What is materialism? It is known as other things like material reductionism and physicalism among others. It is the view that only one substance exists – matter – and that all reduces to matter. This is a faith-based position that is spreading wildly through the West as a reaction to oppressive Western religions. It is philosophically unsound and has no supporting evidence. Let at look at this.
Well, this depends strongly on what you consider to be 'matter', 'material', or 'physical'. For example, light is certainly considered to exist, even by materialists, but it does not take up space or have mass. So, at least potentially, we have a bit of a straw man being set up here. let's stick to physicalism since it allows for physical things that may not actually have mass or take up volume.
Also, even physicalists allow for *processes* which involve physical things. The dynamics can be important as well as the composition. More on this later.
1) The “evidence” for materialism is that doing something to the brain effects how consciousness comes through. Take a drug or a hammer to your head and you may start slurring, seeing things, hearing things, stumbling, etc. This is not evidence of materialism because it is also expected in more supported positions such as dualism and idealism, as we will see. It is the only support that materialism has presented thus far in its favor and it does not even actually suggest materialism itself. We will look at this more below.
No, the evidence for consciousness being a physical process is much more detailed than that. We can point to specific areas of the brain that deal with planning, emotions of various sorts, memory, etc. So, unlike a radio, we can actually point to specific places where a faulty mechanism in the brain affects the conscious state.
And, given the effectiveness of, say, anesthetics, we know that not only can consciousness be affected, but it can actually be turned off via chemical and other physical processes.
2) The Law of Identity is the most basic and foundational law of logic and states that things with different properties cannot be identical – “A is A and not Non-A”. The material and conscious worlds have entirely different properties, including but not limited to (respectively); being spacial vs. not taking up space, being objective and being subjective, being universally accessible and being wholly private, and many more. We can illustrate this by looking at a brain, having others see it as well, and measuring the space taken up by the brain. Now imagine your fantasy man/woman standing in the room before you. Does she take up space? Can others see her? Are the traits that make her “perfect” objective? Of course not, because matter and consciousness have different properties, and so thinking matter causes the mind is a violation of the most basic logic.
As pointed out above, not all physical things take up space. So that isn't a relevant aspect. Second, with MRI and other brain scans, aspects that were previously 'subjective' are now becoming objective. In particular, again, we can point to actual brain processes that mediate our thoughts and emotions.
In the imagining of the woman, you are mistaking the internal representation for the real woman. If the 'thought' of the woman is a process in the brain (which all available evidence points to being the case), the thought of the woman would take up no more space than a JPG 'image' would take in the memory of a computer. No additional mass would be required, no volume would be required, etc. But still, the process would be a physical process just as the sequence of 0's and 1's in the RAM of a computer is physical, but takes up no volume nor does it have mass.
And we can push the analogy further. The brain processes information. The thoughts and emotions we experience are a type of information. And information, as shown on computers, need not take up the space of what it refers to. So, you are making a category error here: thinking the image has to have the same properties as the referent.
3) Our own conscious experience is the one thing we know directly, and everything else we know of depends on us being conscious beings. This includes matter. So to reduce consciousness to matter reduces the one thing we know with certainty to something that we know through it. This is unreasonable.
This is a matter of epistemology, not ontology. It is how we come to know things, not necessarily what they are. Yes, our brains aquire information through limited means: through our senses and the processing of that sensory data. And since 'we' are a process in a particular brain, 'we' are limited to the information available to that brain.
So, the reason for the reduction is a limitation of how we acquire information about the universe, not a limitation of the universe itself.
4) Things like cognitive science prove the mind can override the brain. Self-regulation, internal coping skills, bio-feedback, meditation – all are conscious and willful acts that override the material body. This can be seen such as in a depression patient recognizing a depressed episode coming on and using skills like Self-talk and meditation to keep the episode at bay. This is scientific fact, and once you remove willful engagement from therapy it becomes ineffective. Further, and good psychiatrist will also recommend counseling or various therapies along with the physiology-altering drugs.
