There Are No Materialists

 

… of the kind often described by anti-materialists, idealists and religious people.

Image created by ChatGPT, under prompts based on the essay. The image above shows L’Homme Machine (by Julien Offray de La Mettrie) and Thomas Hobbes.

Philosophers often say that all the people in a philosophical debate should put the strongest and most contemporary version of their opponents’ views. This is clearly not happening when it comes to most anti-materialists and idealists. In terms of a concrete example. Spiritual idealists hardly ever cite contemporary physicalists or philosophers of science. It’s as if they’re still debating with Thomas Hobbes or Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Even when they do quote living philosophers they deem to be materialist, their precise arguments aren’t tackled. Usually the quotes take the form of the philosopher supposedly digging his own grave with his own words.

Although some people, including some philosophers, treat the words “physicalism” and “materialism” as synonyms, others don’t. (Philosophers like Daniel Dennett and David Papineau sometimes use these words interchangeably.) The problem is that when critics use the word “materialism”, they have pre-20th century materialism in mind.

Of course, it may well be the case that anti-materialists have just as many problems with physicalism as they do with materialism. And perhaps that partly explains why they often conflate the two terms.

Materialism Before the 19th Century

So what kind of materialism do the idealists and religious critics have in mind? This one:

Materialism is the view that everything that exists is matter.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is often treated as an early materialist. His view was roughly that everything that exists is body (material substance). All phenomena are matter in forms of motion. Even mental processes are motions in the brain. (According to Hobbes, imagination was deemed to be “decaying sense”, and thus “decaying motion” in the brain.)

We also have Pierre Gassendi, who was a Catholic priest. Then came the 18th-century materialists. Examples include Julien Offray de La Mettrie (author of L’Homme Machine — Man a Machine) and Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach.

So if someone wants a target who isn’t made of straw, it is Hobbes and the Enlightenment materialists, not any later materialists and physicalists.

So what is matter in this picture?

Matter is solid stuff which is extended in space, composed of particles, and governed by mechanical laws. Of course, it’s the materialist position on minds, consciousness and human persons that’s really in the driving seat here. After all, old-style materialism had it that minds are material, and thoughts are motions of matter.

What about Isaac Newton and gravity?

Newton’s theory was the first major challenge to the billiard-balls of mechanical philosophy. That’s because gravity acted at a distance without direct collision. That said, his theory didn’t yet introduce fields or energy as fundamental entities; those entities came later with Faraday and Maxwell.

Put simply, Newton’s theory of gravity didn’t immediately overthrow the mechanical worldview. After all, the “clockwork universe” idea was mainly a response to Newton.

19th Century Materialists

I’ve mentioned 19th century materialists. If Michael Faraday, etc. discussed fields in the first half of the 19th century, then the materialist stereotype isn’t even applicable to them!

To Faraday, the field itself is physically real — not merely a mathematical device. Fields aren’t mental. So this shift from particles to fields didn’t overthrow materialism. Instead, it just changed what counted as physical. Fields are still part of the physical ontology — i.e., they’re not mental, supernatural, or immaterial.

What about energy? (This is something that consciousness-first idealists often focus upon in order to prove a point about materialism.)

As with Faraday, we can say something similar about James Clerk Maxwell. He showed that energy resides in the field itself. So physics now had something that occupies space, stores energy, and propagates waves. Clearly, this isn’t matter in the historical sense. However, the fact that energy occupies space, stores energy and propagates waves shows that we’re still talking about something physical.

So, in the 19th century, energy was treated as a universal conserved quantity. Heat, motion and electricity were understood as transformations of energy. Sure, energy isn’t matter (or a material substance) in the historical sense, but it’s still physical (i.e., not mental or supernatural).

What Is Physicalism?

Physicalism is the view that everything that exists is ultimately physical, where “physical means whatever our best physics says exists”. This is a case of philosophers essentially relying on testimony (related to the everyday term, but not identical), which is itself a philosophical notion.

It can even be said that physicalists are committed to the ontology of physics (whatever that turns out to be). In this respect, we can return to Hobbes. A modern materialist could simply say the following about Hobbes:

Hobbes was right that everything is physical. We just now understand physics differently.

What Is Physical?

When anti-materialists ask for a definition of the word “physical”, or ask, “What exactly counts as physical?”, they believe that they’ve played their trump card. Yet, as philosophers have often said, a myriad of other terms both in and out of philosophy create very similar problems. Think about “idealism”, “truth”, “freedom”, “knowledge”, etc.

As stated, physicists now talk about fields, energy, spacetime structures, quantum states, etc. In order to be a stereotypical materialist, the philosopher would need to reject or ignore what physics has to say about these things. No philosopher does ignore all these thing.

