Quadrants of the Corporeal: Reflections On the Foundations of Experience

The universe has the resources to create conscious beings with cognitive powers. We are the living proof. But what if these resources are limited in such a way that the universe cannot create a being with sufficient cognitive powers to fully comprehend any corporeal object—not acorns or water molecules, let alone intelligent animals. Quadrants of the Corporeal: Reflections on the Foundations of Experience presents reasons to believe that precisely this is the case, and explains why this cosmic fact makes “the mind-body problem” or “the hard problem of consciousness” impossible to solve. No being that this universe can make can understand what makes conscious beings conscious.