Category Archives: Philosophy (ugh!)

I hate to admit to engaging in this realm of thought, often so egregiously disconnected from material reality.

Ditching Dualism #8: Sentience

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These animated little guys know what they’re about: sensing and responding (sentient). Adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

Now we turn to one of the more perplexing aspects of materialism: one that prevents many from abandoning dualist beliefs. How can sentient living beings possibly arise from matter alone? Dualism asserts a sharp ontological divide between animate and inanimate (mind and matter as a parallel aspect), categorically prohibiting animate beings from being wholly composed of inanimate matter. The last post addressed the flaw in characterizing matter as being “inert” in the first place.

But even once past this barrier, our inability to connect all the dots from atoms to conscious experience (which no one has managed to do, and likely never will), strongly tempts us to declare—assuming phantasmic authority—that no such route even could exist, or that failure to map it means it may as well be declared non-existent (a reaction worthy of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast). Where’s the adventure in that?

As an aside, allusion to “phantasmic authority” above may elicit the reflexive charge that advocating materialist monism is an equivalent assertion devoid of authority. Not so fast. Materialist monism amounts to being satisfied that matter/interactions can plausibly form the entire basis of reality even if we don’t understand how. It is in claiming materialism to be insufficient—without evidence—that meat-brains seize more authority than they are due. Materialist monism cedes authority to the universe as we find it, rather than presuming to fabricate comforting alternatives.

Anyway, lacking a complete map, how does materialism deal with our experience as sentient beings, or other sentient life? We find a significant clue in the etymology of sentient. The root word is “sense.”

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Ditching Dualism #7: Objections

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By mhx (Wikimedia Commons)

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.

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Ditching Dualism #6: Maybe Monism?

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Blurring into one, without boundaries (see details for creating this graphic).

Okay, we needed to go on a long two-post detour in order to better understand how manifestly-imperfect mental models trap many of us in a self-centered dualistic mindset, and how we might recognize the pattern and move past it. For some, it may be tempting to focus on the division between humans and animals as the crux of dualism, but the more fundamental divide as articulated by DayKart [my gesture of disrespect] is between mind and body (matter). As long as we hold minds to be transcendent phenomena apart from matter and proclaim without evidence that “mind” could not possibly derive entirely from vanilla physics and atoms, we risk elevating ourselves to holy status—justifying the savaging of mother Earth as a collection of commodified resources. Perhaps more importantly, there’s also a very good chance it’s just plain wrong.

To be clear, I am not claiming to have the right answer. No one can (or should) make such a claim. But I will make the case for what it seems the universe is trying to tell us. It’s not necessarily the most appealing framework (even for me), but what is that to the universe?

Relatedly, here’s what I think really gets the goat of those who cringe at the suggestion that mind is not apart from matter, and that it is in fact “just” an arrangement of matter: such a stance would seem to relegate us and all living beings to mere “machines,” echoing DayKart’s disregard for animals as unfeeling automata. As vile as the implications were in his case (vivisections), why “demote” not only animals but ourselves (gasp) to similar lowly status? It’s demeaning—if one derives meaning from a sense of supremacy, as many in our culture do. If we (and animals) were just machines, all sorts of atrocities would seem to become fair play, and we would wish to avoid this at all costs.

We need to pause and take a breath, here. The reaction spelled out above is burdened with hasty reflex and all sorts of mental-model baggage (and only makes any sense in a recalcitrant dualist framing). We’ll have to unpack all this, slowly. We’ll eventually get there—not all in this post—but for now I’ll just point out that it is abundantly clear to us (and is also true, I would say) that we and other living beings are far more amazing than any machine we might imagine when restricting the comparison to our technological gizmos.

We’ll revisit the central “machine” objection a few times in posts to come, but for this post it’s time to outline basic metaphysical options to help guide our discussion.

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Ditching Dualism #5: Revolutions

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Early depiction of evolution (Wikimedia Commons).

In this quest to move past dualism, it may be useful to examine a few key revolutions that corrected erroneous and sometimes damaging perspectives in the past. I hope to cast dualism in a similar mold: eventually to be abandoned as an embarrassing, destructive, and self-centered phase of adolescent excess.

We’ll consider common elements of past beliefs (flat earth, geocentric, creationist) that most eventually moved beyond, and see that dualism shares many of the same traits of anthropocentrism and missing context.