Naturalism and Physicalism

Many anti-materialists and religious people will be just as much against naturalism as they are against physicalism. After all, naturalists believe that reality contains no supernatural entities. Having said that, some idealists, for one, may claim that they don’t believe in supernatural entities either. They may even accept that idealism must still be informed by science. Thus, they may argue that they simply interpret the given physics in a way which is at odds with physicalists.

To sum up. Physicalism is a metaphysical thesis about what exists. Ontological naturalism, on the other hand, has it that only natural things exist (hence the name). We also have methodological naturalism, which has it that science is the best way to investigate reality. (A well known early advocate was W. V. O. Quine.)

Non-Reductive Physicalism and Emergentism

Added to all the above we need to factor in the fact that there are non-reductive physicalists, and physicalists and naturalists who believe in weak emergence. Yet here again this is a difference that doesn’t make a different to most idealists and religious critics of materialism because there’s still no room in these pictures for supernatural entities, the soul and consciousness being fundamental

Take John Searle’s biological naturalism. He believes that consciousness is a real biological feature of brains. It isn’t reducible to physics. So Searle is still a naturalist, but not a reductive physicalist.

There are two questions here: (1) Whether these emergent features take us beyond physicalism. (2) Whether supervenience sits comfortably within physicalism.

Of course, these questions need to be answered elsewhere.

Idealists vs Materialists

Idealists believe that the fundamental constituents of reality are mental or that consciousness is fundamental. It’s this fact that’s at the heart of the strong words against materialism. In simple terms, many critics of materialism are idealists.

If materialists still argued that humans are machines made of particles, or that the mind can be reduced to mechanical motion, one can see why idealists and religious people have a problem. As usual, it’s mainly about us. About human persons.

Most physicists most certainly do not believe that the fundamental constituents of reality are mental. So does this mean they are materialists by default? Many idealists would say ‘yes’. (Perhaps others would say ‘no’.)

So, in that sense, it isn’t really a case of anti-materialism vs materialism at all. It’s actually a case of idealism vs materialism.

Physicist Brian Greene on Consciousness and the Soul

 

The theoretical physicist Brian Greene is a self-described “physicalist” and “reductionist”. That doesn't mean that he dismisses all philosophical and even religious alternative notions of consciousness. In fact, Greene came to reject his earlier crude(?) explanations of consciousness after reading Frank Jackson’s paper ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’ (1982) . Yet he’s still a physicalist! (Jackson himself returned to physicalism.) What Greene does now is put consciousness in a various historical and social contexts, which means noting what philosophers have written too.

Source: Wiki Commons. See here.

Brian Greene quotes Albert Camus (of all people) stating the following:

“‘Everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.”’

That truly is a consciousness-first philosophy. Greene then speaks for himself:

“For science to pay no mind to consciousness would be to turn from the very thing, the only thing, we each can count on.”

This almost reads like the words of an idealist or a phenomenologist. And it’s hard to disagree with them… except for the last clause. It was certainly once the case that science paid no mind to consciousness, but that hasn’t been the case for over three decades now.

Having stated Greene’s “open mind”, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t see the problems with other views, and the motivations behind them. He concludes the above passage this way:

“Indeed, for thousands of years many have denied the finality of death by hanging existential hope on consciousness.”

Of course, the denial of death wasn’t always about something as abstract and intangible as consciousness. So perhaps Greene was simply referring to thousands of years of consciousness-first philosophy — if philosophy with a religious bent. Faith in eternal consciousness seems a little more sophisticated than the “resurrection of the body” and its “ego” — or is it?

The faith in eternal consciousness may itself be eternal. Greene writes:

“Atman, anima, immortal soul — it has been given many names, but all connote the belief that the conscious self taps into something that outlasts the physical form, something that transcends traditional mechanistic science.”

Humans have always wanted to live forever, whatever form that takes.

Brian Greene on Anti-Materialists

Greene not being an analytic philosopher, and these words being from a “popular science” book, means that he tells us about the possible motivations of those who hate physicalism. He writes:

“I have encountered many people who resist this perspective. People who feel that any attempt to subsume consciousness within the physical description of the world belittles our most precious quality. People who suggest that the physicalist program is the ham-fisted approach of scientists blinded by materialism and unaware of the true wonders of conscious experience.”

Greene himself responds to such a position. But firstly, let’s add a few more points into the pot.

It’s utterly bizarre that anyone could ever believe that the “scientists blinded by materialism” could be “unaware of the true wonders of conscious experience”. Isn’t it the case that conscious experience is available to all — even to Hitler and the insane? Who else could be unaware of the true wonders of conscious experience? Greene is correct to say that some anti-materialists believe that materialists are mentally and spiritually impoverished. But that seems to go against their central doctrine: that experience is fundamental and universal. Do “evil materialists” somehow bypass that which is fundamental and universal?

Of course, people can be “blinded by” all sorts: by idealism, anti-idealism, Marxism, anti-Marxism, etc. too. So this is a malady common to all isms. (Those who criticise materialism often seem blinded by their anti-materialism.) Thus, perhaps we should conclude that the term “blinded by” doesn’t help anyone.

