Joy of the Finite...

"Unweaving the Rainbow" specifically attacks the idea that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview makes life seem meaningless. Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades -- before we die forever -- in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe.

Richard Dawkins, Salon

I'm an atheist, which is not that big a deal these days.  There are somewhere between 7 and 35 million of us in the U.S. alone (depending on how you define the term), and many hundreds of millions more across the globe.  We can even count some of the 400 million Buddhists as atheists, at least those that do not hold the Buddha to be divine.  But I'm also a materialist.  I believe in those things which can be shown to exist and I do not believe in things that cannot be shown to exist.  It is this worldview, more than atheism, which many find troubling.  Atheists can easily be dualists, embracing or at least accepting the possibility of any number of supernatural beliefs, but materialists are necessarily atheists in the strong sense.

I have found that religious people defend against materialism with basically two arguments.  The first is that materialism is accepted on faith in exactly the same way as any religious belief.  Therefore, they argue, although you may prefer materialism it is not a superior philosophy, just a different, equally arbitrary one.  This is quite untrue.  I hope to refute this argument in depth in a later posting, but for now it should suffice to observe that there is a difference between holding as true that for which there is evidence, and holding as true that for which there is no evidence.  While the materialist endeavors only to do the first, the theist has to do both.  This puts them on the sharp side of Occam's Razor.

The second argument is rarely an argument as such; it's more often a statement like "if you really believe that you're nothing more than matter, why don't you just kill yourself right now?"  I have heard this strange but heartfelt sentiment many times.  It appears that the religious feel that it is the non-material, or spiritual, component of their worldview that makes existence worthwhile.  While it is a logical fallacy to argue that something must be true because it would be bad if it wasn't (in fact this is one of the canonical examples of argumentum ad consequentiam), it would be only fair to try to understand why.  Why is it that contemplating a materialistic view of reality is tantamount to suicide for so many people?

Few are so unmoored that metaphysical introspection would make them turn into oncoming traffic in despair.  Most of us have a rather visceral commitment to our own existence that we would not end lightly.  Even in times of crises our family and friends, home and career, plans and ambitions, all compel us to keep moving forward.  At times these may pale into trivial insignificance, and one may seek change and new adventures, but only for the very unbalanced do these life crises turn into questions about whether one should exist at all.  So where does this existential tension arise?

In a classic case of projection, the theists accuse materialists of "reductionism," while in fact it is they who suffer from the strongest form of this fallacy.  Theists and other adherents to the supernatural do not accept that a complex system can be more than the sum of its parts.  They hold that unless the constituent elements of an aggregate innately posses a given property then the whole cannot either.  Since atoms aren't alive, for example, and we're made of atoms, we must be merely non-living automatons.  Since chemical reactions don't have feelings, and our brains run on chemical reactions, our brains can't have any more feelings than a pot of soup.  Because rocks aren't conscious, human beings have to be made of exotic parts to posses consciousness.

Theists posit souls, which hold the consciousness and all other human qualities in pure non-material form as the solution to this non-existent dilemma.  The New Agers are no better, turning instead to quantum physics to find mind and magic in the subatomic which they incorrectly and incoherently project to the human scale.  Materialists, on the other hand, are content with the notion that interesting and worthwhile phenomena emerge out of simpler systems, and we seek the right level of explanation for each.  We would no more look to our constituent elements to explain our humanity than we would try to explain mortgage interest rates by electron orbitals.  We do try to reduce the complexity of theories as much as possible, and sometimes that can be done by looking for similar processes in simpler systems, but we only go as far as the observational details will allow.  The reverse process, employed perhaps without thinking by the supernaturally-inclined, is entirely unjustified.

But let's face it, the real issue is death.  Here materialism offers cold comfort indeed.  It predicts not merely that the death of the body means the death of the mind, a permanent oblivion beyond the ability of anyone to really imagine, but the death of the civilization, the species, the planet, and the universe itself.  Whether crushed to a white-hot singularity or spread as a cold gruel of particles robbed even of the energy to form the weakest of bonds, not just us but our family lines, our species, and all life everywhere is doomed to extinction.  To be a materialist is to grasp that you and everything you cherish is finite.

But so what?  Does existence have to be infinite to have meaning?

