We live in an age of science, which has enabled technological advancements unimaginable to our ancestors. Unlike philosophy, which depends somewhat on certain subjective values and one’s own sense of plausibility to settle questions, science poses questions directly to nature, in the form of experiments. Nature then answers by displaying certain behaviors, so questions can be settled objectively.
This is both science’s strength and its Achilles’ heel: experiments only tell us how nature behaves, not what it essentially is. Many different hypotheses about nature’s essence are consistent with its manifest behaviors. So although such behaviors are informative, they can’t settle questions of being, which philosophers call ‘metaphysics.’ Understanding nature’s essence is fundamentally beyond the scientific method, which leaves us with the—different—methods of philosophy. These, somewhat subjective as they may be, are our only path to figuring out what is going on.
Materialism—the view that nature is fundamentally constituted by matter outside and independent of mind—is a metaphysics, in that it makes statements about what nature essentially is. As such, it is also a theoretical inference: we cannot empirically observe matter outside and independent of mind, for we are forever locked in mind. All we can observe are the contents of perception, which are inherently mental. Even the output of measurement instruments is only accessible to us insofar as it is mentally perceived.
We infer the existence of something beyond mental states because, at first, this seems to make sense of three canonical observations:
(i) We all seem to share the same world beyond ourselves
(ii) The behaviour of this shared world doesn't seem to depend on our volition
(iii) There are tight correlations between our inner experience and measurable patterns of brain activity
A world outside mental states, which we all inhabit, makes sense of observation (i). Because this shared world is thus non-mental, it isn’t acquiescent to our (mental) volition, thereby explaining (ii). Finally, if particular configurations of matter in this world somehow generate mentality, it could also explain (iii). And so our culture has come to take for granted that nature is essentially material, non-mental. Again, this is a metaphysical inference aimed at tentatively explaining the canonical observations listed above, not a scientific or empirical fact.
The problem is that such metaphysical inference is untenable on several grounds. For starters, there is nothing about the parameters of material arrangements—say, the position and momentum of the atoms constituting our brain—in terms of which we could deduce, at least in principle, how it feels to fall in love, to taste wine, or to listen to a Vivaldi sonata. There is an impassable explanatory gap between material quantities and experiential qualities, which philosophers refer to as the ‘hard problem of consciousness.’ Many people don’t recognize this gap because they think of matter as already having intrinsic qualities—such as color, taste, etc.—which contradicts mainstream materialism: according to the latter, color, taste, etc., are all generated by our brain, inside our skull. They don’t exist in the world out there, which is supposedly purely abstract.
Second, materialism lives or dies with what physicists call ‘physical realism’: there must be an objective world out there, consisting of entities with defined properties, whether such world is being observed or not. The problem is that experiments over the past four decades have now refuted physical realism beyond reasonable doubt. So unless one redefines the meaning of the word ‘materialism’ in a rather arbitrary manner, metaphysical materialism is now physically untenable.
15th November 2019
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