Some themes appear to exert a magnetic pull on my attention: I keep coming back to them and often feel like I’m on a treadmill. It’s hard to figure out why: why am I compelled to keep these topics alive? A recent insight ties some of it together.
Years ago, I wrote a post called A Physics-based Diet Plan. The premise is that humans do not create or destroy atoms within their bodies, and that the energetics are too minuscule to register measurable mass–energy conversion. As such, a person’s mass change—as measured on a bathroom scale, for instance—from one day to the next is completely captured by the difference of mass inputs and mass outputs. It’s just atoms in and out.
Now, the human body has many channels for mass loss. Bathroom functions, breathing (net carbon/water loss really adds up!), and perspiration being the main mechanisms. Mass gain is almost entirely through our pie-holes. And entry via that channel is almost always facilitated by a hand delivering food to the mouth under the control of a brain. If you want to lose weight, the directive is simple: eat less and breathe more. In other words: diet and exercise. I know: radical, right? Every successful program for weight loss involves essentially this same advice, in various guises. That’s because it’s just atoms in every single case, at the foundational level. But oh boy, you wouldn’t believe the resistance I get to this framing. Let’s talk about that…
AI Warning
Before getting underway, I thought I would point out that I typed “do the math physics diet” into Google so that I might review what I wrote 12 years ago. The AI summary at the top said:
The “Do the Math” physics diet, popularized by mathematician Steven Strogatz at the University of California San Diego, is a concept that applies principles of physics to weight loss. It emphasizes that weight loss is fundamentally about managing energy balance, specifically calories in versus calories out.
The UCSD part is okay, but Steven who? Googling “Steven Strogatz UCSD” delivered this AI summary: “Steven Strogatz is not affiliated with UC San Diego. He is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University.” Great; I appreciate the consistency! Can’t spell fail without AI.
But most infuriating to me is that my emphasis was on mass balance, and explicitly not calorie-counting! It serves as a warning to not trust AI to correctly represent ideas.
Restated
Perhaps it helps to by crystal clear here. If a weight measurement one day indicates a gain of exactly one kilogram from the day before (and we trust the scale), then your body added one kilogram more mass than it removed. Maybe food and drink added to 2 kg and poop, pee, net exhalation, and perspiration added to 1 kg. Or it might have been 3 in, 2 out. Or 3.14159265359 kg in (I did call it a pi-hole after all) must indicate 2.14159265359 kg out. [Actually, thermal losses (radiated, convected, conducted) and associated mass–energy conversion via E = mc² would make it 2.14159265349 kg out. I hope you’ll forgive me for leaving this wrinkle out of the main story. And if your scale is that good, I call BS.]
The math can’t work any other way. Accounting for every atom (and its mass) that comes in or goes out is bound to add up to the net change…every time.
Eating more and/or breathing (exercising) less leads to weight gain. Just as gravity never grants an exception to humans, eating less and/or breathing more leads to weight loss…every time. When I see my own weight creeping up by a kilogram or two, I can generally fix it in a day or two by skipping a meal or two. I let myself experience hunger! My stomach may begin to growl and throw a tantrum, but it shuts up and I carry on. I let it cry itself out in a tough-love relationship. We’re still on good terms.
Objections
I will say that it is rare not to get pushback—often vigorous—when I present this foundation. That, to me is fascinating, and I think part of why I return to it—not so much in my blog posts, but in conversations over the years. In fact, it’s dicey enough that I have to exercise judgment on whether I can “go there:” can this person handle the strain of mass conservation: of matter over mind?
I would be totally fine with objections of the sort: “Yes, that is unassailably true, and I’m not arguing with the basis. But many complicated elements come into play in terms of how we experience the phenomenon.” Absolutely. Physiology is complex, and psychology even more so. This does not change the basic statement that at the end of the day, mass change can be no more or less than the balance of mass in vs. mass out, and that the mass-in part is especially controllable.
Objections take many varieties. Almost inevitably—as we saw in Google’s AI interpretation above—the goalposts are changed to counting calories rather than mass. Try as I might to steer it back to mass, I sometimes just can’t land that point, to my astonishment. Another ubiquitous response is a variant of “but I’m different; my metabolism won’t allow me to skip a meal; I need protein right now; you’re lucky; not everyone is the same.” Granted, I can’t know another’s experience, and thus gauge how much of the difficulty is physiological vs. psychological. Still, everyone is made of atoms. Everyone obeys mass conservation. To learn otherwise would be huge news!
