Materialismus Delendum Est

/Why no one serious is a materialist anymore/

I have begun reading Bernardo Kastrup’s corpus of work. We will be covering a couple of his books here. For those of you who do not know of Kastrup, he is a Dutch computer scientist and philosopher. He’s done substantial work in the field of artificial intelligence and physics, even having worked at CERN. He is an outspoken critic of scientistic materialism, instead advocating a position known as “Analytic Idealism”, that reality is fundamentally reducible to consciousness, which is the inverse of the standard materialist view - that consciousness is reducible to matter and all of reality is material. His view is that what he variously calls “Mind at Large”, “Cosmic Consciousness”, or, in some forums (such as his discussions with Jonathan Pageau), “God”, etc., is fundamentally what exists. Our experience of our own discrete consciousness and of the material world is the result of a dissociation of this universal consciousness, analogous to the dissociation evident in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder or in dreaming, wherein the various personalities in your dream are all actually contained within you and are you. The world is God’s dream.

This picture is reminiscent of Arthur Schopenhauer’s view (Kastrup has written a book on Schopenhauer, in fact) of the universal Will to Live which is alienated into discrete fragments such as my will to live and your will to live. It is also reminiscent of the famous “Origenist myth” - that the pleroma of intellects existed in union with the Logos and then fell from this state of union into the broken and fragmentary world of matter and body. I’m sure many other analogies could be drawn. It is worth noting that the term “dissociation” has a distinctly negative and pathological connotation, one it seems Kastrup is not entirely insistent on. In his discussions with Pageau, he seemed somewhat open to the idea that the dissociation of the universal consciousness into discrete individual consciousnesses is less a matter of pathology and more a matter of kenosis - of outpouring, ecstatic love - which is certainly Pageau’s position and the Christian position.

The book of his I’ve begun with is his superb Why Materialism Is Baloney: How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe, and everything. In the opening pages of the book he lays out the central problems with materialism and I would like to summarize them for you here (along with some slight expansions).

Kastrup begins by describing “state-of-the-art materialism” and its implications. Materialism entails that all that exists is assemblies of material particles within space-time. This material reality exists independent of yours or anyone’s consciousness. In fact, consciousness only exists as a product of chance evolutionary processes. If there was no consciousness (as indeed there wasn’t, at some point in the past, according to materialism), nothing essential would be lost. The whole great material machine would keep running just the same. When you die, your consciousness and all it entails is lost. There is no room for meaning or purpose in this picture, if we’re honest. There’s no transcendental horizon to human activity. Consciousness is totally derivable from the activity of the brain and the particles which compose it.

Some of the manifold problems with this view are as follows:

1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness: materialism cannot explain how or why there is consciousness at all. This is quite devastating, considering consciousness is the most immediate thing we have access to - indeed, it is the means by which we have access to anything at all. In materialism you cannot explain how it is consciousness - an irreducible quality not present in or derivable from matter (i.e., dynamics of subatomic particles) - could arise from unconscious matter. It can’t explain how the proverbial lights got turned on, seeing as one could easily imagine much of human behavior as it is understood by materialists taking place in the dark, without being accompanied by consciousness, just in the way computers make calculations and have associated behaviors. This is sometimes called ‘the zombie problem’. This isn’t merely a question of matter sufficiently complexifying itself in order to produce consciousness - we are talking about the emergence of a radically new and other kind of thing, seeing as nothing about matter allows us to deduce or predict “the properties of subjective experience - the redness of red, the bitterness of regret, the warmth of fire - from the mass momentum, spin, charge, or any other property of subatomic particles bouncing around in the brain” (pg. 17). We have entered the qualitative realm beyond the quantitative.

2. The problem of intentionality: perhaps a subset of the Hard Problem of Consciousness is that our experience is irreducibly intentional, both in cases of mental representations of objects in the world and in the case of phenomenal experience. Our thoughts are irreducibly about things. They have the quality of aboutness. This is an anomalous fact for the materialist. Further, even apart from actively representing something to our mind’s eye, our relatively passive experience of the world is inextricably intentional as well. As Heidegger said, dasein is care. We experience things because we give our attention to them. We attend to them. This implicitly belies a transcendental orientation to even seemingly passive experience of the world. I believe this is part of why Plato connected reason to eros. To know is to love. None of this is reducible to the movement of subatomic particles.

