Why is strict materialism a hard sell for many in our dualist-dominated culture? Okay, so some are understandably pulled by the attractive idea of an immortal soul. Others just feel that there has to be more to all this than the interplay of matter and energy in a vast, unblinking universe. But attractions aside, what are typical objections to a material-only existence?
It may be instructive to ask why people objected to the idea of a round Earth, to the prospect that Earth orbits the sun, or to the concept of evolution (see Daniel Quinn’s “three dirty tricks“).
Part of it, we must recognize, is good-old-fashioned ignorance. If unaware of the observations in conflict with the stale stance, or insufficiently observant, there would seem to be no need to switch trains. The old view serves quite well enough, and even engenders a certain fondness or comfort. Also contributing is that incomplete grasp of the new idea (perhaps poorly delivered or too unfamiliar) favors its premature rejection—after which entrenchment more likely obtains. But then again, most changes in worldview at the cultural scale happen via generational replacement rather than by changed individuals.
I’ve noticed in the demotion of Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet that many objections come down to: “but they taught me in school that Pluto is a planet, dammit.” In other words, we tend to adopt a rigid foundation of “factual” information that gets locked in at an early age and is damned hard to shake loose later in life. But that’s part of how well-adapted brains develop and work. Plasticity in early life serves us well to build a sense of the world, and rigidity serves us well later in life to retain and pass along hard-earned lessons.
For some matters, deeply-lodged understandings are thoroughly integrated into worldviews, and require a great deal of effort to disgorge. Quite frequently, an increase in complexity erects a serious barrier to acceptance. It’s just easier to imagine a flat earth sitting as still as it feels—being circled by the sun, moon, and stars—than complicated geometries of 3-D orbits following invisible gravitational cues. It’s far easier to tell a story about God creating Earth and all its life being created in six days than to follow the convoluted history of astrophysics and evolution leading from the Big Bang to the first self-replicating molecules to newts and geese (too complicated for any human to fully track, in fact).
These lessons also apply, I believe, to rejection of the prospect that materialism is the “only” game in town. It can be hastily misunderstood, run counter to deeply-felt personal experience, and present such overwhelming complexity as to invite simpler and more satisfying retreats as a form of impatience and undue demand for “truth.”
Not Lego
As alluded to in the previous post, a common misimpression is that matter is inert, so that building from matter is like using lifeless Lego blocks. Life and conscious experience can’t possibly arise from all-dead ingredients, the word-thinking goes. Sure, one can build fancy and impressive structures out of these blocks (especially having become so specialized that a modern Lego kit contains mostly one-off pieces—not like the Lego of my youth!), but such an assembly could obviously never spring to life. I fully agree: a Lego construction (or any electronic/mechanical device) will never become a viable organism. It’s a thoroughly preposterous idea!
But under this painfully insufficient “Lego” model—I mean, it’s really appallingly short of reality—no wonder materialism seems dead! In contrast to rigid/fixed Lego blocks, real atoms are buzzing gobs of charge that literally jump at the chance to interact and bond via electromagnetism. Atoms are very grabby and sticky: seldom found alone. Obviously liquids and solids are self-attracting aggregates of atoms, but even gases are generally molecular rather than single atoms—the self-satisfied noble gases being the only exception. Note that these “inert” exceptions do not participate in biological organisms. Life itself rejects Lego blocks, and that tells us something.
Different molecular arrangements of atoms form different profiles for attracting select molecules. This is the basis of proteins and DNA and lots of other chemical/biological structures. Life avails itself of these interactive capabilities (using standard physics) in innovative ways that mostly have us scratching our heads trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
Even the word “avails” above would seem to imbue Life with an extra-material agency, but this interpretation is unnecessary, borne of language limitations. The subtle trick is hidden in the deep underbelly of evolution. Feedback has preserved those arrangements that realize advantage in novel (initially accidental) material arrangements. What looks like proactive agency is complex behavior shaped by success in feedback.
Complexity
The complexity of Life, the Universe, and Everything is so utterly overwhelming as to preclude end-to-end understanding. I’ve already mentioned simple systems like three-body problems and helium atoms that defy exact calculation, but at least numerical methods can step in to provide useful approximations and demonstrate strict adherence to the rules of the road for somewhat-more messy arrangements. Highly-interactive large systems soon outstrip computational ability. The air particles in a room are far too numerous and vigorous to possibly model numerically (∼1036 collisions per second—the outcome of every collision being sensitive to sub-picometer offsets). Luckily, emergent, aggregate measures like temperature and pressure capture the essence of the statistically-robust result. It is similarly impossible to predict the shapes and trajectories of all the shards of a dropped coffee mug. It doesn’t take much complexity at all to bust our capabilities (also sensitive dependence on initial conditions, or chaos, stymies clockwork calculability, as does quantum uncertainty and associated indeterminacy). When it gets to something as complicated as Life, we can absolutely forget crafting a full account. Even designing a single novel protein to accomplish a novel job is beyond our means. We’re just not nearly smart enough and patient enough and vast enough (in time and space) to keep up with the universe.
For some personalities, a framework they can’t completely understand is unacceptable. To me, such an attitude is terribly unfair, and even arrogant or self-aggrandizing. The actual universe as it exists and as it has evolved for billions of years is under no obligation to configure itself simply enough that primate brains are capable of getting it all in a few hours or even a lifetime of pondering. Physicists are accustomed to not getting their way. The universe does what it does, repeatedly ignoring our ideas for how we might like it to work, handing us something unexpected in its place—upon which we are grudgingly forced to acknowledge weird and unwelcomed ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics. We don’t make the rules, but try to read and interpret them as correctly as we are able. Fabricating in our brains how we want something like mind or consciousness to work is essentially worthless, having practically no chance of matching reality. It’s working backwards from an assertion/affinity rather than struggling to follow breadcrumbs laid out and leading to unexpected (sometimes unwanted) places.