Yes: I can agree that physiology varies. For example, two different genes are responsible for both the production and detection of the odd odor from asparagus in urine. That makes four possible types of people combining production/smelling capacity. To some people, cilantro tastes like dish soap. Some don’t metabolize lactose. I don’t happen to like cucumber or watermelon (same base flavor), or raw tomatoes (though relish cooked tomatoes). Some physiologies handle excess food differently in terms of fat storage, or burning fat. Lactose processing varies genetically. Psychologies are even more varied.
None of that changes basic mass conservation or the fact that we are made of atoms.
The Crux, and Thematic Root
In the introduction, I mentioned that some topics keep drawing me in. I didn’t list them before, but the three are (linked to Do the Math posts):
- Mass balance in diet
- Food makes babies
- Consciousness, free will, determinism, mind, soul, etc.
All of these can produce sparks. The first two are related to food and our experience of it. The third relates to experience more generally. All touch on the atomic, animal, evolved nature of humans, and all offer enough complexity to obscure the basics.
Challenging Mythology
When I constructed a list of mythologies of modernity, basically all of them reveal blind spots or distortions about how we humans perceive ourselves. We’re not very reliable when it comes to self-assessment. The three items above also—deep down—get at what it is to be human. I sense that the fierce objections these topics generate stem from the same place: wanting to believe (and feeling) that we are more than atoms, animals, corporeal.
And this is why I am compelled to keep coming back. How we perceive ourselves is of critical importance to how we behave in the world. It colors every relationship, and sours many of them (just as I am in danger of doing by harping on such unpopular themes).
A position of humility seems far more likely to work well within the Community of Life, forging strong, respectful, two-way relationships. Exploitation and extreme power differential is no way to form meaningful, lasting, mutually-beneficial bonds. Our propensity for crafting grossly asymmetric, exploitative relationships is a one-way ticket to extinction.
Thus, I keep hammering at the hubris of specialness, or transcendence. Ultimate humility is accepting that we are dirt. We are atoms. We are material. We are corporeal. Warning: achieving humility might require a bit of humiliation. Creating exceptions (my body is different; the rules do not apply to me; humans are in control unlike animals; we have a non-material consciousness, soul, transcendent self) is expected behavior for members of the human supremacist club.
I’ve said multiple times that I’m sick of living in the Human Reich. This is why I repeatedly challenge attitudes that elevate humans above the rest. It’s a very dangerous and destructive place to be.
The Unimaginable Gulf
I’ll wedge this bit in, even if it’s not perfectly in the flow… Picture a barren, lifeless hunk of cooling lava that has just broken the surface of the ocean as new land. Compare this to a tract of living tropical rainforest an ocean away. In pointing out the material basis for humans, I’m suggesting that despite radically different appearances, the foundations are essentially the same: rock/atoms/physics. Standing on the volcanic island (i.e., a scientist studying fundamental interactions), it might be possible to know essentially all there is to know about the lava (and there’s nothing else), yet hopeless to use the same tools to track the complexity of the rainforest. They seem to be entirely disconnected from each other. Moreover, from the island, the rainforest is well over the horizon and out of sight. Yet, they are still connected by an unimaginable expanse of rock that runs under the ocean. Earth turns out to be round, even if—rather understandably given its vastness—it looks extremely flat to our eyes (i.e., to direct experience).
I’m basically saying that the two rather different-seeming realms are not different planets; are not using different rules; are made of the same stuff. But the analogy fails in that when comparing inanimate to animate arrangements, we simultaneously have access to both rudimentary physics and complex biology: both are on full display. What’s more, we find wherever we look that life is made of the same stuff, obeying the same rules—even if we have to throw our hands up at the unfathomable complexity of Life, honed over billions of years. The striking commonality is a major hint that is very awkward to deny!
It’s like we have one foot in each domain, and it takes a big stretch to recognize that uncharted connective tissue joins the two. Instead, we tend to imagine we’re split into distinct categories (lifeless material vs. living “otherness”). The sheer size of the gulf is what does it. We can’t wrap our meat-brains around it—but that fact is hardly surprising, of course.
