Epistemic Authority: What Ontology Leaves Unresolved

Abstract: Even when consciousness-first metaphysics is accepted at the level of ontology, physicalist epistemic privilege does not automatically dissolve. This essay examines the structural problem that emerges: physicalist assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge can survive the very inversion that was supposed to displace them. Earlier work in this project exposes physicalism as an unjustified default at the level of ontology. But a subtler asymmetry persists at the level of epistemology — in which modes of awareness are permitted to "know," where first-person access sits in the hierarchy of explanation, and whether contemplative evidence carries weight or merely illustration. The residue is specific: the ground's capacity for cognitive self-intimacy is still assumed to require neural substrate; third-person description retains authority over first-person experience even when the subject matter is experience; and an inherited binary — "blind ground vs. reflexively self-modeling ground" — silently constrains how the question of mind-at-large's self-intimacy can be posed. This essay diagnoses that persistence and argues that ontological inversion without epistemic revision is incomplete. Keywords: epistemic authority · ontological inversion · physicalist epistemology · first-person knowledge · contemplative evidence · cognitive self-intimacy · idealism · epistemic residue Part of the Return to Consciousness research program — 30 philosophical essays exploring consciousness-first metaphysics. Full project: https://returntoconsciousness.org/