Machine Aversion
Finally, a common and predictable objection to the materialist framework is rejection of the notion that humans are mere machines. The objection itself betrays a dualist foundation, demanding/asserting two standards: a “lower” one for mere matter (note my leaning on the word “mere”).
This topic is central enough that we’ll return to it in the next post, after laying out more of the materialist perspective on how sentience can arise. For now, suffice it to say that comparing living beings to the machines we build is like comparing a pebble to a landscape. Both are made of matter, and the pebble will contain basically a full sampling of atoms found in the landscape, but the landscape has a heck of a lot more going on: vastly more elaborate and interactive structures. We don’t say that the landscape can’t be material in origin because so is a pebble and there’s no comparison in terms of complexity.
In other words, pathetic machines (technological devices) that can’t come close to the achievement of living beings are so unlike marvelous machines of life that comparison becomes nearly meaningless. It’s our restricted mental models (and domains asserted by language) that cause the disconnect, not material reality that’s at fault.
Maybe a few more disparate comparisons will help. Sticking to machines humans fashion and utilize, one could compare a smart phone to a simple stick used as a lever. Both are machines in the standard sense, but the lever doesn’t come close to capturing the complexity of a smart phone—in either material arrangement or function (relatedly). On the life side, imagine a segment of RNA or DNA—even just three base pairs long (a codon), defined by a particular arrangement of something like 50–60 atoms. Now compare to an entire living organism. Both are part of Life. The RNA segment, when immersed in a bath of appropriate materials, will selectively grab a particular amino acid (facilitated by a translator key). This is already dazzlingly complex, but on the “inside edge” of what we can track based on first-principles understanding of attractive/repulsive forces operating between atoms and molecules. Yet, it absolutely pales in comparison to the staggering complexity of the whole organism, whose tens-of-millions of codons (and protein products) interact to a baffling degree.
The point is that even if we can understand one end of the comparison spectrum, in trying to grasp something toward the other end we find ourselves hopelessly adrift without once crossing some ontological gap. A gap in understanding all-too-easily can be interpreted (or asserted) as an ontological gap, even if baseless. That’s the crux of it.
Thus, “humans are not machines” can either be translated to: “human biophysical complexity far outstrips that of the dumb inventions we call machines” (materialist view) or “humans cannot be cast as machines because it’s a category error” (dualist/idealist). Who’s mental models are conjuring categories (under what compulsion, and using which cerebral hemisphere)? I’d say the error is in asserting/inventing categories out of our brains that the universe will ignore without hesitation.
Defining Machine
In the materialist view, then, no fundamental gap—”only” overwhelming complexity—separates living beings from simpler arrangements of atoms. Dualism flies out of a gap: the universe gets split into two aspects. We don’t have a word in English for “an assembly of atoms whose composition and structure enable emergent behaviors that a randomly-arranged pile of the same constituents would fail to accomplish.”
Some words that approximate elements of this concept are: machine; apparatus; instrument; contraption; contrivance; assemblage; hardware; automaton; mechanism; arrangement. All have connotations that present a mental block when trying to apply all the way across the vast spectrum from a single atom to a living being. But “machine” is the one that usually sticks—for better or for worse.
The “machine” objection is thus partly semantic, partly a matter of inconceivable complexity, and partly offense at the notion that something as spectacular as a living being could be “nothing but” atoms in a particular arrangement (adapted/vetted in evolutionary feedback over billions of years).
Yet, arrangement is of paramount import. Scrambling the atoms in any lifeform would obviously render it a lifeless pile: destroying its ability to function. But the same can be said for any machine: smart phone or lever-stick. Almost the entire story is in the arrangement—no matter the scale—and the ways in which that arrangement can interact with surrounding material through standard physics channels.
We’ll come back to the machine objection after fleshing out a bit more of the materialist view of how sentience could emerge from atoms in interaction (next installment).
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Thank you, almost everything that was i'm thought/questioned about has been stated.
I will add: I mentioned Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Korzybski earlier, in their writings there are many useful concepts regarding modeling reality (building mental maps), although in general their views are mostly idealistic.
In addition, the concept of "emptiness/void" in Buddhism is in some ways quite similar to the unimistic view – the indivisible unity of everything. Although this is a concept with a lot of layers (embedding) and not so easy to understand, and Buddhism is on the idealistic side of the spectrum. Some benefit from this can also be applied
🙂
Hi Tom, I've followed your blog for a while now. Thank you so much for your thoughts on, well, everything. I also read your textbook. Thank you, thank you.
For your next project, to supplement the blog, I wonder if you had considered inscribing something on the moon–graffiti maybe–with that laser you have? How about, "Save the newts?"
What I reached out to say is, after having followed this blog, and agreeing with you on the diagnosis and urgency of this moment in cosmic history, it pains me to hear you proclaim that you don't have a Mind. I mean, uh, it's what we're using right now! It's what you used to create this blog! Are you an unconscious, unfeeling, robot? I don't think you could have done everything you did if you were.
My point is, isn't the Mind precisely what you, in this blog and in your work and in life, and we, your audience, have sought to cultivate? Wouldn't admitting the Mind into Life's ontology–as a metaphysical organ, say, or as the connective tissue between people–just open up so much more thinking space? And isn't the Mind's awareness and understanding and creativity exactly what needs to be strengthened across the species and the planet at this moment? So we don't all die out and take everything else with us?
And besides, it can now be said that you are out of your Mind, that you've lost your Mind, that you've lost your marbles! Wouldn't it be better to admit you have at least one marble? Just sayin.'