3. The insufficiency of panpsychism: apart from those materialists who attempt to engage the Hard Problem of Consciousness by simply denying consciousness exists, as did the late Daniel Dennett, seeing as that proposition is utterly inane, one route some have ventured in order to engage it is that of panpsychism and its variants - the idea that all matter is conscious to some degree. Tea cups, the thermostat, hydrogen atoms, they all must be conscious. The problem with this is it is clearly an ad hoc proposition designed to salvage materialism by positing consciousness as a fundamental property of all particles akin to electric charge, mass, or spin. It is ad hoc because, according to Kastrup, we have no reason to believe all particles and all of their configurations are conscious. The vast majority of them don’t exhibit any of the behaviors we associate with consciousness. One might say I don’t have any reason to believe anyone but myself is conscious - after all, I can’t have your toothache. However, other people exhibit the same sorts of behavior I myself exhibit, so it is a matter of parsimony to infer they exhibit them for the same reason I do - namely, consciousness. Otherwise one would have to propose two explanations for the exact same set of phenomena, Kastrup says. (As a slight addendum to Kastrup’s argument here, I will add I am not entirely unsympathetic to some variants of panpsychism. I recall the practice of certain Sufis who kiss their tea cups before drinking from them, as well as Fr. Sergius Bulgakov’s distinction between hypostasis and hypostasibility. I am not sympathetic to them for the reasons many materialists are, however.) There are other reasons panpsychism as appealed to by materialists is insufficient as an explanation of consciousness, like the ‘combination problem’ John Vervaeke has described, but that is for another time.

4. The world as hallucination: materialism entails that the world you experience is a hallucination of sorts. You don’t have direct access to the external world. Rather, the world is mediated to you through your sensory organs sending signals to your brain based on the signals they receive from the external world, which your brain then organizes into a picture of said external world. Hence, some materialists have actually said that your real skull is beyond all the stars you see in the night sky (pg. 21), because, for them, all subjective perceptions must reside entirely in the brain. Everything you experience is an internal copy of the real, external reality.

   

   The problem is we don’t have good reasons to believe that this picture of the world our organs construct for us would be comprehensive, beyond superficial, or even accurate on materialist grounds. According to materialism, the mind, which is entirely derivable from the brain, was not evolved for the purpose of granting potentially comprehensive knowledge of the nature of reality, such that we could reasonably claim to encapsulate the nature of reality in the materialist worldview; the mind was not evolved for truth. It was instead evolved for the purpose of survival, according to the standard (neo-)Darwinian model. Mere life. Mere persistence. This would mean that if materialism were true, materialism could not be trusted to be accurate. One might respond and say that truth value and survival value correlate somewhat - if there’s a hungry tiger after me my brain better tell me about it if I am going to survive. But correlating somewhat isn’t good enough to stop materialism from shooting itself in the foot by undermining the reliability of the rational and perceptual faculties it requires to substantiate itself as an accurate worldview. Materialists overestimate the survival value to be had in accurate, complete representations of the world, Kastrup points out. His work in artificial neural networks demonstrates that it is often useful, for the sake of efficiency, to remove or distort much of the external stimuli the network is receiving as such stimuli is simply too nuanced and therefore overwhelming. Therefore, the evolutionary pressures oriented towards mere survival value can not be trusted to provide us a picture of the world - or the faculties which would allow us to construct a picture of the world - that even comes close the reality. However, materialism, on its own terms, is derived from this untrustworthy picture; ergo, materialism is untrustworthy. Kastrup points out his argument here is very similar to Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, although it is not directly an argument for a supernatural being guiding evolution, as in Plantinga’s case.

5. What the hell even is matter?: despite how it may seem, what matter is might not be as intuitive as one would think. You could say, well, matter is fundamentally subatomic particles, with everything else being derivable from their dynamics. The issue is subatomic particles are not the stable, indivisible units needed for that to begin to be plausible as a definition. They are themselves emergent from, at least on many accounts of quantum physics, quantum probabilities. We are more or less back at Aristotle’s idea of prime matter. Pure potentiality. This already puts us back in the realm of classical metaphysics, well beyond the realm of materialism, seeing as there must be some actuality which constrains the indeterminate ocean of potentiality in order to create the discrete identities in the world we actually experience and therefore the world we inhabit. God must speak out of heaven and say “Let the dry land appear”, so to speak. Perhaps consciousness is the locus of this process - there is some reason to think so. This argument isn’t one Kastrup makes in the book, at least not up to this point, and it might be somewhat out of step with his idealism seeing as it seemingly introduces (depending on how it is construed) two poles into the ontology, whereas idealism is a form of monism and reductionism. However, it is an argument that many other reputable minds have made, such as Edward Feser in his book Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (although I am not yet sure if Feser would say consciousness is the locus of this process).

Materialism does not stand up to rational scrutiny nor does it even grant us a “common sense” view of the world. I look forward to what Kastrup seeks to offer as an alternative. Stay tuned.

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