It’s important to realize the obvious: that every human problem, every malady, every concern, every evil, is at root simply a suboptimal arrangement of atoms and molecules. If this sounds quasi-spiritual, it’s because it is — for millennia, pre-scientific humans have attributed all ills to various agents — the gods, magicians, and other humans. This is because these ills demand an explanation, and we didn’t have a plausible one, so we made it up. Now, at least in the abstract, we have a concrete, very likely correct answer: suboptimal atomic arrangements.

This realization is neither trivial nor too broad to be useless. If your problems are caused by the gods (that some people sadly still believe in…), then to solve them, you either need to give up, on engage in rituals (prayer, sacrifice, etc.) that have an empirical impact of precisely zero. The ultimate promise is that the gods or God will come at the end of time to make everything better. Unfortunately (?) for us, that will never happen.

The alternative is to slash all spirits from your worldview and model the world as a game board where all the pieces are humans. This too isn’t quite correct, as many who avoid the error of deification of Nature fall right into the trap of the fundamental attribution error, where everything that goes right or wrong becomes some human’s fault or credit. The attribution error is absolutely omnipresent in politics, because invoking it also invokes human political emotions that a leader can easily use to manipulate everyone who has never heard of the error. Since this is practically everyone, it’s politically rational to exploit it to its fullest, and a self-reinforcing feedback loop of error is created. Excuse me, but there are a lot of relevant forces in this world besides deliberate human choice. The shared biases of all human beings come to mind, as do biological realities such as the existence of malaria, and economic realities such as centralized manufacturing.

One sidenote on the notion that “all ills are caused by suboptimal atomic arrangements”. People will have different definitions of what is suboptimal, that is patently obvious. That doesn’t change the fact the subjective personal ills are caused by suboptimal atomic rearrangements, or that there’s a huge space in the center of the Venn diagram of shared humans goals that is specified by certain specific atomic arrangements. Simply because we can’t specify all these arrangements doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

Despite my recognition of a physicalist basis to all problems, I do not advocate a universal convergence towards One True Atomic Pattern or other such absolutist nonsense. I simply wish us to recognize that all shared human problems can be ultimately diagnosed and remedied using the scientific method plus remedial effort: use tests to determine the suboptimal atomic arrangements, then devise engineering solutions to rearrange current arrangements into a more optimal state. This holds true for mental phenomena as well as phenomena in the external world — my brain is “the external world” for others and it is entirely physical. Those who advocate an aphysical basis for consciousness are making the same mystical mistakes that our ancestors have yawn-inducingly made for thousands of years. I am special even if my consciousness has a purely physical basis.