Thanks for expressing what may be a stumbling block for many. What you're essentially saying is that Mind obviously exists, because we constantly engage in its works. What I'm saying is that what we call Mind is not a "thing" unto its own, but cobbled together by material interactions. Physics produced this blog—every last bit of it—with the atoms in "my" body acting as part of the conduit. It's an elaborate conduit, to be sure: receiving, storing, processing many stimuli and reacting in a way shaped by evolutionary history in adaptively advantageous ways (on average, at least).
Take away the atoms and no experience of Mind is left. Yes, this blog is the product of what we commonly *call* Mind, but that's just a label under which to sweep overwhelming material complexity. That's "my" view, anyhow.
"Take away the atoms and no experience of Mind is left."
How do you *know* that?
You say this as an assumption, right? It hasn't followed from previous considerations, as far as I can understand your writing. That is, you assume it shouldn't exist, because material complexity is beyond our grasp, the phenomenon of 'mind' is also beyond our grasp, and so (in your view) assuming they are one and the same is the simplest answer.
That does not strike me as a very accurate reasoning process, if you don't mind me saying.
Ascribing the value of "unknown" to two things does not guarantee that they are the same 🙂
Here is a paragraph from the draft of the ninth installment (two weeks away), in a section called "We Can't Know":
At the risk of being pedestrian, we can't ever expect to *know* the truth, just as one can't prove that the whole affair is not managed by invisible, miniature pink elephants dancing on the head of a pin. None of these positions are provable, so we're left guessing. I find value picking the simplest foundation requiring the fewest novel entities that is in principle *capable* of doing the job, while—and this is tremendously important—being *consistent* with all empirical evidence to date. Moreover, the result is spectacular!
No real reason to stop at two or even ten thousand disconnected ontologies. But one single (materialist monist) ontology will do, for all we know. To the point/quote that no experience of Mind obtains without atoms, I'll at least point out that not a single instance of thought has thus far operated apart from atoms, as far as we can tell. Is anyone reading (demonstrably) not dependent on atoms? Seems I have a reasonably solid rationale, as these things go.
If I am interpreting your words correctly (which of course I am not sure I am), whay you say is that there is no physical evidence of non-physical phenomena. Well, of course! It would make no sense otherwise!
But maybe I am not being very clear (English is not my first language).
Maybe I could say: there is only one reality (I reject dualism as much as you do), but our tiny meat brains can't possibly understand it. Therefore, all our models of reality are necessarily incomplete, maybe even dead wrong in some cases.
Physics is our most successful model for the physical aspect of reality, and while there are still a few blind spots, it works nearly without fail in its predictions.
However, the level of complexity introduced by life creates so many new (possibly emergent) phenomena that large parts of physics are no longer useful, in the sense that not many relevant predictions can be made.
Therefore, we humans need biology and it's laws to take over. Not overthrowing physics, but adding to it approximations that are useful.
When we reach the phenomena of mind, consciousness, and dare I mention spirit, parts of biology are no longer relevant in terms of predictive power. We need psychology, religion(s), etc.
These are not separate ontologies, merely separate ways for us humans to apprehend different aspects of existence.
A famous piano teacher whose name I can't remember said something like: unless you sincerely try to reach the impossible, you will never reach all that is possible.
I personally don't like the idea of an intentional, human-like creator god. But my idea is that the effects of believing that there is something beyond us mere humans helps us become better humans.
Thank you once again, for everything.
This is a decent capture of how I perceive things. I might go a bit further in the first statement you make: no experience (cognitive or spiritual) appears to operate beyond physics, as every experience is processed by material bodies/brains.
I certainly agree that the methods of physics run out of steam quite early on the ladder of complexity, so that we naturally select approximate, aggregate, phenomenological models for complex phenomena (that quickly become somewhat dodgy and prone to failures). But right: not ontologically separate: all physics-based,—just stupendously intricate and convoluted.
Precisely because our meat brains will never track the entire path from quarks to laughter, all we *can* do is adopt meta-models that move something good. This is why I am fond of animism: a spiritual approach that manages to capture a lot of physics-compatible truth (oneness, relationship, anti-supremacy, blurs animate/inanimate) and as a bonus emerged as a *working* and stable approach for humans in an ecological context: FAR better than modern (dualistic) spiritualities that encourage the exploitative, supremacist Human Reich.
This: https://panthevita.org/ is a good site echoing much (but not all) of what Tom is saying, including about human supremacism, religion etc.
I am generally fine with materialism’s proposition that it’s all “just” an inseparable, interconnectedness web of fundamental particles that obey the laws of physics (at least as best as we humans will ever be able to tell from actual observation/measurement). What I find myself increasingly wondering about is the firm claim of materialists that the universe is deterministic. There is the whole issue of quantum events being probabilistic of course, but It seems to me that there might be another fundamental reason for why determinism may not necessarily be true. Determinism is implied if one *assumes* that what the universe is “feeding into the equations of the laws of physics“ in order to “calculate what the next moment will look like” are so-called real numbers (numbers of infinite precision). But what if there are no real numbers in reality? (a la the ideas of Nicolas Grisin). Real numbers are a *human concept*. What if they don’t exist/reflect reality? What if only imprecise numbers do? What if imprecision is a fundamental feature of reality? It seems to me that this leaves the door open for the *possibility* of genuine creativity, free-ish will and choice existing in the universe.
I find myself increasingly thinking that the idea that we can capture the universe (in principle, if not in practice) with maths and it’s real numbers as perhaps just as ludicrous as the idea that we can capture it with words having precise/fixed definitions.
Note, again, that I am not talking here about the inability of humans to pin down everything absolutely precisely, but that imprecision may be a fundamental feature of the universe, reflecting its genuinely creative nature. Perhaps that is one of the key messages of quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: we can’t pin down anything to absolute precision because that would eliminate the creativity of the universe, which is impossible if that is what it fundamentally is.
