I don't think you hit a nerve; your post is not only confusing, but it seems wrong. > Is it not pure speculation to assume that the world was present before li

I don't think you hit a nerve; your post is not only confusing, but it seems wrong. > Is it not pure speculation to assume that the world was present before living beings inhabited it? You need to carefully define terms here. What do you mean by "world," what do you mean by "living beings," and what do you mean by "inhabited." In any case, the answer to the question you pose is almost certainly answerable in the negative. > But strong questions about ontological declarations of life from purely physicalist material speculative histories are not only hard to answer, they assume more than they reveal. I'm not a materialist, but this isn't correct. In fact, a major criticism of physicalism is that it's too reductive -- not that it has no explanatory power. It has a lot of it; that's partly why most professional philosophers are materialists.