Why I Am Not a Materialist
(Just some sketchy thoughts. I’m not making a cogent argument really. I’m just being open and honest here - just posting what and how I think - and any intelligent critical response to any aspect of this post will certainly affect my outlook.)
Firstly, I’m pretty skeptical of the value of philosophical realism. What determines the reality of something is the context within which we’re talking about it. In the words of Les McCann and Eddie Harris, “real compared to what?” There is no meaning to the description “real” without a given context. A Tofurky® is a fake turkey, but is real food. A wax figure is likewise real or not relative to some initial criteria. The determination “real” cannot precede an understanding of the specified arena within which we are making a useful distinction.
A whole bunch of dominoes fall over, once the reality domino tumbles. Of what use is “substance”? “Foundational or fundamental entities of reality” can’t make much sense in the absence of a useful definition of “reality” as describing that which doesn’t depend on my understanding of an arena within which we can make that distinction. Or to put it the other way around, assuming there is a reality independent of my creation of a conceptual arena within which I can make a useful distinction, this reality lies beyond my ability to grasp it in any meaningful conceptual way.
The fall of the substance domino surely leads to questioning the claims made regarding supervenience. Supervenience itself is a benign concept, but its application in conversations about the nature of mind and matter by supporters of materialism is misguided and undermines materialists’ claims to having achieved a meaningful solution to the mind-body problem. Rather, this is just a form of “greedy reductionism” (to turn Dennett’s words against himself). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy opens its article on supervenience with this statement: ”A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”.” What goes without saying here, is that if there can likewise not be a B-difference without an A-difference, we don’t have supervenience as understood by materialists. But we don’t necessarily have identity, either. What we do have is some kind of entanglement.
There is a fundamental error in the thinking of many materialists, when they state something along the lines of “brain gives rise to mind”. This is plainly an error, as it presumes a separation between mind and matter. If a brain state “gives rise to” a mental state, is there a lapse in time between the two states? If so, how can this gap be accounted for? But if there is no lapse in time, then how can we make the claim that the brain state is ontologically more fundamental than the mental state? If we look at the issue in a macro rather than micro way, how can we look at, say, the evolution of human consciousness as being filled with these lapses? Commitment to the idea that mind has no causal efficacy, but is just a result of physical processes giving rise to illusions is the only possible answer. But then we must commit to trivial notions – we must claim that nuclear blasts (which obviously have causal efficacy according to any theory of natural selection) weren’t created by minds making decisions, but by the processes of the physical world absent the real consequences of will and intention.
Note that all of the previous concepts are metaphysical concepts. As such, they subtly or not so subtly obstruct the ability to think and investigate scientifically.
It is interesting to note that most people don’t take issue with sky/earth dualism, light/dark dualism, or most other fundamental distinctions we make, such that we can usefully divide the world into parts according to some hierarchical scheme or other. Absent any reference to substance at all, then, some kind of dual aspect theory is perfectly natural, eminently useful, and not subject to any of the problems that any kind of substance dualism (of which substance monism is a subset – I’d argue that it is a more radical form of substance dualism) is subject to. “Mental” and “physical” describe different things, functionally speaking. They supervene on each other. We cannot say that they are the same, and we cannot say that they are different. Given our current knowledge, we can’t imagine mind independent of matter. But if we are to be coherent in our thinking, we shouldn’t be able to imagine matter independent of mind. Does this mean that rocks are conscious? Not at all. What it means is that we shouldn’t think we can coherently talk about rocks as fundamentally separate from consciousness. All matter has a mental nature. All mentation has a physical nature. The urge to use the word “basis” rather than nature, to turn the mirror-like quality of the equation into a lopsided account, has certain degraded effects.
The primary effect of this degraded metaphysic (materialism), is confusion about what kinds of problems are best solved “physically”, and which solved “mentally”. The emphasis on psychotropic drugs to solve “mental” problems (in fact, the problems these drugs are meant to solve are not just “mental” problems, but the materialists’ obsession with the brain as a fundamentally independent object of inquiry ironically makes them such) is misguided. An alteration of brain states from without (through physical manipulation, whether through surgery or the use of drugs) cannot have the same effect as a transformation from within (through changing one’s attitudes, ways of seeing things, conceptual tools, habits, social involvements, etc.). This is not an all or nothing situation. If I take aspirin for a headache, I have removed a burden which might be obstructing me from undertaking some project. But the materialistic metaphysic leads to a muddying of these kinds of distinction.
Ultimately, I am not a materialist because I don’t believe that any amount of physical manipulation of the brain (or anything else) can solve the problem of suffering. I believe the root of suffering is ego-fixation. Now if ego-clinging is an everyday name for a simple mental state, then I have no doubt that medicine can come up with a cure. There are modern Buddhists who think of ego in such reductionist terms, and given this fundamental error in defining the problem, they are bound to make a fundamental error regarding a solution – given a drug that claims to overcome the suffering caused by “ego-fixation”, they will take it. And it will “work”. But identity is not of an atomistic character. It is this tendency to think of ourselves in an atomistic way that is, fundamentally, the problem. Therefore, the “solution” is like trying to put out a fire using gasoline. “Love”, for instance, is more or less characterized by materialists as a feeling. There is a certain kind of naive materialist that apparently cannot think of love in any other way. The idea that love is a description of an entire network of relations, both within and beyond any individual body or bodies, is foreign to such a person. For such a person, mind is just what the brain does. “My” “mind” “is” “within” “my” “brain”.
But dualism is no problem, from a non-dual point of view. Drop the metaphysics and the problem dissolves without further thought.