While some perceive the Necker Cube so that my assessment is reductionist and unimaginative, it is also possible to view the same situation through an expansivist lens: admitting that real-world complexity far outpaces our imaginative capacity, and stretching to allow that disparate-seeming phenomena could actually all be connected in a round-earth continuum—despite intuitive first-impressions based on over-the-horizon separation. It’s a matter of looking inward vs. outward—seeming reductionist if looking toward the small constituents; but once there amazingly expansive views avail looking out—just turn around! At some level, my position is that of the irrational dreamer: suspecting a twisted series of connections hidden from complete, provable view. It’s never hard to find folks unwilling to swallow that too-expansive-for-our-brains perspective, based on how things seem to be in our limited experience using limited sensory and processing tools.
Ultimate Truth
Despite impressions, I am less interested in obtaining Ultimate Truth than might be assumed. Rather than proselytizing that a material basis is the one right way to believe, I’m just saying that we have insufficient justification for fabricating something more flattering, and that the associated humility of materialism can be a positive step for humanity. For those among us who accept a material aspect to the universe (i.e., atoms are real—and not every philosopher does), then the most parsimonious, non-dualist stance—and one against which we have zero evidence—is that humans are constructed of atoms in fabulous arrangements governed by evolutionary feedback into complex material entities obeying physics with no override or intervention capability. Every experience or feeling we have rides on this basis, utterly dependent upon it (try feeling anything without involving atoms!).
Part of the challenge is to make clear that our perceptions of the world—and who we are—all filter through limited meat-brains, and that lack of a full, detailed account for how atoms and electromagnetism create a sensation of love does not constitute a valid refutation of an underlying material basis. In other words, our unavoidable cognitive limitation when it comes to stitching it all together is hardly reason to reject the most unflattering material account of our existence. We can’t expect too much of our spare capacity, after all.
Atoms are clearly important to who we are. We could not exist without them, and their arrangements clearly are vitally important as well (i.e., a blender quickly destroys these intricate vital relationships). Why not accept that the same atoms and interactions are capable of extraordinary complexity? What is threatened, exactly (besides supremacist mythology, obviously)? Assuredly, it’s a stretch too big for our brains to connect all the dots. But does that constitute justifiable grounds for facile short-cuts or end-runs? The way I see it, demanding an explanation that fits in brains not adapted for that purpose is tempting but not justified: again putting humans first. We possess neither the right nor the hardware to know Ultimate Truth. But the allure of that trap is very difficult to resist or escape.
Note: I will be away from internet access until July 6, so comments will sit in the queue until then. My apologies for the delay, but please don’t let it stop you from contributing.
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Las religiones, especialmente las monoteístas, hicieron mucho daño al vendemos la idea de que éramos especiales, de que teníamos derecho sobre la vida del resto de criaturas terrestres. Entiendo que Daniel Quinn fuera tan beligerante contra ellas y entiendo que tú pienses que corremos el riesgo de perder apoyos si hacemos lo mismo, al fin y al cabo la mayoría de las personas creen en un único Dios ahora. Pero ¿Qué clase de apoyo vamos a obtener de gente que se cree superior? Necesitamos un cambio de visión para cambiar las cosas y eso pasa por romper con las idea de que somos especiales, que es lo que te venden todas las religiones, hacerlo es doloroso, sí, pero necesario.
Google translate: Religions, especially monotheistic ones, did a lot of harm by selling us the idea that we were special, that we had a right to the lives of all other creatures on Earth. I understand why Daniel Quinn was so belligerent against them, and I understand that you think we risk losing support if we do the same. After all, most people now believe in one God. But what kind of support are we going to get from people who think they're superior? We need a change of perspective to change things, and that means breaking with the idea that we're special, which is what all religions sell you. Doing so is painful, yes, but necessary.
One of my favorite aspects of the various 'teachings' of Robert Sapolsky, champion of the position that we do NOT have free will, is that we are each, in every moment, the sum of everything that has happened, from the moment that our planet coalesced out of the miasma to the snack we just swallowed, and that none of it was in our control (what is the history that led to you being the kind of person who would 'choose' to have that particular snack at that particular moment?) We cannot 'choose' to change, yet we can be changed (by circumstances that are not under our control). It is a frightening prospect (that is, if you turned out to be the kind of person who is frightened by such prospects).
I only bring this up as a way to offer you some emotional support (should you be the kind of person who needs or is pleased to receive such support) for your distress (if it is distress) at the inevitability (given the broad range of possible responses to your points that are enabled by our lack of free will) of resistance to your points.
You, being you, will continue to be you, of that (I being me) I am certain.
Slog on, sir!