Religion says yes.  Every religion in the world and all the popular non-religious supernatural beliefs promise eternal life in one form or another.  Souls, spirits, heaven, reincarnation -- all are imaginative ways to die without actually dying.  Even the dream of personal immortality through nanotechnology, popular with cyber-libertarians, fills this niche for those who are materialist in the money-grubbing sense, but who still don't want to face the reality of a finite life.  People cling to these beliefs without a shred of evidence to support them, and even actively fight scientific truths that might contradict them.  Religion does promise comfort, but is this small solace really worth the cost of polluting your beliefs with irrationality?

There is some evidence that religion makes people happier.  Those with strong fundamentalist beliefs rate themselves as more grounded in their lives than those with weaker faith, and those who actively question their faith report the greatest unease.  This suggests a trend, one which if projected linearly leads people to think that if they let go of all their supernatural beliefs they would fall into an abyss of hopelessness.  But the trend is not linear.  In fact atheists are just as happy as religious people, and strong materialists are as well grounded in their lives as the fundamentalists at the other end of the scale, if not more so.  The unhappy people going through a crises of faith are at the bottom of a U-shaped curve from the very religious on one end to the very unreligious on the other.  If they would just let go of their hope for an eternal afterlife and start working on a personal understanding of the world that takes everything we have learned from science into account, they would start on the road to genuine well-being.

Life is finite, but that makes it all the more precious.  It is to be lived and enjoyed now.  Right now.  Go out and live it.

- jack*

Comments

[Dr. C.]

Great post Jack. As an oldster, I wouldn't be so certain that people want to live forever. I'm past the cusp and, while I still have a few more years to go, am not that unhappy about the conclusion.
I recently was in Vienna and visited Freud's office, which is now a museum. This got me thinking again about the biggest quandry that whatever we call ourselves (materialists sounds so crass) need to work out. That's the problem of free will. If there is no transcendence, and I do not see any evidence that there is, then there can be no free will. That's o.k. by me, but not by our friends on the other side. It also comes down to consideration of molecular thresholds (I don't see any reason to posit quantum effects in neurobiology, but could be convinced.) Your post has stimulated me to go back to the drawing board about this. There are a number of good books that have come out recently and I need to read them.

[paperwight]

Submitted this to the Carnival of the Godless. If you don't want it up in the next one, tell Rasmussen.

[jack*]

PW: Thanks for the submission. Wasn't sure how those COG things worked...

Dr.C: I almost mentioned free will, but it's kind of a separate topic. It's not that big a difficulty, really. The Thomist concept of contra-causal free will is easily shown to be incoherent, and the other requirements of unpredictability and intentionality are properties of certain types of sufficiently complex systems (classical, no need for QM). The error in free will is again failing to see the difference in complexity between a pool table and a human brain.

Daniel Dennet handles this pretty well (although long and with too many cybernetic analogies for my taste) in his Freedom Evolves.

[Zenji]

I'm not sure the philosophical difficulties created by the notion of Free Will can be so easily waved away by a mere reference to complexity. Chaotic systems are unpredictable, but i'm not sure that means they are non-deterministic. And even if they are literally non-deterministic, that means they are, essentially, random or semi-random.

however, Free Will as it is commonly understood is neither determined nor random. What it actually *is* is quite hard to say, as i'm not sure there is a third option apart from some blending of the two, which again fails to adequately explain what we usually mean when we say we have free will.

I myself am a Zen Christian, a confused sort of a beast to be sure, and I hold that Consciousness is fundamentally Mysterious. I have no solution to the question, but i'm fascinated by the problem. I will go further and say that i think Existence itself is fundamentally Mysterious. It's not that we can't learn things about it -- we obviously can learn a lot about it, and i am with you 100% on the idea of only believing (in) things that you can demonstrate to be true. However, and this is personal experience, there are things about the world that i think simply can't be understood, at least by me at this point in my life. My experience, and the experience of Zen Buddhists before me for millenia, has been that it is hard to even talk about what these things *are*, but consciousness is one of the central mysteries to me, and scientific observations of the brain, while all well and good and useful and even fruitful in their domain, will i think fail to really answer some of the fundamental questions i personally have about existence and consciousness. Not that it isn't fun to try. Truthfully, i think that coming to understand what the *question* is, is the really important thing, since i don't think there is an answer available to us, by the very nature of the question.

[Dr. C.]

Thought you would enjoy this link via Pharyngula:

http://www.400monkeys.com/God/

[jack*]

Zenji: The "third option" you're looking for I suspect is contra-causal free will. The notion is that when you go to make a decision you step out of normal causal reality and decide "freely." Naturally this requires a dualistic view since there has to be part of you that can "step out" of the cause & effect world.

