Susan Blackmore writes that she is sitting perfectly still in her garden, calming her mind before turning to her work. She wonders what she is doing there. Has she chosen this spot to sit? How much is she doing, and how much is just happening? The buzzing of bees, mapping out a sonic space around her. A movement appears, something at the edge of her field of vision. The flash of an incomplete … let it go. But curiosity prevails; she glimpses the fox moving on. Thoughts bubble up: the foxes almost died out but are … let it go. The thoughts stop bubbling up. Did she do that? No, it was a trick she learned decades ago. But how does the trick work if she cannot do anything of her own accord? Her meditation over, she stands up. Her hand reaches to pick raspberries. Another flash: it felt like something she intended.

Blackmore shares these and other thoughts in a recent essay published on the Spiritual Naturalist Society website. The writing is beautiful — precise, unhurried, earned through practice. She has practiced Zen for decades and has studied consciousness professionally for even longer. She is reporting from the field, with the discipline of someone who has spent a lifetime learning to see what is actually happening rather than what she expects to find.

What she finds is richness, interdependence, and actions that seem to require intent and agency. Then she applies her intellectual framework, and everything she has just described gets flattened.

“No one is acting,” she writes. There is no self, no agency, no point. The hand reaching for the raspberries was not directed by anyone. The curiosity that turned her eyes toward the fox was not hers — it was “just stuff happening.” The felt sense that she chose, that she attended, that she practiced — all of it is confabulation, a story told after the fact by a brain that was going to do what it did regardless. She believes this because she believes that the universe is causally closed, and in a causally closed universe, consciousness can do nothing.

At one point, she writes: “Help!!!”

And later: “help, help, and again help.”

These are not rhetorical flourishes.

I want to take Blackmore seriously — perhaps more seriously than her admirers often do. She is showing us the cost of a commitment. Not the cost of a conclusion carefully arrived at through the accumulation of evidence, but the cost of a position maintained against the continuous pressure of her own experience. She has spent decades training herself not to believe what her experience so clearly shows: that she is really doing something. Her experiences keep challenging her conclusion, but her conclusion holds anyway. And the essay’s emotional register — the cries for help, the effortful insistence that none of it means anything — tells us what that holding costs.

It’s not a question of whether Blackmore is being honest. It’s a question of whether the commitment that is forcing her conclusion deserves the loyalty she has given it.

Blackmore, along with many if not most contemporary scientists and philosophers, is committed to the premise of causal closure: the principle that every physical event has a sufficient physical cause, leaving no room for nonphysical causation. Blackmore names it herself: “The universe seems to be causally closed. That is, everything that happens is caused by something else.”

Causal closure is the bedrock premise of physicalism, the idea that reality consists exclusively of physical objects and forces. The track record of physicalism as a methodological principle is unquestionably strong. Every time science has investigated a physical phenomenon, it has found a physical cause. Lightning is an electrical discharge, not divine anger. Epilepsy is a neural dysfunction, not possession.

But there is a difference between a methodological principle and a metaphysical truth. As a methodological principle, causal closure says: when investigating physical phenomena, look for physical causes. This is a research strategy, and its success is beyond dispute. As a metaphysical truth, it says something far stronger: physical causes are all there is. The physical domain is not only self-sufficient for investigation — it is self-sufficient in reality. There is nothing else.

The first claim is supported by evidence; the second is not. And the move from one to the other — elevating a productive research strategy to a comprehensive claim about the nature of reality — is not a scientific finding. It is a philosophical leap. The success of a methodology designed to detect physical causes in finding physical causes does not establish that physical causes are all there is. You don’t confirm the completeness of a net by noting that everything you’ve caught was caught by the net.

The physicalist will reply that the cumulative success of a net does eventually give you inductive reason to trust it — and that reply has real force. But inductive confidence in a methodology is not the same as metaphysical certainty about the completeness of reality, and the distance between those two things is exactly where the philosophical commitment lives.

If causal closure is an interpretation rather than a finding, the physicalist picture of the self and its agency is also an interpretation — and a remarkably expensive one. A consistent physicalist must choose among positions that each exact a steep cost.

She can deny that consciousness exists at all — but then every argument she advances against consciousness is itself an achievement of consciousness. She can grant that consciousness is real but insist it does nothing — but then she must explain why evolution sustained for millions of years an enormously costly phenomenon that contributes nothing to fitness — a question with proposed answers, none yet convincing. Or she can redefine freedom as acting in accordance with desires that are themselves fully determined — but for a contemplative practitioner who has spent decades attending to the texture of decision, this is not a resolution. It is a relabeling.