Although there is no objective justification for putting humans at the top of our concerns or of pretending that humans are special, there is subjective justification. We are each more likely to think of relatives and friends as special, better than other humans and other life forms. So it's not much of a leap to think that humans are better, are of more importance, than other life forms. Again, no objective justification for it, but understandable, perhaps. From a first principles basis, nothing really matters at all. Not even matter.
You're absolutely right about people's resistance to being told that the laws of physics apply to their obesity. This has bedevilled me for the whole of my medical career and I suspect most other physicians would say the same.
Early in my career, when I tried to talk to people about this, I got a wide range of responses including "I have big bones" (while seated legs apart to accommodate the quivering mass of belly fat), "I've always been this weight" (no you haven't, you weren't born obese), "I hardly eat anything", or most frustratingly, a sort of mantra which goes "I don't eat X and I don't eat Y and I don't eat Z" and can last for several minutes if unchecked. I would say that less than 1 in 20 obese people will admit "I eat too much".
So I eventually found a way round it which is to show patients a graph comparing their weight now with their weight previously. In most cases it's a 45 degree slope upwards, and it's very difficult to argue against it, which saves me a lot of time in the office, but I still don't know if patients truly internalise what the graph is telling them.
And sometimes, if I think they are sufficiently receptive, I tell them to get a very large, active dog which they have to walk every day in all weathers whether they feel like it or not. That worked for me.
Here's an experimental proposal: use high-resolution cameras to capture a large crowd at a sporting event or some such and analyze how much food goes into mouths along with some estimate of body size. It doesn't have to be exact to at least suss out whether larger people put more food in their mouths during the event—as I suspect they do.
I see you are still on your "I am the most humble Luciferian around," shtick. You take your philosophical materialism as the one TRUE perspective. Then you add in your self loathing (probably from your recognition that humanity is destroying something beautiful and sacred ) where you describe yourself as a mindless, soulless, bag of chemicals with no free will.
Take this statement you made
"that lack of a full, detailed account for how atoms and electromagnetism create a sensation of love does not constitute a valid refutation of an underlying material basis."
hilarious, the Luciferian says you must take his explanation on faith.
Then there is this
"Assuredly, it’s a stretch too big for our brains to connect all the dots. But does that constitute justifiable grounds for facile short-cuts or end-runs? "
Yes it does. We live in a reality that is more complex than can be understood, we have no choice but to use short-cut and end runs. Maybe you should accept that reality? And by the way your philosophical materialism is a short cut and an end run around reality, but you refuse to accept that.
Not sure how your fairly reasonable arguments about logical shortcuts leads you to the unreasonable conclusion that Tom is a "Luciferian."
I can accept that it's reasonable to bundle all the mystery and unknowable parts of existence together and plonk them inside a wrapper labelled "God" or "gods." This doesn't give believers in a particular set of ancient texts the right to claim that their interpretation of the "Will" of that bundle of unknowables is the right one, especially when that interpretation has just about nothing to say about humanity's current ecological predicament.
Do you generally just dislike Tom's argument or do you have some specific counter argument?
I come back to this again, again, again and again.
Transcendence is often associated with Abrahamic religions, that is, with a creator god.
So the piece about the lava island was a little encouraging to finally put it out there.
Why did God create such a big universe, such an enormous complexity of life, such an innumerable number of possible interactions, such complex, differentiated bodies, cells, organs, organelles, molecules? Why didn't he create plastic or one of those thousands of artificial substances that we have synthesized? Why all this? From the perspective of transcendent entities, it would be enough to be a cloud of hydrogen atoms flying and communicating with each other, well, it's hard to imagine, then just sand people, whose entire body is SiO2 compounds. Without organs, without systems, because why would they be needed when there is an immaterial self that already controls everything. The soul went into the sand and he became a man.
Looking at all the diversity of the world, at all the incredible complexity, relation and adaptation, it is difficult to understand why add a soul?
Another interesting point is, if the soul makes us alive and conscious, where does it disappear to in people who lose consciousness or those who lie in a coma?
Why does a person need to eat, why such a variety of organisms? Why is all this needed in the world of the transcendent?
I've pondered many of the same questions when I used to try to make sense of my prior belief in a creator god. I can never go back because none of the questions has an answer. There is no reason I can think of why a creator would make the world discoverable and give a creature the means to discover it, down to the quarks and below, and the "rules" that govern those pieces. And for an entity with infinite power, why are there so many dodgy design elements in species? None of my prior beliefs make any sense whatsoever. So I'll never go back to them (unless my brain is injured).