The sketchy outline of deterministic free will is that purposeful action emerges as simple reflexes become more complex, both in the sensitivity of what they respond to and in how they tune their responses to different stimulii. At some threshold we can no longer reasonably talk about the mechanical chain of cause/effect and have to explain actions by intention. We don't say "the thermostat turned on the heater because it felt cold," but we do say "the beetle bit you because it felt threatened." Both are deterministic responses, the insect is just a lot more complex.

At some level of complexity basic intentionality becomes will. It has to do with when the response options include being able to change the actual goals of the system itself, thus altering the sensitivies and response options. If your thermostat was sophisticated enough to decide to get a new job timing fuel injectors for Formula One racecars, then we'd have to grant that it had a will no matter how deterministic its circuits.

[Zenji]

So basically we're saying that 'free' will is actually dererministic, but that the determination is so incredibly complex that we call it 'free'?

i'm not sure what you mean by 'intentionality' if by it you mean something other than 'will'. That is, i agree, we do say the beetle bit you because it felt threatened, but that doesn't mean that the causal chain was not deterministic. That is, the beetles sensory inputs fed into a computation of threat level, and when the threshold for a 'bite' action was reached, the beetle bit you -- there is no 'freedom' in there. To say "the beetle intended to bite you" is really just another way of saying that the calculation that the beetle's autonomic processes performed resulted in a decision, or intention, to bite. I still feel that 'Free' will is a nonsensical idea, really, or i would if i didn't have such a compelling experience of Free Will...

[The Liberal Avenger]

I'm an atheist, too!

Why don't the Christian girls love me?!

[Dr. C.]

Jack*, I really apologize for throwing in the question of Free Will and deflecting from you excellent commentary. I need to think about all this before I can respond in a coherent manner. There are apparently 400 million Buddhists, but I can't think that they really follow his teachings. I have to think about your contention that reincarnation is just another form of immortality. From what I have read, sparse as it may be, it seemed as if the population of north India in 500 BC (the Buddha's time) sort of universally believed in reincarnation as a given, sort of like we all used to believe in a God as a given. Anyway, keep up the thinking. I've got to read that stuff on complexity and your suggestion of Daniel Dennet.

[Zenji]

Reincarnation is actually quite a difficult aspect of Buddhist teachings. This is because Buddha taught 'no-self' (anatman), the idea that fundamentally there is no 'self' in there, in your head. Buddha went so far as to say "Seeing is, but no Seer. Hearing is, but no Hearer..." and so forth. And if there is no self, what would be reincarnated? Nothing like a little mystery for the ages.

I personally don't concern myself with issues of reincarnation. My feeling is that since i don't and can't know what happens after death, i won't worry about it, i'll worry about the here and now. A Materialist may say that they know there is nothing after death, but i'm not convinced. If you can't see why it would be possible that there is some persistence after death, well, i don't know what to tell you...try looking at the universe from a cartesian viewpoint of radical doubt or a buddhist idea that the material world is in some way illusory -- mind definitely exists, but everything else, not so certainly. It is at least possible that the body is an 'illusion' of some kind, that existence is not what it seems to be. And if it is, then death of the body is not necessarily the end of the mind...

Again, i'm not saying i *know* this, just that it is *possible*. Since we really can't know, the whole question is a distraction from more important matters, and is best set aside, in my mind. Buddha is said to have taught this idea as well, that concerning oneself with things you can only hypothesize about without any way to verify or confirm is pointless and useless.

I hope Jack* doesn't feel like his post has been hijacked...i was enjoying the discussion....if you'd rather i shut up, i will.

[jack*]

Some things we just don't know and can legitimately withhold judgement. Life after death is not one of those things. What we know about nature and the laws of physics pretty much rule out any possibilty that our mental process could persist after the death of the body. No one has an inkling of the slightest possiblity of a remotely plausibly theory for how that might work. It's as close to impossible as anything you might want to propose.

You can argue that science is just wrong about that, but then the burden of proof is on you. If you wish to raise doubt you have to be able to justify that doubt as well. To dismiss scientific knowledge on the premise that it cannot be proven to be certain is to deny the entire concept of science and rationality in general, by which we have can acquire knowledge in spite of our falibility.

No need to stop the discussion. I'm no expert on free will, but I think it's great people are interested in these issues.

