New Materialism

A New MaterialismDownloads
Sampling Reality

Chapters 1, 8 and 12 of "Mind Out of Matter"

Synopsis of "Mind Out of Matter"

One of the many disturbing aspects of our current world is the revival of fundamentalist religion. I was brought up during that time of optimism after WW II which saw the founding of the United Nations and a general optimistic feeling that we were heading into a more rational, humanistic and secular world. This turned out to be an illusion.

I consider myself a materialist in that I believe the universe contains only matter/energy (though possibly in more forms than we have yet discovered, as hinted at by Dark Matter and Dark Energy). I find it a great source of wonder that life could arise from this matter/energy, and even more wonderful that some living things have acquired consciousness - indeed for me this wonder occupies the place that faith in God serves for some other people. (I wouldn't be too offended if accused of pantheism in Spinoza's sense). Nevertheless I'm quite clear about a distinction between those things that actually exist in the world of matter/energy, and those things that are products of our collective imagination - and God as normally conceived belongs in the latter category.

Even so the current debates between so-called New Atheists and those of religious convictions leave me quite cold and somewhat despairing, because of the mutual incomprehension and dogmatism of both sides, and the lack of any conclusion or progress. It seems to me that very few atheists really understand the need to believe in a God, while still fewer religious believers can accept that he is redundant. There are different degrees of superstition among religious believers. The least bad sorts of religion deploy ancient myths as metaphorical explanations for the forces of nature and the contingencies of life (and it's as well to remember that science too can only work through metaphors, the difference being that it constantly submits those metaphors to improvement in the light of evidence). The worst sorts of religion, those now on the increase, invest a superstitious faith in the literal and unchangeable truth of certain texts. Worse still, the term "materialism" has been hijacked by the religious and by New Agey "spiritual" types to mean crass, consumerist, shallow and many other derogatory things, and this distorted meaning has passed into popular usage.

The Left has little reason for complacency in this respect either. The tragic experiences of Soviet and Chinese communism and their attempts to impose vulgar materialism as a state philosophy/religion made matters (pun intended) very much worse, and as a result, since the 1960s theoreticians of the Left lapsed into a form of frank idealism, albeit disguised behind sophisticated arguments that claim descent from Marx and Freud. The Deconstructionist school which now so dominates academic criticism in almost every discipline believes that it is uncovering the historical and economic roots that govern our ideas, but in truth it has lost contact with matter almost entirely in favour of knowledge, which it inadvertently elevates to the status of substance. That this vanishing trick is not more apparent is thanks to the obscurantist language they employ, a cacophonous jargon which is the product of badly translating the terminology of German Idealism into French, then badly translating the result into English. Those who profess progressive politics must have a unshakeable interest in understanding how the world of matter (which includes the mind) actually works: only people who want things to stay just as they are have an interest in obscuring it. That certainly doesn't mean worshipping science, but it does mean keeping abreast of science's latest findings in a critical spirit rather than dismissing science (and even the possibility of truth) as so much socially-constructed ideology.

We now need an envigorated and expanded materialism that understands that the world of matter is only accessible to us through our consciousness, that much of our experience of it is supplemented or distorted by imagination, and that imagined objects may, once passed into other minds, have as much force in the world as material objects proper. We need to re-build the philosophical basis of that old, dogmatic materialism and resolve the centuries-old clash between realism and idealism. We need to incorporate all the new knowledge that the 20th century bequeathed to us about the workings of the human brain, the human mind and the human emotional system, and about the nature of information into a New Materialism.

I've been making some tentative attempts toward such a synthesis, in a book I'm currently writing (working title "Mind Out of Matter"). Here's a brief summary of its conclusions, taken from Chapter 13. You can read a synopsis of the book and three sample chapters by clicking on Sample Chapters or Synopsis.

From Chapter 13:

"Such a new materialism is what I’ve been trying to sketch in this book, with its philosophical roots in Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Kant and Santayana and with its economic roots in Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes (who all understood that the market is not a machine but the resultant of conflicting human desires). It's all underpinned by Darwin’s God-demoting discovery about our real genesis. Advances in neuroscience mean that we can, at least in principle, now talk objectively about subjectivity, especially if we interpret neuroscientific findings in the light of what electronic communications and computers have taught us about information processing. The basic tenets of my new materialism take off from Santayana's aphorism that "Everything is a miracle, until we call it natural, and everything is equally natural that actually happens":

1) What the physicists tell us exists, a universe of invisible particles whizzing to and fro at unimaginable speeds, is indeed all that exists.

2) It’s therefore indeed miraculous that we’re here at all, and able to perceive a world filled with discrete objects that include other people, birds, trees, mountains and houses, but we’ve been capable for some time now of calling human consciousness natural. We are at bottom made of those whizzing particles, we did evolve from single-celled creatures, evolution did give us sense organs that sample information – light, sounds, smells – from the outside world, and a brain that integrates such samples to make us believe in a world of discrete objects.

3) On the other hand, we have not and cannot have any guarantees about the content of the outside world. Everything we perceive is reconstructed in our brains by imagination, and that it coincides well enough with the matter that is out there is again thanks to evolution. We relate to external objects through instinctive beliefs, and we refine and focus these beliefs into the arts, crafts, sciences and technologies that enable us to modify our world (to some extent).

4) A side effect of our ability to perceive is the illusion that we live in the external world rather than being an integral part of it. We are our bodies, and perception is a bodily process. The languages we create to describe the things in the world remain firmly rooted in our embodiment – we can’t think concepts even so simple as up, down, in, and out without metaphors that derive from our experience as physical bodies living under gravity, wind, sunlight and so on.