Why did God put our universe in a black hole?
This is unassailably true and I'm not arguing with the basis. But you can easily account for where people's objections are comeling from within this simple physically fundamental view.
It comes down to respiratory rate, which is driven in the brain by accumulation of CO2 in the blood, and thus by metabolic rate (which produces CO2 from other carbon-containing molecules). As we all know, respiratory rate is only very occasionally, and within strict limits, subject to voluntary control.This is where, to my mind, the variations of physiology most obviously meets the physics.
When someone says it's harder for them to lose weight, this very plausibly can be interpreted as saying that relative to a given activity level, they convert less carbon to CO2 and breathe less carbon out. All of which is subject to many levels of physiological regulation from genes to hormones. This doesn't mean anything you've said is in any way untrue. But it also really is true that people lose atoms (via respiration) at very different rates due to entirely non-voluntary factors and at identical activity levels due to physiological variation.
Before addressing causes of variation in metabolic "efficiency," I'll just point out that if person A needs half the CO2 reactions as person B for the same activity, then person A needs to eat less than person B. Each person has their own balance, so that the eat less/breathe more rule for mass loss applies to every human made of atoms.
I would doubt that mitochondria (metabolic units within cells) vary much from person to person in efficiency. A heavier person *will* have to expend more energy to climb stairs, and also has a larger surface area for thermal regulation. The first (gravity) scales linearly with mass, but thermal loss is going to be closer to a 2/3 power (surface area). In any case, yes: variations manifest so that two individuals have have different food intake requirements for the same "apparent" activity level. But whatever the individual baseline, the mass balance rule applies in full force.
Agreed. Everyone has their own balance and definitely the eat less/breathe more rule applies universally. I just think giving due recognition to physiological variance is helpful because it shows why there really is so much difficulty around this. While at the same time, the physics shows why that difficulty is always ultimately defeatable if sufficient measures are taken.
But just to clarify, the variation in metabolic rate between people is not primarily related to differences in metabolic or mitochondrial "efficiency". It is due to differences in basal level of metabolic activity. In other words, most of our energy is not expended on what we would consider "exertion", but on what we do "at rest". And what we do "at rest" is a huge number of cellular functions, all of which take place at different rates in different people. To give just one example, there is evidence that regular exercise can reduce chronic inflammation by shifting energy from baseline immune/inflammatory activity to skeletal muscle. This is possible because there is a basal level of immune/inflammatory activity, which requires energy, and which varies between people (such that for some it is abnormally active and creates problematic inflammation).
@ Mike Roberts:
I guess nothing is ever going to qualify as “mattering objectively” if the way in which the word “matters” is used is based on the setting up a subject-object division in the mind, and the object being framed as the thing that matters to the subject. “Mattering” is always going to be confined to having no meaning beyond “subjectively mattering” when the word is shackled so.
But why can’t the subject also be said to simultaneously matter to the object, even if the object is not a conscious entity, if the subject’s existence has some impact on the object?
And where does this subject-object division really lie in reality anyway? Just in our mind? I have a hard time picturing what the subject-object division concretely corresponds to if absolutely everything is just interacting particles.
I personally don’t think the word “matters” should be tethered so tightly to the subject-object division, and if it is, then maybe it’s a pretty limited word and doesn’t itself matter much in the grand scheme of things.
If something exists, in my books it should qualify as truly “mattering” (“objectively mattering”) simply by virtue of its existence. It is part of the universe and will affect what actually happens in the universe.
It is difficult to disagree. But for example, the word "idea" or "goal" has no equivalent in the real world (but is related to it), and also influences and sometimes very strongly influences, and therefore "important".
Words are only "short" and "incomplete" models produced by our fleshly brain, explaining the information received by our "bodily detectors" from the processes of the surrounding world, for its explanation.
If we skip the moment of simple verbal statement of *facts* seen or heard, the average person often also forms impressions and conclusions (in words that further confuse and generalize the specifics), based on experience and knowledge, which does not contribute to accuracy, clarity and impartiality.
In this sense, words and language are often very limited in a certain sense, explaining which here would be pointlessly long.
I just came across a Charlotte's Web reference the other day that seems fitting here, talking about Wilbur the "humble" pig and pointing out the root of "humus", also shared with "humiliation", is soil – not proud, close to the ground. Basically, dirt.