[Zenji]

You're neglected to do what i asked you to do -- entertain doubt that the 'physical universe' is what it seems to be. This is something Descartes practiced, and long before him, Buddhist and Hindu meditators, who called the world "Illusion."

If you prefer a more scientific approach to the question, consider the idea that the world might be virtual, in the virtual reality sense. That is, it might be the product of some technology in a containing 'meta-universe.' You know, the ol' brain-in-a-vat thing.

Now before you go into me about how i can't prove that, i'm with you. I admit it, i can't prove it. I'm not even trying to prove it, i'm just saying that it is *possible*. Dennet's argument against it is, or was when he wrote "Consciousness Explained" lo those many years ago, was that the technology would have to be so amazing that he simply couldn't believe it would exist. My answer to that is, look how far our technology has come in a mere 50 years or so, since there have been modern computers. Now imagine that we survive as a species for another 1000 years....how good a virtual world might we be able to generate? how bout 10,000 years after that? You yourself are comfortable with a universe that is billions of years old -- why not a technological civilization that is 10,000 years old?

So sit back, close your eyes, and imagine for just a second, just for the sake of the argument, that this world is virtual. Your body is illusion, part of the program (i know, 'It's the Matrix, man! cool!'... just bear with me). The link between your brain and your mind is part of the illusion. You can say, a la Descartes, that your mind exists for sure, but you can't say that anything else is certainly 'real' in the sense of 'not part of the illusion'. And really, your mind is part of the illusion, too, but it is *you*.....and if you accept not that this is fact, but only that it is, however remotely, *possible* (and really, on what basis do we decide the remoteness of the possibility?), then you must admit that it is also possible for the 'computer' (or perhaps, better, technology) that creates and sustains your existence, to continue to do so after the illusion of your body has suffered the illusion of death.

Again, i wish to emphasize that this is a thought experiment, and not an argument for how things really are...but i ask you to consider it because i think it can be very informative as to *why* the buddhists, and other religious people, believe in the old dualist notions of mind as being somehow separate from body, and of self or 'soul' being persistent after death.

Again, i am not asking you to *believe* in anything regarding an afterlife or what it is like...only that it is a real *possibility* through this means, or some other means as yet by me and you unimagined. And then, i am more than happy to say, "screw it" because its all just idle speculation and there is no way to settle the issue. Maybe you can't believe it is possible, maybe you can, i dunno, i don't really care, much. I just like to talk about it. =o)

But the argument that the mind relies on the brain doesn't cut it with me, because i believe in the *mind*, but i'm not sure about the *brain*.

[Zenji]

It has occurred to me, yesterday, while i've been thinking about this, that what we have here is the classic 'mind-matter' split. A Strict Materialist, like yourself, believes in the primacy of Matter -- matter is real, and mind relies on matter for its existence. A Religious Mystic, like myself, essentially believes in the primacy of Mind -- mind is real, and matter is at least suspect, if not totally illusory.

I must admit, that most of the non-mystical-experience based evidence is on your side in that debate. Matter is consistent, persistent, and insistent. Everything in our ordinary experience leads us to believe in the reality of matter and the secondariness of mind. I will readily admit, the only reason i believe as i do is from mystical experiences, which i of course cannot expect to convince you, as their content is unavailable to you.

Still, i think there are some arguments that might admit some doubt into your hard materialist views...at least, there are some arguments that interest me. You might be surprised to find out how sympathetic an avowed religionist is to materialistic and scientific viewpoints, despite my ultimate decision that i can't quite commit to them fully.

[jack*]

There are infinitely many alternate theories about the true nature of the universe we might entertain. Perhaps the entirety of known space and time is the equivalent of a science fair ant farm at god school. Perhaps the Earth is, as South Park suggested, a planet-sized reality show. Or perhaps the last 15 billion years has just been the wild dream of a couch potato named Doug who ate too much pizza before passing out. Or perhaps Mormon cosmology is true.

With sufficient retrofitting, any of these notions can be made logically consistent with physics and astronomy. That's actually very easy. More than that, the theories can be made unassailable by any evidence -- in other words, unfalsifiable. This is why they are all unscientific. While there are observations we can imagine that would overturn the scientific theories of gravity, atomic physics and evolution, no such observation could ever even dent the theories about God or Doug.

So how do we decide what's true? We cannot rely on the normal tests of consistency and evidence, since consistency and lack of evidence are the hallmarks of this type of theory. We cannot pick the most likely theory since we have no way to assign the a priori probability of Doug or God. We could use Occam's Razor and pick the simplest, but there is no guarantee that the simpler theory will be true.

