The Parable of the Puff of Air
Reductionist materialism, also called eliminative materialism, is the proposition that no substance other than matter can or could exist.
The basic argument, first proposed, if memory serves, by Descartes, is that the universe is composed of two substances, mind and matter, which are separate, but connected at the pineal gland. Other philosophers, from this basis, argued that the separation was absolute, and kept in apparent harmony by monads or divine providence, not of their own nature. In later days it was argued that without a substance in common, the two could not interact, nor be kept in harmony. Therefore there can be only one substance.
The materialist holds that this one substance is matter. The idealist come to an opposite conclusion, but that is a discussion for another day.
The materialist argues that existence of matter is confirmed by the senses; matter endures without loss of mass or energy, despite changing form, even while individual men, empires and species rise and fall, enter and pass out of existence.
More to the point, matter is governed by cause and effect that operates independently of the willpower or perception of any observer, which attests to its independence hence its objective existence.
Since all things are one substance, and that substance is matter, therefore everything that seems not to be purely material in its form, substance, meaning or motions, can eventually, in theory, be reduced to matter in motion. This is particularly true of the forms and substances and behaviors of living things, especially man, and of the various abstract and eternal concepts man encounters in his mental life.
This means all abstractions, thoughts, concepts, symbols and words used to express them, and, indeed, all perceptions, memories, images, and visualizations used to represent their past and future byproducts of perception, are material substances. They have no mental properties properly so called because, by hypothesis, all things that seem to be mental properties are byproducts determined by the constellation of inanimate material causes that produce them.
The fashionable term for a byproduct that shares but seems not to share properties in common with its ultimate material cause is “emergent property.”
As the beauty and geometry of the snowflake is an emergent property growing out of the geometry of the water molecule, so, too, by analogy, are the allegedly mental properties of a mind, including perceptions, thoughts, and volitions, which grow out of the neural activity in the biological machine called a brain and its interactions with the material in the surrounding universe.
The logic seems sound as far as it goes, until one raises the question of who, precisely, can know that materialism is true, if all observers are themselves purely material?
You see, photons and protons and atoms and molecules and pebbles and stones and mountains and worlds and stars and all the panoply of the inanimate universe contain not one iota of truth.
Truth is a relation between symbol and object, between word and fact. When the fact is as the word says, the word is true. Otherwise, not.
So if the human mind is nothing but the atoms of his body in a self-replicating configuration, then self-awareness is illusion, because thought is a material byproduct of material action, no more meaningful than the secretions of the gall, or the production of carbon dioxide by the lungs.
A cloud of carbon dioxide is a material thing. It cannot be ‘about’ anything, it cannot represent anything, either accurately or inaccurately. Such a mass of air molecules it is not a symbol, not a word, and so can neither be true nor untrue.
Those categories simply do not apply at all.
Likewise for gall byproducts, or any other purely material end product of a purely material process.
Now if all human thought is nothing but a material byproduct of a purely material neural process, then so, too, are all perceptions, including the perceptions supporting the conclusion that matter is governed by cause and effect that operates independently of the willpower or perception of any observer.
If this perception is merely a neurochemical mass, then it is not true, since the categories of true and untrue do not apply. But this is the axiom of the line of reasoning leading to this conclusion.
Likewise, if all human thought is nothing but a material byproduct of a purely material neural process, then so, too are axioms, statements, speculations, theories, and conclusions of philosophy: including the philosophy called reductionist materialism.
Reductionist materialism, like all philosophy, therefore is a mass of neuro-electric activity that is not a symbol, not a word, and so can be neither true nor untrue; and any word spoken to explain or support this philosophy is a cloud of carbon dioxide, and any written word a squiggle-mass of meaningless ink.
This is a self-refuting philosophy. Any philosophy which eliminates the philosopher himself from his own model of the universe can be safely dismissed from consideration.
For the record, I hold the Cartesian division of the universe into two substances to be just such a model. In effect, Cartesian dualism makes the philosopher into a ghost in a machine, that is, a mind without bodily properties inside a body without mental properties.
Every waking moment refutes this conceit. Any act of perception begins with an object of perception, a fact, and ends with a subject of perception, an image or symbol representing that fact. It is for this reason that perceptions can be true or false, accurate or inaccurate, clear-sighted or blind. The object of perception can be described material categories: length, mass, duration, candlepower, current, temperature, moles of substance.
And likewise, any voluntary motion of the limbs begins with a final cause of the will, that is, a symbol or sign in the thought of what one means to accomplish by the motion, such as an image of what the world will look like if an object is moved from one position to a better position. The motion ends in some degree of success or failure, depending on the recalcitrance of the objects involved in the attempt, and the motions likewise can be described in material terms of what mass was moved where in what time by what about of pressure and so on.
In contrast to the Cartesian conclusion that these two substances have nothing in common, it seems common sense to me that the mind and matter are rarely found apart. Even dead matter cannot described in its motions without reference to the mathematical and formal ratios and relations we call the laws of nature, which are mental objects, perceived by the mind as eternal truths, or not at all.
While a pure thought thinking pure thoughts purely about itself may perhaps be imaginable, in order for those those to have any object outside of themselves, some form of perception or introspection or awareness is needed, and awareness means that there must be an object, mental or physical, of which one is aware.
To me, the difference between body and mind seems to be an inescapable category of human thought, necessitated by the difference between four things: dead bodies that cannot move deliberately; living bodies that move deliberately; one’s own thoughts, which spring from one’s own self; the thoughts of others, which do not spring from one’s own self. The fact of the human condition is that one cannot talk to a stone, nor see nor hear the thoughts of men or beast, except they give an outward sign in some fashion one understands, nor use a pillow to smother a guilty conscience, nor measure a thought with a yardstick, stopwatch or pair of scales.
The axiom that all material effects spring from material causes applies only to empirical statements about empirical truths. It was never meant to apply to anything formal, imponderable nor abstract, such as mathematics or geometry.
The axiom is not used, nor can it be, to describe the rational or deliberate or habitual or instinctive or vital actions of plants, beasts, men, angels — with the one exception that we sometimes excuse a lapse of the deliberate action into habit or instinct by claiming some material cause interfered with our fitness to think and reason, such as to excuse a lapse of judgment by saying a man was drunk or ill, fatigued, or insane.
The axiom that all things are material, including the thoughts of men, and are therefore lacking in all mental qualities, is an obvious self-contradiction. One wonder why even a single schoolboy argues in favor of such a thing.
The premise contradicts itself. No one accepts it on a rational basis.
On an emotional basis, however, once we learn as children that the solid earth moves and the rising and setting sun stands still, or that solid chairs and tables are made of clouds of solar-system-shaped atoms which are mostly empty space, the youth learns to expect that nothing is what it seems.
If he then is baffled and dazed by the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, while at the same time never taught even one iota of honest philosophy, the world turns into a mystical zen puppetshow, where nothing is at is seems, and where logic cannot deduce, from the sound of two hands clapping, the sound of one hand clapping.
In a crazy quilt world where atoms are said to be indeterminate, saying men’s souls are mechanical is merely one more paradox in a dazed modern world.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