I also find myself increasingly wondering if “Will”/ “Creative urge”/“Spirit” (not mind!) is something even more fundamental than the fundamental particles and laws of physics. Perhaps the universe is fundamentally physical space with spirit/will embedded in it, and time, with everything else (including the colour red and consciousness) emerging from this combination, including the fundamental particles and laws, which it may have created/evolved/self-taught itself. This combination would allow the universe to be simultaneously the creator and the creation. The universe creates the story of itself in real time.
Maybe the indigenous peoples may *still* lay claim to possessing the most metaphorically true description of reality, surpassing even the materialist and panpsychist descriptions? I like to think that the emergence of the human concept of spirit occurred *naturally* over deep time (as atoms eventually became humans), not via any actual active theorizing by humans, but just as something that was always obvious. In this way, perhaps the concept of spirit reflects a deep fundamental truth about the universe? It is also a concept compatible with a sustainable existence. If it wasn’t, it would have died out. This counts for something and suggests/hints to me that “spirit” itself (not just the human concept of it) might genuinely be something real, and that it has always been there and is present in everything.
The tenth (last) installment will address determinism. In short, you are correct that the universe is not "calculable" by anything other than itself. Any additional randomness that one might imagine is yet another source of jostling out of "anyone's" control. Lest we be dualists, "we" can't step outside and monkey with the process. We *are* the process, and along for the (exceedingly complex) ride—full of illusions brought on by a manifest inability to "see it" from the "outside."
How do you tell a subsistence farmer that an electron is a vibration in the electron field, a field that spans the universe, and carries a charge that interacts with the electromagnetic field (that also spans the universe, whose own vibrations are photons), and are just one of many different vibrations in other fields that make up the bits of matter that make up the dirt and plants and animals, including him/her self, and that assemble into bits of flesh that make up the large piece of meat that lives inside your skull that is responsible for your ability to listen to this story?
When I first heard of virtual particles, the paired vibrations of "matter" and "anti-matter" that spring into existence for infinitesimally small periods of time before recombining, I imagined this happening, occasionally (whatever that means), somewhere out in "space." Then I listened to a lecture by Richard Feynman speaking of this happening, constantly, within the "space" defined by an atom. And how many atoms are there in the universe, and how many virtual particles are generated and consumed every second, and how many seconds have passed since the beginning (whatever that means) of the universe?
How do you explain that, in any meaningful way, to someone whose principle concern is getting enough to eat today? The difference in scale between the human experience and the quantum dynamic basis of that experience is unbridgeable. Small wonder that humans make up gods.
What you say of virtual particles is true, as far as I understand. It's truly mind-boggling, and I wouldn't believe it for a second if energy levels in hydrogen were not ever-so-slightly modified by the phenomenon in a way that is experimentally verified.
But to the farmer (or my real preference: the animist immediate-return hunter-gatherer living without one iota of modernity's influence), I would say: keep doing what you're doing, and fashion your belief systems around the Community of Life (as animists have always done) in such a way as to maintain continuity and overall health. Don't worry about atoms. I wish we had never trod this path. But we're here now, and for those of us who know of atoms, what I speak of is a possible off ramp away from destructive dualism and back to a sort of animism (unimism?) in which we are all (rocks and mushrooms and foxes and people) part of a single fantastic phenomenon. I believe it is useful to paint the picture of how the deep insights we've destructively wrenched out of the universe can be cast in a way that allows us to stop the madness and tuck back into an ecological life—one where we might eventually forget we ever knew about atoms.
I am reminded of an earlier education into the 'why' of so many ancient cultures' objection to early [11th through 8th centuries bce] Hebrew 'religion' – calling the latter 'atheism'. Seems to me that the 'commandment' about having 'no other gods' that ruled out 'life after death' of individuals is what was being called 'atheism'. That has stuck with me as much more in line with your discussion of a "living universe" and our 'unimism' with it. Now, of course, there was recourse to a god, but in an immanent way only, through ethos, not mythos.
If absolutely everything in the universe is, in principle, explainable by way of reason (which I think is what a belief in materialism entails), then there is no room at all for *genuine* creativity, free(-ish) will or choice in the universe – these things are all just an illusion. I *believe* this to be false. My belief is just that – a belief – and there is no way I can prove my belief by argument. Ultimately, people must make a personal/“personal” choice/“choice”: that the universe is *genuinely* creative or it isn’t. I believe that at the very least, the universe as a whole (a “self”) is genuinely creative and has free will and choice, even if we humans may not. I know that this all sounds like I am anthropomorphizing the universe, but maybe what it actually is is de-“human supremacizing” humans by granting everything else, including the universe, what we modern humans claim to be features exclusive to ourselves: free(ish) will, choice, creativity, consciousness, etc.
(There is the definite possibility that all of the above is just an indication that I am just a dualist/human supremacist at heart…)
The first statement doesn't grab me as a good definition of materialism. In a sense, I'm trying to distance from a "fully explainable" requirement. I would replace "explainable by way of reason" with "following only the rules of physics." The part about creativity stumps me as well. Surely Life in all its variety is an astounding display of creativity: far beyond what meat brains can do. But if you mean created by some "external" or non-material entity, well, yes, now we're safely back in dualism territory. Why insist on some soulful creator? As far as we *know*, nothing prevents the creations we witness from self-forming, simply because they *can* (and preserve their creative result via replication, in some cases).
Dear Tom,
I have followed your work for many years, almost from the beginning of this blog (was it what, 15 years ago?), and if I am not mistaken, today is the first time I am writing to you.
Your writing has been central to my big life decisions of many years ago, and it was in great part thanks to you that I got the courage to leave the city and live "differently", in a very small and extremely well insulated house I designed and built myself (with friends and family of course).
In light of my gratitude to you, please allow me to tell you a story about my grandfather.
His wife, my grandmother, had just died a few months before, and the whole family gathered in his house to comfort him and show him our support as best we could.
