Many still consider materialism – the view that nothing exists except matter and its movements – the result of years of careful scientific progress stemming from the Enlightenment. But not so argues Bernardo Kastrup. In an exclusive extract of his book, yet to be released, and a result of decades of research, Kastrup charts the historical origins of materialism, why it was a useful fiction and why it is now time to outgrow it

We must face up to the fact that mainstream Physicalism is not only a fiction, but one that isn’t even convenient anymore. In the early days of the Enlightenment, it did serve a socio-political purpose as the tensions between a nascent science and the Church grew. By carving out a metaphysical domain outside ‘spirit’—a translation of the Greek word ‘psyche,’ which also means ‘mind’— early scientists hoped to be able to operate without being burned at the stake, as Giordano Bruno was in 1600. The notion of a physical world fundamentally different from, and outside, psyche must have sounded ludicrous and harmless enough to Church authorities at the time that they left scientists alone.

As a matter of fact, it isn’t a secret that the founders of the Enlightenment were well aware that Physicalism was a political weapon first and foremost, not a plausible account of the nature of reality. Will Durant, in The Story of Philosophy (Simon and Schuster, 1991), points out that Denis Diderot—one of the authors of the Encyclopédie, the founding document of the Enlightenment—acknowledged that “all matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce the unity of consciousness to matter and motion; but materialism is a good weapon against the Church, and must be used till a better one is found” (page 300). Diderot had clarity and honesty about what he was up to, which we can’t say of most self-appointed spokespeople of Physicalism and ‘Scientism’—a naïve and fallacious conflation of science and metaphysics—today.

___

The historical, sociopolitical, and psychological convenience of the physicalist fiction is almost impossible to overestimate.

___

Later, in the second half of the 18th century, the industrial revolution—with its railways, steam engines and machine tools—was picking up steam and the emergent commercial class, the bourgeoisie, was accruing social influence. As a consequence of this process, by the time of the July Revolution of 1830 the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment had shifted from edifying art and philosophy to down-to-earth technology and the practical applications of science. At this point, the same notion of a physical realm distinct from psyche not only justified the growing dominance of bourgeois intellectual elites over the clergy, but also provided a psychological handle—a convenient fiction—to help scientists extricate themselves from the phenomena they observed. This, in turn, may have helped increase the objectivity of empirical experimentation at a crucial early juncture for science.

But by the second half of the 19th century, the original Enlightenment clarity that Physicalism was mostly a political weapon—instead of a truly plausible metaphysical hypothesis—had been lost, as chronicled by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007). Yet this, too, came with a payoff; in fact, the biggest psychological payoff of all: understanding phenomenal consciousness—i.e., our very ability to experience—as a mere by-product of physical arrangements eliminated, in one fell swoop, the single greatest fear humankind had had throughout its history; namely, the fear of what we will experience after death. For if our minds are generated by living brains, then there will be no consciousness to experience anything after death.