The answer to this dilemma can be made as complex as you want, and many philosophers have done just that, but it's mostly a matter of common sense. Beliefs are the way we model the world, and their value should be measured based on their effectiveness at helping us solve the real problems we encounter. If the Doug theory doesn't make predictions, or answer questions, or otherwise fill in holes in our understanding, we don't need it. In this, very real, sense Doug and God do not exist.

[Zenji]

I understand what you're saying. And you're right. I can easily concoct some wild 'theory' (or better, story) about how the universe might be, and there really is no proof one way or the other. And so, doing so and then relying on the story so concocted is foolish.

However, the point is merely that materialist reductionist philosophies are limited, by their nature. There is an element of uncertainty to the metaphysical world, and i think that that uncertainty has to be acknowledged. I am comfortable saying "i don't know" about the nature of reality, but you are not, it seems -- you want to say, "I do know. It is what it appears to be, and nothing more. Only the things we can prove to be true are true."

To me, this is an error. The fundamental issue at the heart of the error is the issue of knowledge vs fact. I am comfortable only *believing* in the things we can demonstrate. But i am not comfortable believing that reality is necessarily limited to that set of things. In your earlier post you said that life after death was 'as close to impossible as it is possible to get', and then later you acknowledged that you really have no way to measure the likelihood of alternate possibilities. If the world is as we percieve it to be, and contains no unforseen complications, then fine, but i don't believe the world is so limited.

In short, i am not trying to argue that life after death exists, only that it is possible. I am not trying to argue that it is probable, only that it is possible. And why am i so arguing? Because i think it is extremely important for us, as humans, to recognize our limitations and the limitations of our understanding.

As a continuation of the discussion, which may not be welcome now that there's a new post, i want to say that i personally believe in the primacy of Mind rather than the primacy of Matter, *because of my experiences.* That is, i have personally, i myself, had religious *experiences* which point me in the direction of perceiving that there is something more to the world than what we ordinarily percieve. I really don't have many, if any, answers as a result, but i do have questions, and to me they are well founded and important.

What does that mean for you? Well, i'm going to take a wild guess here and say that as a Hard Materialist and an Atheist you write off religious experience as delusion. You are free to do so, but i will say that to do so is to argue not from evidence but from premises. I personally cannot so write them off, as you might expect. That said, i realize that i can't really expect you to accept me as an authority on the basis of my claim to special experience....and i don't want you to, anyway. What i would ultimately like would be for you to acknowledge that such experiences are possible (not definitely valid, just possible), accessible to anyone including you (even if invalid, the delusions are accessible), and that they might be worth investigating in a scientific manner (by experimenting on your self and your own consciousness to see what the issue is all about). Failing that, i just like to shoot the shit on the internet =o)

have a good one.

[jack*]

I think we're arguing in circles at this point, Zenji, so perhaps we should let it rest. Just to quickly answer your last objection: science is all about limitations. The entire theory and practice are predicated on the assumption that humans can get things wrong and that we need a rigorous method to assure that what we call knowledge is really true. That said, there's no point just assuming that everything we know is wrong either. One has to strike a balance between dogmatism and universal skepticism.

While I can acknowledge the logical possibility of life after death, it contradicts so much of our understanding of the universe that it would require a revision of science more radical than the advent of quantum mechanics. Given the weakness of the evidence in favor of it, I think that the likelyhood that we'll need to make such a revision is vanishingly small.

[Dadahead]

Greetings. I just posted on this very issue this morning.

My take: materialism is dead, and has been for some time.

[Zenji]

I'm happy to let it rest if you like. I think you'd be surprised at how much i am in agreement with you, basically. Although in my mind there are some potential avenues where consciousness might continue after the death of the body, i am the first to admit i have no proof, and without proof, well, no sense trying to make pudding.

In addition, most of my thinking rests on the idea that the Universe is not entirely what it appears to be, and so, science will naturally not need to alter it's views on these matters...science concerns itself precisely with how the Universe appears to be. Although an individual scientist may come to have a mysticists understanding, i can't see personally how one could ever apply scientific modeling to the question *outside of the laboratory of one's own self*....that is, i believe that mystical truth is available, even readily available, but not from the outside, where science needs to position itself for generalized results. I think scientific methodology and rigour is an absolute aid to a religious seeker; but the truths so discovered are ultimately personal truths, available only to the particular seeker who has sought them.