Out of the blue, in the middle of lunch, he said something like this, to no one in particular:
"Many decades ago, when these things happened, we knew how to go about them. We would go to the priest, he would tell us to pray some number of Hail Mary's and Our Father's and whatnot, and we would go to the church a few Sundays to pray, and we would be at peace. Later, we started hearing that religion was all made-up stories, that there's no heaven or hell, that preists are all liars… now we don't know what's true anymore. We can't go back believing what we used to, and we don't have anything else to take its place."
This was one of the most important moments in my life, because it made me realize something: it doesn't matter what we believe in, what matters is what our beliefs do, the kind of person we become by believing.
I don't go to any church, because the little forest around my house is my church, and my house is the altar. My "god", if I need to use this word, is Life.
My belief is that, like you say, the vast majority of reality is beyond the capacity of our little meat brains to understand. But unlike what you say, I choose to embrace a much vaster, much more complex point of view: that Life goes beyond the material universe. That the physical aspect of existence is just one of many layers of existence, all connected, none taking precedence over the others, none overlapping or interfering directly with the others. Much greater complexity than what is possible through physics alone – and physics remains intact, ruling over its realm just as before (I did study physics in college and remain fascinated with it).
I think you are on a wonderful path coming to terms with parts of reality that were previously invisible to you, and from what little I can tell, it seems to me that there is still a long path in front of you to explore.
I sincerely thank you for putting your thoughts out here for us, and for the time you took to read mine.
I like Richard Feynman's quote "Matter is space doing something." And my meat brain absolutely loves your blog!
Appreciate the acknowledgment that language captures imperfectly (even radically so) the concepts under examination and that for many notions there are no suitable words or phrases. Also, comparing things at opposite poles of the simplicity-complexity continuum is a useful framing device but tends to wash out the gray area between, which is to say, most everything. Accordingly, the reflex to divide into discrete categories tends to miss that inscrutably complex interactions are interlocking and dynamic, not static even if ultimately attributable to (mere) matter.
The supposition that, in principle, the universe is describable solely according to material processes and interactions pushes toward the simplicity pole but is like exchanging the map for the territory: to understand and/or describe the universe one must essentially be the omniscient universe — an obvious paradox.
Regret that (some) humans have trod down the path of knowledge and are now burdened by its implications may well be the impulse behind the story of The Fall (expulsion from Eden). Accompanying aphorisms include “ignorance is bliss” and “one can never go home again.” The innocence of childhood (or the womb) is by default ever only a temporary state, perhaps balanced by the permanent state of nonexistence following death.
In Treatise on the Gods by H. L. Mencken he conjectures that dreams were the inspiration for religion since people would see dead folks as in life in their dreams. That would be the source for the belief that something continues after the physical death of the body. Today we have better insight into the process of dreaming and their is no evidence that it’s a path or portal into a spiritual realm.
On further reflection, I do believe that the universe, considers as whole, has free will and that the story being played out (the one that it is creating from itself) is the evolution of creatures/things/processes that exhibit more and more free-ish will (I think that even particles have free-ish will. They get to choose between only a limited number of choices that are weighted towards certain options, but each individual particle gets a highly constrained *choice* nonetheless). I also think that the reason we happen to be in so much trouble now is largely down to modern humans having TOO MUCH free-ish will and capacity/tendency to choose the wrong options. I’m not suggesting for one moment that we need more control of humans by tyrannical human-based power structures, but we need something to keep us in line and living in accord with the general “vibe” of the Life: the creation of a story that becomes ever more meaningful the more the increasing cast of characters are able to harmonise their existence with one another. We should seek to live in a way that reflects this understanding. I do think that there is spirit/will/genuine creativity at the fundamental level of the universe (more fundamental than particles and the physical laws) and that us accepting something “deep” like this is key to us learning to live truly well again. Animism presented a view of reaity that made it “logical” for us to behave well on this planet.
As an aside, I am somewhat sorry to anyone who I might have suggested was exhibiting dualist tendencies in their thinking, because I know I am a massive hypocrite making such accusations. But maybe it is actually heathy for us all (including me) to be accused of being a dualist every now and then (including by ourselves!), just to encourage us to examine our own lines of thinking and try to identify and weed out dualists tendencies that may lurking beneath. Perhaps, being thoroughly modernity-immersed humans, it is impossible for any of the current generation to be completely non-dualist and to draw ourselves completely away from dualism’s siren song. We are probably too far gone. I am certain that this is the case with me and my thinking. But perhaps our collective efforts might lead to future generations that are less and less dualist in their mindset, even if some degree of dualistic belief will perhaps always (necessarily??) be present.
Life recycles. Other things don't. The law of life is what makes the recycling of life (in equilibrium) possible. That is the law of life. How it is done is the dualistic reductionist details that give rise to the fantasy that we can control the law. We are part of life; we are alive.
It depends what you mean by recycle. The (non-living) world is hardly static, constantly weathering, erupting, burning, and so on. Even without life, the pieces of the planet would get reused and repurposed constantly. There really is nothing special about life, it just seems to us as if there is.
I both agree and disagree with "nothing special about life." It depends how special is defined, of course. A materialist monist position is that Life is not ontologically distinct, but "simply" a vastly more complex arrangement than rock—defying complete understanding, in fact. But Life does things that either would not happen on their own, or would happen far more slowly on their own. In this sense, Life is a catalyst. In chemical reactions, I would say catalysts are special, but in using that word would not be implying that catalysts somehow operate outside/beyond the physics governing the rest.
It is good also to consider that reductionist SCIENCE is also dualism. Try to get a scientist to spit that out. (I am trying as we speak.)
It's not enough to make the assertion, with labels meant to denigrate (reductionist; topic of post #9 in two weeks). Please identify the dualism in materialist monism (or in the position I advocate in this series). I'm not arguing that the universe is split in two, as dualists do. Where is the ontological gap?