Blackmore is caught in a bind between her commitment to a worldview and what she is experiencing.

She rejects agency, the idea that she is directing her thoughts, and she declares consciousness pointless. But she continues to live as a deliberate, choosing self. She directs her attention, constructs arguments, and maintains a discipline that presupposes, at every moment, the very agency she has just denied. The contradiction is not a failure of her thinking. It is the inevitable result of a framework that cannot accommodate what it is trying to describe.

Which brings us to the question no one in these conversations wants to ask: what role does faith play in each of these positions?

A Christian holds that reality includes a dimension — transcendent, purposive, and personal — that is not accessible to empirical verification. She cannot prove God’s existence. She believes it anyway, and that belief organizes her life.

A committed physicalist like Blackmore holds that reality is exhaustively physical, that causal closure is true, that consciousness is epiphenomenal or illusory, and that the felt experience of agency is a confabulation. She cannot prove any of this. No experiment has demonstrated causal closure. No experiment has shown that consciousness does nothing. She believes it anyway, and that belief organizes her life — to the point of decades of deliberate practice aimed at training herself not to trust her own experience.

These worldviews share a common feature: they are both based on a foundational commitment that exceeds the available evidence. Neither position is sustained by the accumulation of proof. The physicalist will resist this comparison, and understandably — the cultural authority of the position depends on an asymmetry: we follow evidence; they follow faith. The physicalist’s faith is underwritten by an extraordinarily successful research program, which makes it a different kind of leap. But a leap it remains, and observing that physicalism involves its own act of faith collapses the asymmetry. To the physicalist, that collapse can feel like an attack on rationality itself. But it isn’t. It’s an observation about the logical structure of the commitment.

What distinguishes Blackmore’s faith from the Christian’s is not that it requires less credulity, but that it is more costly to maintain. The Christian has her own overrides to manage, of course — suffering reframed as purposeful, doubt treated as temptation. But these do not typically extend to denying that she is a conscious agent.

Blackmore’s faith requires the opposite: a sustained rejection of first-person evidence — evidence that deserves to be taken as seriously as anything from her laboratory research. Every meditation is further pressure of a contemplative practice that clearly reveals what her framework says cannot be there.

Read her essay again, with this in mind. She is paying close attention to what’s going on around her, to the aliveness of the garden. And then she flattens it: none of this means anything; no one is acting; it’s all pointless. That is the sound of faith, though she would never call it that.

But dropping a faith in physicalism does not mean fleeing into the exotic or the anti-scientific. Rigorous, naturalistic frameworks exist — Russellian monism, dual-aspect monism, process philosophy — that take the empirical findings of science fully seriously without requiring the practitioner to override the evidence of her own experience. They differ from one another in important ways, and each has its own difficulties. But they share the conviction that consciousness participates in the world rather than watching helplessly from the sidelines.

And here is perhaps the most important point. It is not necessary to choose among these frameworks with confidence. Thomas Nagel has argued — and I think he is right — that we are not currently in a position to achieve certainty about any comprehensive metaphysical picture. The honest intellectual posture at this moment in history is not to replace one orthodoxy with another but to hold the question open, to follow the evidence with genuine curiosity, and to resist the pressure to settle prematurely on an answer that forecloses possibilities we may not yet be equipped to see. This does not require being agnostic: I have my own inclinations, but that is not the point of this essay.

What matters is recognizing that the physicalist framework is one interpretation among several — not a deliverance of reason — and that treating it as the only option consistent with intellectual seriousness is itself an act of faith, however strenuously its adherents deny it.

Everything that Blackmore described while sitting in her garden can remain exactly as she described it. The interdependence. The absence of a Cartesian homunculus pulling levers from an inner theater. The deep embeddedness of the self in the world — porous, relational, continuous with the garden and the fox and the turning sky. None of that requires a ghost in the machine.

Nor does it require believing that there is no underlying self. She does not need to flatten what she sees. She does not need to tell herself that curiosity is no one’s, that attention is no one’s, or that decades of practice had no purpose. She does not need to cry for help.

The premise that forces that conclusion — that the universe is causally closed, that consciousness does nothing, and that the self is a confabulation — is a philosophical commitment, not a scientific finding. Other rigorous and naturalistic interpretations exist. They honor the evidence rather than overriding it.

The door has been open. It remains open now.