5) Nevertheless we can use these languages to create abstract systems that explain the cause of events of the world. The varieties of such explanation range from magic, religion, philosophy, mathematics, physics and chemistry to poetry, plays and novels. Rationalists would like to grade such explanations by the pragmatic criterion of how effectively they predict actual events and enable us to act on the world. Anti-rationalists will want to grade them according to how well they satisfy our emotional needs. The task of a new materialism is to get beyond this unproductive dichotomy.

6) Emotions are not the same as feelings. Emotions are chemical information processing systems, prior in evolutionarily terms to language-based reason. They warn us against the most dangerous of external hazards and induce us to propagate and (in mammals at least) to nurture our own species. The emotions work by releasing hormones and neurotransmitters that have mentally-global effect, changing both conscious states and bodily functions, and fine-tuning our sensory and reasoning abilities. "Feelings" are merely our perception of the internal changes wrought by these emotional processes.

7) Extreme rationalists would like to completely separate emotion from reason but this is not possible even in theory. Each item of information stored in our memory gets tagged with the emotional state prevailing during its original perception or conception. These emotional tags, which Antonio Damasio has dubbed “somatic markers”, are weighed whenever a rational decision is made, influencing the outcome in the most emotionally-satisfying direction. As we identify and reconstruct the things of the outside world our brains cannot help but attribute emotional value to them. Scientists try to free their work from such subconscious evaluations through the institution of peer review – by aggregating the opinions of many individuals it is hoped such biases will cancel each other out. On the other hand priests, advertisers and politicians live by amplifying such emotional biases.

8) The question of meaning in language is intimately tied up with this process of emotional evaluation. All attempts to base semantics solely on the formal properties of language and logic have so far proved unsatisfactory, because the entirety of the meaning of an utterance is not inherent in the words alone, but in the emotional value those words have in the mind of a particular listener. Meaning is about values, interests and emotions as much as logic.

9) The existence of an unconscious dimension to the human mind, as proclaimed by psychoanalysis and denied by behaviourists and rationalists, is now an indisputable fact, backed up by ample experimental evidence. However recent neuroscientific discoveries about the number and nature of our emotional subsystems throw doubt on the adequacy of Freud’s or Veblen’s models of “instincts”.

10) A far greater proportion of our behaviour than we’re currently prepared to admit is unconsciously motivated. The phenomenon we call “intuition” is a kind of unconscious knowledge - but it is by no means confined to sexual matters or the result of repressed thoughts. The most mundane of our activities, including the workings of perception itself and the regulation of our basic bodily functions, all proceed outside of consciousness. Whenever we master some physical or mental skill beyond a certain point our brain tends to promote (or demote?) that skill into an intuitive action, thus freeing up processing power to face more novel challenges. This is the basis of habit and habituation.

11) Morality is one of our mental capacities in which intuition is especially active. Experiments suggest that most people cannot provide satisfactory rational arguments to back the moral decisions they make, and it’s likely that much moral reasoning actually employs “hard-wired” brain circuits that bypass conscious areas to trigger emotions directly. There is no absolute morality handed down by God (or Allah, or Jehovah) but there is something approaching a “natural” morality that stems from the structure of our brain’s emotional subsystems. This morality is harsher and cruder than most actually existing ethical systems, deeply biased toward our own kin group, deeply xenophobic, vengeful and sexually permissive. It does however support a conditional form of altruism with notions of fair play. However as Nietzsche explained, all actual human societies construct for themselves far more elaborate moralities, which include those of all the great religions. To persist such moralities need to at least partly comply with the "natural" morality, but they all typically attempt to suppress certain of its aspects, just as Christianity (in theory) attempts to suppress revenge, and most religions repress sexuality.

12) Moralities are sets of values, expressed through rules that are either made explicit in spoken and written language or remain implicit in myths and stories, songs poems and pictures, modes of dress, rituals, dances and other cultural artefacts. Moralities therefore belong to the realm of information, but they have effects in the realm of matter thanks to the emotions and the resulting actions they trigger. One way of looking at human history is as a contest in which people continually seek to modify their own and other people’s emotions - that is their brain chemistries - using as means various rituals, drugs, foodstuffs, artworks, rhetoric and physical violence. Terrifying people can make them more pliant and easily ruled, thanks to the debilitating effect of stress hormones, but in extremis it may enrage them sufficiently to rebel. Drugs like alcohol, tobacco or cannabis offset the effect of such stress and their use is therefore always contested and controlled by those with socio-economic power. This way of looking at history needn’t be reductionist because it does not claim to predict the precise effect of particular activities on particular individuals. It can be enlightening at a statistical level, contributing to explanations of religion as well as trade in psychotropic substances like alcohol, tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco."

SAMPLING REALITY

This is an abridged version of the first part of "Mind Out of Matter". It deals with the intersection between Information Theory and neurophysiology, focussing on recent developments in the theory of perception and the philosophical issues of ontology and epistemology that these raise, going on to affective neuroscience and the central role that emotions, understood in a physiological sense, have to play in reasoning and decision making.

I'm releasing this work free of charge under a Creative Commons licence pending publication of the whole work: you can download it HERE or from the attachments list below. I've enabled comments for this page so that you can pass on any feedback, queries and criticisms.

Sampling Reality by R. J. (Dick) Pountain is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.