Now, many scientists are indeed dualists, as members of modernity steeped in its ways. But saying that a single phenomenon (e.g., physics) underlies all experience without the need for something "plus" (like mind/consciousness) is the opposite of dualism.
"What looks like proactive agency is complex behavior shaped by success in feedback" – but the word 'success' implies purpose (and so agency…)
For someone so keen to highlight the shortcomings of words, you've produced an awful lot of them hammering this one nail. Dualism is false – we get it. In other news: every single aspect of 'normality' we grew up with was based on lies (or ignorance, being very kind). All the sophistication, the culture, technology, healthcare, science and 'progress' – all were built on violence, destruction and propaganda.
Let me reiterate that, because even writing it just now has chilled me to the bone: *all science and technology is directly predicated upon the exploitation/destruction of the living world.* So I say accepting the (increasingly less reliable, due to peer-review issues, corruption, removal of negative findings etc etc) word of 21st-century science is akin to accepting the results of the Nazis' biological experiments.
But maybe the Nazis weren't responsible for their actions? Maybe Descartes wasn't responsible for his either, in which case calling him a wanker is nonsensical, isn't it? You can't have it both ways – either the Nazis were bad and DayKart was indeed an onanist, or it was all billiard balls and no blame can be apportioned. There lies the central difficulty in trying to deliver a moral message while simultaneously denying the existence of choice. (But 10/10 for effort.)
Determinism seems to apply at an intermediate level. There is quantum indeterminacy, and also indeterminacy at the macro-level of organisms (giving rise to the seemingly inflamatory term, 'free will'). Just as studying individual notes can't explain the experience of hearing music, so studying the inanimate can't explain the animate. Call it 'emergent' if you like, but don't deny its reality.
For all my words (more to come), I appear so far to have failed to deliver the nail, as what you write retains a dualist core. Then again, its a tough pull, and I shouldn't expect my efforts to accomplish the Necker Cube flip for dyed-in-the-wool dualists, who demand something more than physics/materialism. Physics PLUS something else that can't be—even in principle—accounted in standard physics interactions means two separated ontologies and thus dualism.
I wish we had never trod the path of modern science. I wish humans never left their animist nest within the Community of Life. But I can't pretend we haven't learned a great deal, and neither can many in the present day. I can forgive ignorance of physics (e.g., impoverished billiard/Lego model) for those (most) who have not personally verified much of it in lab settings. But it's not as similar to Nazi "scientific" racism as you imply. The lab equipment isn't that clever—incessantly lying about electrons. Anyway, since I found an off ramp that works for me (believing what we learned through science, as others do), presumably it can be useful for others as well—so that the destructive ways you correctly point out can become a thing of the past.
It would take a post-length response to unpack why "you can't have it both ways" betrays a recalcitrant dualist framing, but most simply it insists that there *are* two ways: mechanical ("billiard balls") and moral—and never the twain shall meet. No allowance for morality to be a mechanical result in a complex social species whose members are as tuned to react to socially destructive behavior as a microbe is to flee a toxin. Materialism does not mean inert! Reactions must be part of the story, to arbitrary levels of brain-busting complexity. The last paragraph likewise amounts to an assertion of ontological divorce.
The point of the Necker cube is that either view is 'right'.
I see materialism as not the complete picture – not because of a demand for something more, but because it claims to know it all (or at least the basis for it all). Why should the universe fit *any* model?
Perhaps you're stretching the definition of dualism a bit, i.e. I thought dualism meant mind and body are separate (I don't think they are), rather than meaning anything not accounted for by known physics is therefore 'dualist'?
Living things do not differ from machines in complexity alone. A machine has no life. It doesn't care if you turn it off, pull its batteries out or smash it with a hammer, because it's an inanimate object.
Yes: Necker Cube is not a completely apt metaphor (what metaphors are?). The key feature is that we can get stuck in one view, when a flip is possible. In some optical illusions, there is a more objective "truth" aspect.
It is above our pay grades to ask why the universe would elect to have a small number of particles and interactions (or follow rules at all), but that seems to be the way of it according to an enormous mountain of experience. Materialist monism isn't making up the basis as expressed by the universe, but reporting with as much fidelity as possible. Might there be more? Can't rule it out, but neither need we demand more. Materialist monism does not claim to know it all, but satisfies itself with the completely plausible notion that all we see could emerge from the basis we've witnessed. If we can't prove otherwise, where do we get off expressing disappointment or clamoring for more?
And yes: suspecting something more, especially when ontologically distinct and not just more "mundane" physics, satisfies the test of dualism: if materialist monism isn't enough, hello dualism (or tripartism , etc.).
Does a spore or a sperm cell care if you smash it? Is smashing a grain of sand fundamentally different from smashing a (similarly "inanimate") landscape, other than scale and complexity? Anything that's smashed won't function the same any more, which matters to the universe. It appears that you're asserting an ontological gap that could just as well be borne out of complexity alone. The dynamic range makes comparisons across the spectrum (from smart phone to spore to microbe to fox) too big for our brains. But that's not the same as too big for the universe to express a gapless similarity.
I'm not sure whether anyone is 'getting off' at 'expressing disappointment', or 'clamouring' for anything… These pejorative expressions could perchance betray a certain impatience…
"we can't prove otherwise" – well. Why the need to prove anything whatsoever? That's the thread that was pulled that led to 'progress' etc etc ad serious nauseam.
I disagree that "suspecting something more" qualifies as dualism. If everything is 'One' (Animism) then it can't be 'two'.
Smashing an inanimate grain of sand *is* different to smashing a landscape – because a 'landscape' is home to animate organisms, to whom not being smashed matters a great deal.
(@Yevhenii, I don't know if you're agreeing with Tom or with me?)