I would encourage you to follow your instincts, popularity be damned, though I understand creators in the questioning-modernity space may find themselves in the awkward place of trying to discuss thorny topics without stepping on modern people's toes too much. It's why, I suspect, other blogs or podcasts in this vein will periodically throw their audience the sentimental specialness bone – like, there is a crisis and we need to reduce overpopulation and overconsumption, but also, still, nothing is more important than you, your safety and comfort and dreams and retirement plans, and that of your immediate human kin/loved ones, and it's totally cool if you want to make a bunch more tiny humans even in the face of all this (the latter especially grates on me – if I want to be loud and proud about my childfree status, I still feel I have to do it elsewhere, which really is odd!). It's too bad butterflies can't give likes and salamanders don't do podcasts. and nothing we create will go viral amongst a stand of ash junipers (except, well, an introduced invasive virus), or, for that matter, those people of the future who we're screwing over. I think they'd be fans of what you're saying and doing here. Not sure if you're familiar with the anthropologist Jason Hickel and his work, but I just finished his book "Less is More" (which I recommend) and he talks about Descartes' intellectual opponent, Spinoza, who was ridiculed and ostracized in his time for his ideas but is now seeing renewed interest. Too late for him, but maybe not all in vain? People are going to need to swallow some bitter medicine in the coming years, decades, centuries, but maybe shouldn't be surprising at this point they aren't exactly lining up in droves to do so.
Another reason to keep going: I went back and read the original Physics diet post, and all the comments along with it, and have been following your writings as you discuss the other two potentially prickly topics. I'm a lifelong skinny person who learned long ago to keep my mouth shut about anything weight-related, especially around other women, but finally my case makes sense – I just breathe too dang much! So, thanks. As for the other topics, though sometimes thought-provoking, I didn't find any responses I felt truly challenged your aforementioned 'parsimonious, non-dualist stance' and I'm musing as to why people are so attached to the otherwise.
I used to have really bad panic attacks about death, dissolution, the abyss, etc. that frankly became embarrassing, considering what I professed to believe. They finally went away not long ago (possibly while I was following the discussions here?) and I suspect truly, finally letting go of consciousness as a separate *thing* played a big part. When you are a lonely person, or especially a lonely child, and you spend a lot of time alone with that consciousness, it's almost like it does take on a life of its' own (or so you think! Nicely done, meat-brain) and the idea of losing it is terrifying. That's not to mention that we're told since birth, in a million different ways, that it *IS* a real thing and it makes humans special and better, and believing otherwise will really put a damper on your social life. Living in that sort of fear backfires eventually, and though it did entail an uncomfortable grieving process like there is with waking up to any other reality, being on the other side of it is a huge relief, ultimately. We just aren't that big a deal! Whew. Goodbye, chronic anxiety. And, obviously, aren't you (Tom) the living proof that as long as you let go of human supremacism, what results isn't nihilism but expansiveness and wonder? It lines up with my own experience, though my path getting there was quite different.
So yes, you may alienate some people with your trio of touchy topics, here's a tagline for you that may attract new readers: "Do the Math: Lose Weight, and Possibly, Your Paralyzing Fear of Death" 🙂
"why am I compelled to keep [the topic of consciousness etc] alive?"
I suggest it's because (at the subconscious level?) you know you're mistaken.
By breaking the *process* of life down into ever smaller parts that one thinks one understands, one literally loses sight of the bigger picture. Life can't be understood via the 'lens' of a scanning electron microscope.
Yes, humans have ruined the planet etc. and modernity sucks, big time. That strengthens the reductionists' argument in no way. Indeed reductionism can be traced back to the 'Enlightenment' and its utilitarian view of the world (Descartes saw animals as pure mechanisms, after all). Reductionism could even be said to have paved the way for modernity. Your "humility of materialism" therefore does not follow. So let's leave humans (humble or not) out of it for a minute and look at the broader phenomenon of all life.
Life does not behave mechanically. That is so obvious, it shouldn't need saying – yet you continually deny it!
It behaves *purposively*, at every level. The 'parts' (if one insists on looking at them as such) work towards the goal(s) of the whole organism. It is totally unlike a machine – no matter how complex the machine. The parts of a machine really are just that – parts of a mechanism, with no purpose except in the mind of the builder.
No 'transcendence' – right. Organisms are born, they live and die. Atoms to atoms, dust to dust.