Anyway, as stated earlier, Greene offers his own riposte against the “anti-materialists” when he writes the following:

“That the mind can do all it does is extraordinary. That the mind may accomplish all it does with nothing more than the kinds of ingredients and types of forces holding together my coffee cup makes it more extraordinary still.”

Then comes the clincher:

“Consciousness would be demystified without being diminished.”

In a spoon-feeding manner, this means that an evil materialist can happily accept that the human mind is “extraordinary” — even unique. Yet he needn’t import anything mystical into his picture in order to stop consciousness from being diminished. Surely it isn’t too much to state that consciousness can be extraordinary without importing anything mystical or non-material into the equation. In basic terms, then, nothing Greene says diminishes consciousness.

Is Greene a Physicalist?

The odd thing about the ‘Particles and Consciousness’ chapter is that it’s sometimes hard to decide if Greene is actually a physicalist. He says that he is. This indecision isn’t because Greene is open-minded and refuses to crudely dismiss other viewpoints. It’s because his actual philosophical position sometimes seems unclear. Perhaps Greene has a clear scientific position on consciousness, but is open about philosophical positions.

Greene does tell his readers the following story:

“Some years ago, during a good-natured but heated exchange on the role of mathematics in describing the universe, I emphatically told a late-night television host he was nothing but a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics. Not as a joke…”

This reads like the very-well-known quote from Francis Crick and it’s certainly unequivocal. It’s worth noting, however, that Greene uses the words “some years ago”. It’s clear that Greene’s views on consciousness have changed over the years. However, he is still a physicalist. In terms of the quote itself, not even an evil materialist believes that such a television host is literally “nothing but a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics”. Just as Francis Crick didn’t literally believe the following:

“‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

I believe that Crick was being rhetorical and provocative here. At the same time, he may have been telling the truth too — if only to a degree. In terms of the rhetoric and provocation, it’s true that Crick’s critical attitude toward religion was one motivation for writing The Astonishing Hypothesis. So, to put it in non-rhetorical terms, Crick certainly did believe that religions can often be wrong about scientific issues (as do many religious people). He claimed that it is science’s job to rectify the false claims of these religions too. (At least those claims which appear to have a scientific subject.)

Crick was also well aware that when he began studying consciousness he was tackling a subject which traditionally had been the sole property of religion and philosophy.

Another point that can be made about Crick’s rhetoric and provocation is that he was simply attempting to get a point across. And the best and simplest way of doing such a thing is to be poetic and rhetorical. After all, strongly-expressed views often attract a large audience.

To return to Brian Greene’s own, “You are nothing but a bag of particles”. Is the non-literal nature of this statement given away by the use of the word “bag”? Or is there more to it than that?

Interestingly, and in terms of the dreaded reductionism, Greene tells us that “the remark sprang from my deep-seated reductionist commitment”.

The Hard Problem

It’s fascinating that Greene ties his subsection ‘The Hard Problem’ to a passage from Isaac Newton. He quotes Newton stating the following:

“‘To determine more absolutely, what light is… and by what mode or actions it produceth in our minds the Phantasms of Colours, is not so easie. And I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties.’”

This is almost literally a statement of the hard problem, written some 300+ years ago… On the other hand, it isn’t! From Newton’s own words, it’s clear that he only wanted to find out “what light is and by what mode or actions it produceth in our minds the Phantasms of Colours”. Newton didn’t want to know why we experienced particularly colours in response to various actions. He wasn’t interested in the why-of-qualia. That would have been to “mingle conjectures with certainties”. Newton believed that we could be certain about light, and how it caused certain colours in the mind via the eyes and brain. However, everything else was conjecture. In other words, everything that depended exclusively on first-person or subjective reports was beyond science, and thus conjecture to Newton. And that remained the case for 380 to 390 years.

If we update Newton’s words, we can say that he realised that everything he knew about light, etc. (as Greene puts it) “seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience”.

Greene, unlike Newton, did once indulge in an explanation, if not a conjecture. He writes:

“When asked, I would often say that conscious experience is merely what it feels like when a certain kind of information processing takes place in the brain.”

Greene became unhappy with that position. Why? It was because “the core issue is to explain how there can be a ‘what it feels like’ at all’”. Thus, Greene’s former “response too quickly dismisses the hard problem as not being hard and not even being a problem”.

Despite that, Greene finished off the same paragraph by stating the following: “The physicalist perspective does indeed summarize my own long-held view.” So let’s spell that out. Even though Greene seems to reject, or simply just question, his former view that “conscious experience is merely what it feels like when a certain kind of information processing takes place in the brain” as failing “to explain how there can be a ‘what it feels like’ at all”, and that was too quick a dismissal of the hard problem, he still sees himself as being a physicalist.

In any case, it was Frank Jackson’s Mary who made Greene question his former position.