Past Prevailing Paradigms

We’ll start with Flat Earth beliefs, as touched on in the previous post. In all likelihood, more than one human over the hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural period imagined the sun and moon to be spheres (illumination of lunar phases as a pertinent clue), and assumed the same to be true for Earth. The Greeks convinced themselves that Earth was round, and even estimated its circumference based on shadow lengths at the summer solstice. Astute sailors knew something fishy was afloat well before the voyage of Columbus, based on how ships and land reliably sink below the horizon as distance increases. Yet Flat Earth belief prevailed until recently. Part of the point is that adoption is not monolithic or simultaneous. Most people still had no need for anything but a Flat Earth model. Restricted to a small locale, the larger truth was neither evident nor relevant. That’s what counts for effective mental models. A Flat Earth model is not at all inappropriate, in a limited context. All mental models are incomplete and wrong in some way(s), after all.

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Ditching Dualism #4: Going Mental

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Since this series aims to confront dualism in its primary form as a mind/matter split, we should devote some time to mental matters. What are the central arguments for mind—or associated consciousness—as a phenomenon unto its own, not “reducible” to mind-numbingly complex material interactions (just reducible to a label of “mind,” apparently; simpler!). What is it, in fact, that we do with our brains, and how much of it depends on matter (i.e., physiology)?

Subjectivity: What it’s Like

At its core, belief in mind rests on the truth that one individual can’t experience another’s “inner” experiences. Language helps tremendously in providing a foggy window into others’ experiences. And while clumsy, language does at least help to confirm predominantly-similar sensations among humans. Yet even via language, how can we really know what another’s pain feels like? How can we know that seeing blue feels the same to them as it does to us? We can’t, really. And since individual life-experiences create differing associations within each of us, the full impact of seeing (or imagining) the color blue is surely a bit different from individual to individual. To my dad, it meant the Kentucky Wildcats, for instance.

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Ditching Dualism #3: The Divorce

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Dualists have a foot in each camp, precariously.

Having prefaced this series on dualism with a clarifying exaltation and a grounding in animism, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and trace the origins of dualism.

Animist tendencies have to be stamped out of children in our culture, who display a natural proclivity to treat the entire world around them as alive and full of potential friends. They soon learn from acculturated adults the sin of anthropomorphism. “Stop talking to that stool and inviting it for tea! Don’t dare project human greatness onto mere ‘things’—or even animals. No, not even Boots, the family pet. Yes, technically humans are animals, but that’s just a quirky fact, not how we should act.” Indeed, we do a number on our kids, molding them into fine little human supremacists.

Viewing rocks and weather and rivers as part of a single, unified co-dependent Web of Life, animists are somewhat allergic to both supremacy and hierarchy. Humility is the watchword. We don’t and can’t understand enough to call ourselves superior, voiding any case for ranking. Many cultures recognized humans’ newbie status and explicitly looked for wisdom in our elder relatives: the plants and animals, who knew how to live in “right relationship” with each other and with the planet—tested over eons.

This aversion to hierarchy went hand-in-hand with “fiercely egalitarian” social practices—wherein everyone had essentially equal access to food and its means of procurement. Various “leveling mechanisms” were employed deliberately and explicitly to prevent the emergence of instability resulting from power concentration. Demand-sharing and jocular meat-shaming were common practices in this vein, all the way to banishment or death for dangerous aggrandizers (see also earlier, related work from Hayden). As Christopher Ryan phrases it in Civilized to Death, “There’s plenty of ferocity in the ‘fierce egalitarianism’ of foragers.”

So, what happened to upset this long-standing social order?

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Ditching Dualism #2: Animism

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Tell this rock it’s not alive! From Wikimedia Commons.

In this second part of our journey to dump dualism, we peek at the ancient worldview of animism. Why this additional detour before getting to dualism itself? Two answers come to mind. First, it’s valuable to know what pervaded long before dualism swept in. Second, some aspects of animism might provide an appealing alternative—and in so doing might stave off the sense of nihilism and lack of meaning that can accompany the contemplated abandonment of an entrenched worldview. In other words, it’s nice to have another lifeboat at the ready—especially one as time-tested as animism—before asking someone to step off their current, familiar platform.

Rather than being a religion, animism is a mindset that had common purchase around the globe prior to modern times. Not only is it important to appreciate how we used to be when the planet’s ecological relationships were more “normal,” but it offers a worthy alternative to dualism that has much overlap with an astrophysical perspective.

Animism is contrasted with the prevalent scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being, as fabricated by Greek philosophers during modernity’s early adolescence. This ladder-ranking schema places humans awkwardly straddling the domain of superior angels/gods and that of “lower” animals and plants. Note that this is an implicitly dualist framing, separating the heavenly from the earthly—humans of course having access to both at once: a foot in both camps.