These have been shown to work by changing the way the brain processes information. The brain is not a static organ. Things such as biofeedback can and do change the circuitry of the brain and that is why such techniques work to help with the conditions you mention. Again, the changes are physical changes, even when accomplished via feedback and counseling.
5) The mind is actually capable of manipulating nature, even changing it to suit its will. One example of this is in architecture, where complex buildings are created in the mind and then transferred into the objective material universe. Movies or music are another good example as they exist as ideas before they even become “reality”. Medication is another example where we literally change the nature of substances in order to affect our health, such as manipulating the flu to make yearly flu-shots.
And yet, whenever we 'change' nature, we do so through the laws of nature. We cannot build building that violate the physical laws: when we try, the building collapse. Medicines work through the physical, chemical nature of the medicines and the biochemistry of our bodies and minds.
6) Materialism also relies on the faith in future discovery. “Maybe one day we will find the mechanism that makes consciousness.” “Maybe one day we will explain how the subjective arises from the objective”. And maybe not. This is blind faith and nothing more.
Are there things we have not explained? Yes, of course. And so *any* understanding is based on hoped for future discoveries.
But the track record of physicalism in solving previously difficult problems, from disease (bacteria, not malicious spirits), to the composition of stars (not some fifth substance, but the same sorts of elements that we find here on Earth), to healing even mental issues through medicines that work on specific types of neurons shows that it is an effective working hypothesis.
7) The Upper Paleolithic Revolution was an event in human history that saw the species leap from “just another animal” to a species with higher consciousness. This led to the creation of art, religion, the rise of individuality, the creation of languages, the formations of societies, etc. Everything that let human beings become the dominant species on this planet occurred during the UPR. However, we had already existed as an evolved species for tens of thousands of years before the UPR. Further, this changes seems to have affected the species as a whole over a relatively short amount of time, rather than through the longer-term genetic changes we see with evolution. On top of this, the consciousness that it produced, as we have been discussing, had not only different properties from the natural world but was able to question, manipulate, and go against it. This again shows that consciousness is entirely different from the material world and how it functions.
Sorry, but his is outdated information. We have continuous information through the supposed 'break' that shows all cultural change to be gradual:
78,000-year cave record from East Africa shows early cultural innovations
8 ) Absurdity – in short, materialism leads to philosophical absurdity any way you look at it. For example it pretends to be a skeptical position but relies on the senses and puts what we know aside for what we know through it. This is the exact opposite of skepticism, and skepticism and materialism are mutually exclusive.
On the contrary, it is the dualist position that leads to absurdities by putting aside what we know: the physical world, for what we cannot know: anything non-physical. ALL the evidence is that consciousness is a physical *process* (not a thing).
Yet another absurd reduction of materialism is again found in the single piece of evidence that doing things to the brain affects consciousness. Sure, maybe this means that materialism is true, but there is no other evidence that materialism is true! It would be like saying “well MAYBE magic leprechauns are the cause of gravity.” Sure that could theoretically explain it, but is that really the most rational way to go about it?
Funny, it is the dualist position that consciousness is not physical that seems closest to the leprechaun theory here. We can point to specific areas of the brain that do things, but instead you suggest a leprechaun of a non-material consciousness with no way to test it.
9) Finally, materialism is dangerous. For example we can look at mental and behavioral health and how those are treated. For instance, any good doctor who prescribes medication to address the physiological side of mental illness will also recommend therapy to address the mental side. As talked about above, without willful engagement in such therapy interventions no changes can occur. It would be dangerous to address only the physiological and not the mental aspects of these illnesses. Further, belief that individuals are deterministic machines with no control over their lives would make any kind of mental/behavioral healthwork impossible. Imagine a counselor telling a client to just say “**** it” because they have no control over their problems anyways!
And why would a materialist say such a silly thing? We know that both counseling and medication can both affect brain functioning, with both having different specializations in that treatment. it seems more dangerous to deny the physical aspect of consciousness and insist that any defect is a problem of personality as opposed to something that can be fixed.