Wherever we look life is made of the same "stuff" – this seems to be where you're having difficulty. All material 'things' comprise atoms etc, yes, but not all are mechanisms. Just because we don't understand life, that doesn't mean it's a too-complicated mechanism. Material? Yes – Mechanism? No.
As to free will/consciousness being an "illusion" – in that case, who or what is being fooled? An illusion can't exist without an observer, can it?
But rather than allow organisms to be conscious, in order to fit your model you have instead relegated them to mere mechanisms. 'We can't know ultimate truth', but then 'it's all mechanisms'. Sounds like a pretty big claim on UT.
The fact that you've thought about these things *using your consciousness* is a great irony. Direct experience (i.e. consciousness) is the most fundamental evidence available. To deny it is to deny reality.
I appreciate your points (and that you cover a lot of ground relatively compactly). I would suggest that rather than suspecting a fundamental mistake, my continued attraction has more to do with the difficult nature of so complex an emergence: defying facile description by meat-brains: challenges can be attractive. Attempts at articulation keep falling short because we're not wired to get it easily.
I completely agree that Enlightenment science has greatly accelerated modernity's atrocities and is a net negative. The insights gained are destructive precisely because they have been "correct" (predictive). Yet, intent is a major piece here. The same knowledge in the hands of an animist respecting all life would not have the same result, but could even amplify the sense of oneness (rocks are our kin, and we could not exist without them).
I have a sizable queue of posts written up, and one explores the apparent purposefulness of Life, and how feedback can make it appear so. So I'll leave that off for now. I stand by the statement that matter in living organisms obeys physics without exception and thus behaves mechanistically, however brain-bustingly complex.
The prefrontal cortex deliberately connects to many brain regions so-as to be "looped in" to what's happening, and thus acquires some awareness of brain functions: a meta-cognition. I suspect that it is in this complex that a sense of "I" is manufactured, and this mental model representation of "I" can easily take itself too seriously, believing itself to operate outside the brain (as it indeed operates outside—parallel to; overseeing—many other parts of the brain). The illusion happens at this level. No irony to me that such a process is able to marshal a connected string of logical pieces: no denial of reality required.
As for ultimate truth, I can easily see your point. The nuance is that my preference is to make up as little as possible in our untrustworthy brains, inventing something that isn't there for the simple reason that we can't grasp the complexity. Yes, suspecting that it's all atoms and interactions can come off as an assertion of truth, but it seems that asserting it to be otherwise is a greater unfounded leap (and you do tend to assert otherwise, despite an occasional claim of agnosticism). The materialistic view requires no other element, force, override, or plane of existence—even if it can't connect all the dots. The humility is in not claiming to have the complete answer. Conversely, asserting that life is not mechanistic or that we have a soul or non-material consciousness requires more fabrication beyond observation: not the simplest, humblest account.
(Nitpick: Enlightenment knowledge would never be in the hands of an anamist, as members of that culture would have no desire to 'know' physics, build mines, chainsaws, helicopters, chemical factories etc etc ad nauseam. It's a fundamentally different (and infinitely wiser) worldview. As to the 'correctness' of such knowledge being proved by its destructiveness, idk. Maybe it's only superficially correct, like Newtonian physics (vs Relativity).)
I agree that matter in organisms obeys physics – but not that organisms therefore behave mechanically.
I can see your (entirely plausible) reasons for holding the purely materialist view. It *is* simpler than the (probably unknowable) likely reality. (If that makes it the more humble account, that might be incidental, though.)
It is more of an observation, rather than an assertion, that life does not behave as a mechanism. Maybe 'unprovable' to a degree acceptable to modern science (like a lot of intuitively felt things).
"*I* suspect"… "It is no irony *to me*" – In other words, "you" are a real, conscious being, capable of thought and judgement. This is what I mean when I say that an illusion can't exist without an observer. It's simpler to posit the existence of an observer than to say an illusion is fooling an illusion of an illusion .. etc.
What is 'matter'? Are the particles oscillations in a field? Matter and energy are different aspects of the same reality. If self-organisation in nature occurs at all levels, then perhaps 'purposiveness' is ontologically prior to matter. I look foward to your post on the apparent purposefulness of Life.
look at *your* hand. Now tell me *whose* is it? *Who* sees it, analyzes it and makes judgments?
Obviously, the illusion occurs for the body, which is in a state of awareness of its own existence and orientation in space/time/reality as a result of the implementation of neural modeling, the interaction of genes and other processes in the body, which create a connection, connection and sensation of both the internal state and external stimuli at a certain moment in time (consciousness).
