with the well-known physicist Sean Carroll on “the physics of consciousness” gives us a great example of a reductive physicalist view of consciousness and the world around us.
A reductive physicalist ontology is “flat.” As captured by Sean Carroll's description, it only considers the bottom of the layers of nature to be truly real. As John Vervaeke demonstrates in his excellent talk at last year’s UTOK Consilience Conference, Leveling Up, there are many reasons why that a flat ontology is philosophically misguided. Here I will only focus on one key aspect, which shows why a flat ontology misconstrues “reality” for that which is continuous and most widely shared.
To be consistent, he should have just said: “Everything is really just one thing, the same thing, the singular energy superforce that simultaneously is everything and causes everything to be. We can talk about things as being different because it is useful. That is, the Standard Theory of elementary particle physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology all give us useful categories, but they are not real in a fundamental way.
A common term for understanding differentiation is emergence. Extended naturalism gives us a coherent way for understanding emergence. Emergence does come up in the interview with Carroll. When asked about it, he gave the example that the fluidity of the air is an emergent property that is not associated with the specific molecules that make it up. This is what, there are two other kinds of emergence, and both have more ontological significance than aggregate emergence.