My apologies for being impatient with (what I paint as) impatience on the part of those who want something more than matter/physics as a basis. My grandfather once said "Dogs are tricky people."
If the "more" that you suspect is not ontologically part of material monism, then it would seem to count as another distinct piece (installment 8 has some treatment of this, so perhaps wait to see what's there).
You invited a Community of Life (assumed by you to be ontologically distinct) into the landscape, which makes sense (the landscapes we ourselves know on Earth do host Life), but doing so (for one holding Life/matter to be ontologically distinct) clouds the comparison across vast scales of complexity. You can help me out by imagining a diverse planetary landscape complete with weather, storms, sunshine, waterfalls, volcanoes, glaciers, carved river valleys, sporting rainbows, and any number of other wonders (nothing you would call animate) being smashed by a planetary collision and comparing this to smashing a sand grain as an illustration of vastly different scales of complexity. Or is Life the bright dividing line, forming an unbridgeable ontological gap, so that planetary destruction (and all the wonders it contains) is only lamentable if it had any potential for someday hosting Life—otherwise it may as well be an inconsequential grain of sand…
Ok, I'm now going to attempt to go beyond 'logic'. Is it wrong to destroy a mountain, irrespective of what life resides there? I say yes it is. Looked at like that, planetary destruction is not inconsequential to the universe. Nature is beautiful – whether or not humans exist to witness it. But science *can't* understand that. Beauty 'does not compute'.
Dismissing the word 'animate' (and 'consciousness' at that) won't do. You can't start ditching bits of the English language just because you don't like what some of the words mean.
When an amoeba is going after some morsel, it really does want that food. It's not pretending. It's not 'following an algorithm'. It is desirous of the food.
Pain and pleasure are another example. When they're experienced, there's not some 'subroutine' happening in your head – the feeling is real, *embodied*. All these things are mediated by consciousness. No consciousness (eg by anaesthetic), no feeling. No understanding.
Right: the universe is amazing without sentient life to reflect/admire. The fact that it can spin out such diversity is testament enough.
I won't place the English language as the arbiter of truth and righteousness. It's a hindrance that I have no practical choice to avoid using in my culture. It's okay not to like how some words are defined and the implications of taking those definitions literally. English imposes a dualist framing, and I feel justified in fighting back.
The coming posts address some of these issues, but of course the amoeba wants food. A bubble wants to rise. Where does the want come from? An amoeba can't be an amoeba if it doesn't have the reaction it does to food. The materialist monist stance is that nothing prevents complex material arrangements from sensing and responding. The phenomenon of life builds in (through feedback) that desire, but it doesn't come out of the ether: it is supported entirely by the material scaffolding—in ways that are exceedingly difficult (if not impossible) for our puny brains to track. Not ontology, but incapacity, is the view.
And yes, if you interfere with the hardware—shut down the mechanism (via anesthesia)—the sensation goes away, eliminating the stimulus/response "subroutine" (to give it a label woefully insufficient to the material complexity). Asserting no mechanism (complex "subroutine") could even in principle be responsible seems unsupportable (keeping the dualist flames well-stoked).
If you stop a bubble from rising (by eg a metal plate) then no harm is done, but if you kill an amoeba… I say there *is* a difference. The bubble *can't* care whether it rises or doesn't, but the amoeba *lives* – ie it desires to live. That's the distinction. You can't kill an inanimate object like a bubble.
You continue to impose a dualistic divide/distinction, held captive by language (inanimate, desires, care) and yet more "can't" statements/assertions. So much certainty. The materialist/animist can comfortably say the bubble desires to rise, that it can indeed be destroyed/killed, and reject "inanimate object" lines in the sand that could stem from complexity rather than dualist gap. In the materialist monist view, the amoeba's "desire" doesn't come from another plane, but arises by material construction (and by necessity to close the feedback loop, otherwise it wouldn't survive to act like an amoeba).
It seems the (dualistic?) convention is to use words like "desire" or "care" when complexity of the associated mechanisms exceeds our grasp, but that we find it silly to apply such words when the situation is simple enough to fit in our meat brains (like a bubble). Again, my whole stance is to try calling out what we make up vs. what the universe can do. We are no one to tell the universe what it can't do with its toys (atoms and interactions).
Yes, but isn't it likely that complexity isn't the *only* thing that exceeds our grasp?
O what a shame, to be "held captive by language". The limitations of words are really infinite. Re certainty – right back at you. Materialists' certainty is that reality is only what humans can discern/catalogue.
The materialist *cannot* attribute 'desire' to an inanimate object such as a bubble. That is an abuse of language. Yes, words are an imperfect means of communication, but they're all we've got (at least as far as the story of science and 'progress' goes. Too late to ditch them now).
"The materialist *cannot* attribute 'desire' to an inanimate object such as a bubble. That is an abuse of language." Yet another cannot statement: not a dualist materialist, sure. I have no qualms abusing a dualist language.
A more careful read of my posts will have a hard time finding equivalent certainty and claims about what the universe can't do (e.g., search "claiming" and "platypus" in #6; but similar couching throughout that I have no authority/claim on truth). Instead I try to make the *case* for why stuff we make up in our heads is suspect, and not on equivalent footing to stuff we actually can see and measure, repeatably. If we have no slam-dunk reason why matter/physics is not enough to underwrite life, then it seems like the least speculative position—acknowledging our ignorance and lack of authority to dictate what can't be. Dualism (or ten-thousandism) may be correct, but appears to be unnecessary. You won't find me saying dualism *has* to be wrong, and that materialist monism has to be right. I just make the case for why materialist monism seems to be (could well be) sufficient, and that maybe we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves and be metaphysically greedy (aggrandizing) just because it's too hard to track.
