I try to have all my articles in my head when I write since I aim for them all to be consistent with each other. But if you want to focus on the physicality/zombie article, that’s fine. And I thank you for challenging me on this because these issues fascinate me, and I relish the chance to explore them further.

I think, though, you’re strawmanning what I say in that article. For one thing, you’re ignoring the final section which speaks of Weberian re-enchantment of nature, Animism 2.0, and pantheism. I agree, then, that science has evolved in its understanding of nature, and I agree also that scientists personally may regard nature as precious. But in so far as that’s so, I’d argue it’s not just because of what science itself—as methodological objectification and naturalism—entails. Scientists will implicitly have adopted a pantheistic stance towards nature, based on philosophical or quasi-religious reactions to scientific knowledge.

You strawman the article also when you say my argument implies a personal attack on scientists. I’m talking about science, not scientists. Or if you like, I’m talking about scientists in their professional capacities which differ from their political activities. I’m sure most scientists are secular humanistic, liberal, progressive environmentalists. I’d explain that by saying the progressive attitude is a result both of their education (their modern indoctrination) and of their firsthand experience of how that which is disenchanted tends to be re-enchanted.

Hence the zombie image, according to which the corpse is reanimated. But I’d defend the metaphor’s extensions too. Zombies are indeed horrific, as you say, but so is the wilderness, according to our effective “modern” response to nature (our gradual replacement of the biosphere with the technosphere). Talk is cheap here, so regardless of the lip service we’d pay to politically correct notions of how nature is precious, we act generally as consumers who prefer to cultivate the wilderness. Nietzsche explained what’s horrific about godless nature. Atheism, he said, is a cultural catastrophe, which runs counter to secular humanistic whitewashing. Cosmicist philosophers like me continue to make explicit what’s implicit in godless cultures.

But back to science itself. I agree that the objectivity or physicality of nature isn’t wholly a mental projection. Scientists have indeed discovered a lack of vitality that prehistoric animists naively posited. But science is also the cognitive stance of methodological naturalism/objectification, which began as kind of secular faith or aspiration that goes back at least to Lucretius. Our collective aim is to dominate nature in godlike fashion. Again, that has little to do with the opinions of individual scientists since I’m talking about an emergent, societal property.

Science is an institution, a tradition, and a method. The method has discovered much objecthood in nature, but in applying human reason, the method also presupposes physicality and godless order. Pragmatically, we assume nature is objective to give us a chance to domesticate the wilderness since physical phenomena can be controlled like slaves. Physical objects are quite comparable to robots or to slaves, the latter being dehumanized persons. What was once experienced childishly as an enchanted realm has ossified in the more mature, ambitious imagination and enterprise.