A persuasive argument has it that this perceived separation from the earthly domain took root in agricultural practices, whereby cultures began to aggressively manipulate and control “lower” life, as its domesticating masters. Abrahamic (monotheistic) religions explicitly grant dominion of Earth and its lesser inhabitants to a culture of ordained human supremacists.

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Ditching Dualism #1: Exaltation

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Image by Amore Seymour from Pixabay

By elevating human experience above the remainder of the universe, dualist beliefs can impede efforts to move past modernity—which I believe must end whether we wish it or not. Therefore, it seems important enough to devote some time to the matter. The first question one might ask is: “Am I a dualist?” A crude test involves answering the following questions:

  1. Is matter real (not a creation of mind), obeying physics independent of consciousness?
  2. Is mind/consciousness its own phenomenon, not a product of known matter and physics?

Here’s how I would label the results: Y/N is materialist (like me: mind is matter); N/Y is idealist (mind is everything); Y/Y is dualist (mind and matter separately real), and N/N is too bizarre for me to confront. “Maybe” answers are okay, too, but perhaps this series will result in greater clarity.

The topic of dualism is too important and too stealthily integrated into modern worldviews to be handled in a post of ordinary length. Maybe a book would be better, but I’m going to be lazy and parcel it out as a series of posts. I recognize that what I am attempting is very tricky, and probably insufficient to persuade anybody—we do get set in our beliefs (although I was once a default dualist, and still squirm at some of the implications of abandoning this comfortable, safe, and culturally reinforced position). All the same, I will try to anticipate failure modes and navigate around them before they seize the reader.

The larger effort here benefits from first establishing a starting position before even getting to the main topic of dualism. I hope it helps build a coherent framework, perhaps establishing deep resonance, connection, and trust before trying to extract the toxins. Of course, I may lose some people even in trying to establish a foundation, but I find I’m most interested in building something among those who start off with admiration for the universe we are lucky enough to inhabit. The others may be beyond reach.

The motivation for starting with an exaltation to the living world is mainly that I will ultimately be making the case that we find ourselves in a material universe, and that the only non-dualistic way to take this seriously is to have microbes, fungi, plants, and animals (including humans, of course) be entirely material beings. For many, this elicits distaste over the notion that humans and animals are “just machines,” and thus don’t deserve any more regard than a calculator. This hasty conclusion misses something enormous, and I thought it important to begin by expressing complete admiration for Life (which I even tend to capitalize, mimicking the convention for God). If being “only” material would seem to make a living being worthless, I hope by the end of the series the reader will understand this to be a failure of scope and not at all a necessary conclusion.

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Atomic Humans

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From Wikimedia Commons

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…

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Nursery Rhymes

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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Image by Loren Elkin from Pixabay

We all appreciate that human individuals progress through stages of cognitive development on the way to adulthood. A toddler is simply not equipped to run a country (hold your quips): the brain hasn’t fully developed. Infants love the game of peek-a-boo precisely because they have not yet cemented the idea of object permanence. Language capability improves over many years—decades, actually. Brains are not “fully” developed until the late twenties (yet assert mastery starting in the teen years).

But, what does “fully” developed mean? It means significant further development in structure or capability is not to be expected. Does it mean that brains reach some theoretical ultimate capability—no more improvements possible—or do they maybe stop short of perfection? Why would evolution produce anything substantially better than what provides sufficient selective advantage in an ecological context, in simultaneous consideration of all other organism attributes and the biodiverse and social environments in which they operate? The tangled difficulty of that sentence barely hints at the immense contextual complexity involved.

So, every last one of us ceases brain development well short of some notional limit. Does that stopping point cross the threshold of being able to master all knowledge or understanding about Life, the Universe, and Everything? Of course not. Evidence abounds. So, we will never comprehend it all, given our limited meat-brains.

All this echoes things I’ve said before. What’s new in this post is what I hope will be a helpful analogy to how adults present ideas to children possessing less-developed brains—thus the Nursery Rhyme title. Since adult human brains also stop short of “full” development, how might we expect our imperfect brains to interact with what we can’t fully understand? We encounter this conundrum all the time in giving “sufficient” accounts to children that are effective, even if they must be over-simplified or distorted to get the point across. So, how would a hypothetical species possessing far more wisdom explain the incomprehensible to us, as if we were children to them?

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