Phrases such as " English imposes a dualist framing" and "It seems the (dualistic?) convention is to use words like "desire" or "care"" are a cop out. It's like appealing to the referee when losing. The language is the tool we have, just like science is.
Why *do* materialists bridle at words like "desire" and "care"? What *is* so wrong with those words? Surely their meanings are clear – how, exactly, are they 'biased'?
It's almost as if a materialist denial of the reality of the meaning of (e.g.) the word "care" is at odds with the language – therefore the language must be 'wrong'.
The cube hasn't flipped yet, if you're asking these questions. Maybe as a window, ask yourself why you bridle when I (in fact state that I *cannot*) apply "desire" to a bubble. The central issue is that you (and our cultural language conventions) erect a dividing line (dualism) dictating which material arrangement is allowed to pair with this verb. What if those conventions have unfortunate biases built in? Are we not allowed to challenge? Is challenging a cop-out? I can see why it might seem so if the bias is hidden from view, as it is from one side of "the cube."
In everyday life talking with friends, neighbors, etc., I use language in the colloquial sense, ignoring the (many) asterisks. But language is not "just like science": it is a far more arbitrary construct various cultures invent/evolve in various ways—while no culture invented quarks and leptons and their properties/interactions (just the language-names). The universe did the inventing. The difference is not at all trivial.
So, yes: the language is wrong for a materialist monist. Is that so outlandish, that a cultural construct might carry the imprint of the (dualistic) metaphysics on which it is founded? Language is not fundamental in the way that electrons are. It is not constrained to mirror material reality in the way that the material universe is. That can be (is) a legitimate problem.
I tend to think that words are an invention that humans use to communicate ideas. "Desire" is just a word. It has no objective meaning. Can a rock have desire? Well, not in the human invented meaning of the word. But remember that desire is a word for some brain chemistry which is an interaction of molecules. There really isn't anything special about that interaction, when there are an almost infinite number of interactions between molecules in the universe. Something akin to what we call "desire" may well be happening with some of those interactions. We just don't know.
I want to "interject" with a comment to James:
Language "confuses" the message.
Studying the world in various ways, devices and technologies, we discover an unchanging structure and order of things that are "basal"/basic/fundamental/(the only possible in our configuration of the Universe and more broadly in its existence and development)
And these things *are* *enough* to fulfill the minimum conditions for functioning. We do not know *everything* and *every* aspect, but selective *slices* from the most diverse places, perquiring with the most diverse methods/devices/*minds* shows exactly this state of affairs (confirms).
Therefore, creating a simplified map or model of the territory, we confidently declare the ontological unity and inseparability of *everything* from *beginnings*. Regardless of whether it is a playing orchestra or a random cubic meter of basalt; they are unified in the components of their structure, but different in the type of components, configuration, order, and interaction.
BTW, the series has three more installments, and #8 (on sentience; coming soon) addresses many of these points—like on what dualism comes down to for me in relation to materialist monism. Also a bit on panpsychism as inherently (closet) dualist. Perhaps we should pick this conversation back up after that. #9 and #10 are on reductionism and determinism, respectively, so perhaps it would also make sense to await their release for explicit discussion on these matters.
Reading other comments, it appears to me that many are conflating materialism with determinism to some degree, which is where most objection or criticism begins. In my few real-world conversations on the subject of materialism, I've encountered similar subject drift quickly towards determinism.
Is this a trend others have observed or encountered? If so, why is that? I can only speculate.
I've generally accepted a layman's "bounded rationality" approach when it comes to determinism–it being a question of time and scale–though never considered it integral to a materialist worldview, which is to say "no essences"–only particles and void.
I'm hopping on the Ditching Dualism thread late here, so I may have missed prior relevant discussion on the materialsm-determinism relationship. Looking forward to reading through.
The last installment (#10) centers on determinism and its connection to dualism/materialism. Should be out Jan 27.
I've just finished reading the first 4.5 (of 5) parts of a series on Resilience.org by Kevin R. Nelson. It covers many of the same themes found in this series on dualism and DTM generally in recent years.
It is very much worth a read.
@Mike Roberts
Words are used as a way of expressing (simplified, impoverished) lived experience.
That is, there is a process, for example, a flash of lightning (already a ridiculous formulation, because isn't lightning the same flash? 😀 Is the noun lightning the best way to create a model of a phenomenon? And what about thunder? After all, it's one process?) We don't know how/what lightning *really* is, what it looks like, outside the bodily filters of our perception (sight, hearing, touch (xD), or various recording devices and experiments (IR cameras, UV cameras, laws of electromagnetism, etc.), which are also perceived by the electromagnetic reflection of information (sight). In essence, the structure of the phenomenon must be similarly (complementarily, accordingly, similarly) recorded by detectors, devices and instruments in order to simply give more sincere knowledge or understanding of the phenomenon.
So, after receiving this *knowledge*, *understanding*, and experience of lightning, we try to convey these characteristics and describe the phenomenon in words, starting with giving it a name and ending with higher forms (more impoverished and associative) of abstractions, for example when we call lightning a fast car or something like that.
That is, words are not identical to the phenomena and processes that they name or describe, I would even say that words do not have *meanings*, they are only possessed by people who use them and who put some meaning into them. That is, words are absolutely not objective.
I want to throw in Marvin Harris' cultural materialism, with an example I heard from Daniel Schmachtenberger on The Great Simplification.
Our culture is dominant because of dualism. If you have a plow, and you don't want to draw (pull?) it yourself, you force some animal to do it. But a true monist would have a hard time doing so, because it would mean significant cruelty towards the animal. However, so long as someone is going to do it, that someone will have a competitive advantage over the monist, which will either displace the monist or convert them to dualism.
Individually, you or I may have a choice (lucky us). You or I may choose monism for ourselves because that seems more ontologically correct. But the current culture is necessarily dualist, and I suppose it will remain so until it perishes.