Billiard Ball Materialism
This is a collection of remarks made by various people about how Materialism can't be the best explanation of the world we see. By Materialism I mean the idea that matter is all that there is: it is all atoms, photons, energy, various fields, etc. and there is no additional non-material component to the universe.
The billiard ball is a poor metaphor by which to understand matter, and matter can do a whole lot more than you would think billiard balls could every do. Thinking that atoms act like billiard balls is a hindrance to understanding how the universe works.
Bernardo Kastrup
In a video named "Why Materialism is Complete nonsense", Kastrup makes some comments about how materialism does not explain anything. Kastrup believe that atoms and photons are actually manifestations of mental phenomena, and that consciousness is fundamental. Called Analytical Idealism.
Thinking that materialism is fundamental leads to all kinds of insolvable problems. Example: if it is fundamental, then we are saying the noumena are the phenomena.
Yes. Actually we are saying that noumena are emergent from material phenomena but that is the same thing: for every noumenon there is an associated phenomenon. What is wrong with that?
We are saying that the world is made of non-conscious stuff, fundamentally non-conscious.
Yes, that is exactly right. The conscious stuff is made out of unconscious stuff in the same way that a burning candle flame is made out of non-flame stuff.
Consciousness is the idea that there is something it is like to be the world, beyond my perception of it. There is another ontological ground beyond the way they appear to me.
Certainly in a fundamentally material world, there is simply no issue there being something that something else is like which is beyond my perception of it. Other people taste other things without me perceiving it. I don't get the issue here. Another person's consciousness is running in their body, and I would have no perception of it. Theoretically, I could open them up and observe the corresponding phenomena, but doing so is practically impossible and in any case not part of our daily experience.
If we eliminate that, we have to reduce conscious stuff to unconscious stuff . . .
Yes, consciousness is emergent FROM unconscious stuff and nowhere here has he said anything that makes that unreasonable.
which nobody has managed to do. I would claim it has been proven incoherent to try.
400 years ago a candle flame was a mystery. Nobody had figured out how material (atoms) could produce a flame. So a completely separate substance, phlogiston, was invented to explain it. Later we learned how it works, and phlogiston was thrown out the window. That is the same situation we find ourselves in with consciousness. Flames are a process that runs as part of a complex interaction between different kinds of matter, and consciousness should be the same, but millions of times more complex.
I would like to see that proof!
It is wrong in principle, like trying to reduce the number 5 to a marital status.
The concept of "reducing" is probably the wrong way of thinking of it. How do you reduce a candle flame to the interactions of non-burning things? Do you just reduce it? Or do you recognize that the shape of the candle gives rise to the shape of the flame, and that the flame is a dynamic interaction that does not exist (in reduced form) in the wax or the air. Dissect the candle and you will find no little flames in there. Same for the air. It is the form and the dynamic interaction that gives rise to a candle flame.
it leads also to unfortunate psychological consequences. If consciousness is just an epiphenomenon . . .
No! Why did he jump to epiphenomena? to the contrary, materialists are saying that the material world gives rise to REAL consciousness, and Kastrup seem unable to comprehend this. He has a strong inner belief that non-mental things can not give rise to mental thing, and so therefor the materialist must be somehow thinking that REAL consciousness does not exist. We have gotten completely off course here!
that exists only as much as the stuff I can measure about it.
There is no question that people feel pain. Can you measure the pain I feel? We don't know of any way now, and we might never know, but that still does not lead to the conclusion that is it non material.
the we are oddities in the universe, we are peculiar and we really don't belong here.
Not at all. Consciousness is perfectly normal, just like candle flames. This is all just circular reasoning: he doesn't believe consciousness can be a material process, and so he claims somehow that consciousness can't be a material process, but he has not given one single bit of evidence or support for this. It is purely supposition.
If consciousness depends on the integrity of the body, then when my body decomposes, but consciousness comes to an end.
Yes it does. Do you have any evidence contrary to that?
Therefor I am already dead, I just don't know it yet.
I can't even begin to respond to this wild conclusion. Life is perfectly observable so on the surface the statement is nonsense. But he is implying a completely different nonsense: that because I will die some day, because my consciousness will end, therefor it has effectively has the same value as already being ended.
Obviously when I think about myself, it is very hard to contemplate my own demise. I have a strong will to live, and I simply can not imagine that I might not be existing. However that is simply a limitation of human ego. He lets this discomfort with death dictate his ontology, maybe so that he can avoid thinking about how there will come a day when he will no longer exist. Ontologies have no business being defined in such a way as to minimize discomfort.
everything is ultimately for nothing.
Here we have the meaning of life argument: there must be meaning to life. Christians claim it comes from God, but Kastrup is not a theist. His desire for a meaning in life drives his choice of ontologies.
However, materialists do have meaning in their lives, even more so because they know their lives will end. The meaning of our lives lies in what we do during life and what we leave behind. You meaning is what you give to your tribe, not some pre-ordained magical purpose that was given by a god.
all of this arises from simply thinking that the external world is what it seems to be.
No, this is not a logical consequence. He made an unjustified quantum leap. I am still waiting for some justification for there being "more" than a material world.
it is just what I can measure, and there is no inner world. There is no inner being.
This is where he gets materialism all wrong. There is an inner world that is constructed as processes in the material world. Other people really do think, and they do so materially. They have their feelings, their needs, their desires. There is certainly an inner being, and that inner being stops by rendering them unconscious (or dead). He has simply not demonstrated that this can not be the result of material processes.
Materialism has nothing going for it. It is an artifact of a social movement caused by the church.
Hmmmm
It is self evident that physics is a statement on what nature is, and is nothing mental. You can do all of science without doing a single metaphysical thing.
Sure, but give me some indication that there is more to it. What and why is not explained by saying there is a cognitive layer below the physical layer, because we can still ask why that exists.