That is, *you*, as a set of atoms and interactions, realize consciousness through which you realize *yourself* (as a set of…) and the surrounding, considering it a "special" intangible gift, but in reality this state is only an illusion, for the state of realization of consciousness created by *you* (as a set of…).
That is, *you* are the body+illusion of consciousness.
Your awareness of *yourself* is only the work of the body.
And through this work of the body, which creates awareness of itself, the understanding is also realized that consciousness is an illusion.
In this sense, consciousness quite possibly cannot just be or not be. And most likely also has degrees of complexity, which quite possibly depends entirely only on the complexity of the brain, and self-awareness, I assume, on the complexity of the prefrontal cortex and the complexity of interactions between it and other parts.
Again, we are playing at a semantic "short" level.
Nice! This clued me in to another angle on which we have direct experience. Babies have very little sense of self, as brains are not yet wired up. In fact, development of "theory of mind" progresses all the way through one's twenties, and all associated with brain development (largely in the prefrontal cortex). So, we each hold our own history and (ragged) memory of the development of the illusion in its increasing sophistication. Huge differences are seen between people at 1 yr, 2 yrs, 3 yrs, 5 yrs, 10 yrs, 20 yrs, and 40 yrs. Their "souls" are not equivalently sophisticated—the illusion not as fully formed. Try having a conversation about this stuff with a 3 year old and see how much conviction they assert about having a conscious self.
So many words…
My hand is mine, are yours someone else's?
If you think you're an illusion, great – knock yourself out.
In reality, there's nothing special that separates the living from the "non-living." Everything follows natural physical laws—be it thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc.
Nothing against the laws of physics, but I do believe the living and the non-living are not the same.
A child, not playing philosophy or semantics, would agree.
That illusion works effectively on a child is not the least surprising. The ability to regard apparent and striking differences between animate and inanimate arrangements of matter as fundamentally the same at much different levels of complexity is not child's play. How early should we go in development to get "correct" answers?
It just seems more likely (weak argument, I admit) that our instinct about the difference between the animate and the inanimate is more 'correct' than saying there is no difference.
Fair enough. It does go beyond "saying," however, as every probe into the business fails to come up with any material difference (same atoms, same physics) as deep as we are able to penetrate. In other words, it's not just random spouting from the meat-brain, but looking to what's actually there to the best of our abilities. Sure, we could be missing something, but all evidence so far (and lots of it!) is on the side of regular material in complex arrangement—a complexity that certainly may be sufficient. Positing something beyond/apart from material/interactions seems more in the "saying" camp, based on superficial observation of emergent differences.
But probing and penetrating may not be able to supply answers in this case.
Science only goes so far. In the end, us organisms are embodied in the world – and the information that yields can't be gainsaid by methodology or theory.
Sure, science may have some 'consensus' view on the nature of matter etc. (or it may not, I don't know), but perhaps the 'anamist' take might be that the living and the dead are fundamentally different. Ok, it's still all atoms, but there is probably some unknown invisible shit that's important but can't be known.
@James
I have followed the ongoing debate between you and Tom (and others) about materialism, consciousness, free will, determinism, etc. with great interest. Thanks.
When I read the book “Free Agents: How Evolution Gave us Free Will” by Kevin J. Mitchell, it seemed to me that his take on it all sits somewhere between that of the two of you. I found it very illuminating, but am still mulling it over. Perhaps it might be of interest to you both?
Here is a review to give you a sense of it:
https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2024/01/23/book-review-free-agents-how-evolution-gave-us-free-will/
@Bim
Thanks, it has been a good debate. That book looks interesting, although I am trying to read fewer books. I ordered The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist not realising the size of it – nearly 1400g. I'm about halfway through Volume II.
He also covers a lot of the same ground.
Many have a hangup about causation (or causal 'chains'), but life (and reality) is not a chain of static events but is a flow, a process, as Mitchell appears to acknowledge (going by that review).
Of course cause and effect still pertain, but life can only be understood by seeing it as a whole (or Gestalt). It's the left hemisphere (as described by McGilchrist) that likes to fragment everything into pieces it thinks it can grasp. Hence the tendency for modern science to split things further and further, all the way to atoms, in a vain attempt to see how the organism works
Checky answer: the secret to weight loss is to breath more ;-).
Inhale lighter O2 molecules and exhale heavier CO2 molecules. Problem solved!