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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28158 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Materialism, as the philosophy exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When we talk about someone being a 'materialist' we don't mean they shop for lots of handbags or fancy dining room sets. Instead, a materialist is generally defined as seeing all facts or pieces of the world, including the human mind and will, as dependable on or in the most extreme case reducible to physical processes.

In other words, there is only physical matter moving around and interacting, no other forces exist in the universe.

There are a number of major issues within determinism such as free will, and the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes. Of course this claim has been papered over from the materialist side by claiming that free will is just an illusion, but the determinists haven't made much headway. The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.

Now challenges to materialism present a number of problems, primarily the fact that our modern, statistical, ScientificTM worldview cannot tolerate or understand any phenomena that aren't easily and simply repeated. Even if supernatural phenomenon did exist however, the bias against them has grown so massive in the last century that any respectable scientist wouldn't be caught dead going near these claims.

Why does this matter for the Culture War? Well outside of even religion, our entire cultural regime rests upon Science being the arbiter of truth and ender of disputes. If it turns out our materialistic worldview science has given us ends up being false, there are innumerable cultural repercussions, from the temporal vindication of religion to the re-opening of entire new vistas of understanding. Materialism's truth or falsity is, I would argue, the most important higher level question for our world to answer at the moment. Unfortunately, the mainstream consensus has been that materialism is true a priori despite massive contradictions. Even if many moderns don't outright argue this, their actions and stances on various topics reveal them as materialists through and through.

I'd imagine many people reading this haven't been exposed to some of the more respectable claims of anti-materialists. I'm going to quote heavily from this article by Roger's Bacon to give you an idea of some of the more interesting claims. Bacon, in turn, pulls heavily from a book entitled The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, if you're interested in further reading.

Bacon explains how Freeman Dyson, an intellectual titan by any standard, posited this idea:

In my review I said that ESP only occurs, according to the anecdotal evidence, when a person is experiencing intense stress and strong emotions. Under the conditions of a controlled scientific experiment, intense stress and strong emotions are excluded; the person experiences intense boredom rather than excitement, so the evidence for ESP disappears...The experiment necessarily excludes the human emotions that make ESP possible.

This view is generally referred to as "Traumatic Transcendence," or in other words you need extremely strong states to activate latent 'powers' or abilities, states which controlled experiments almost by definition cannot excite in patients. We're not just talking scaring someone a bit, we're talking extremely near death or something similar. And even in those states it's an extreme rarity of cases, apparently. However, we have extensive anecdotal reports, many from quite distinguished thinkers and well corroborated, that propose something like traumatic transcendence being real.

There are of course other examples. I'm going to quote this one from Mark Twain at length, which I find fascinating:

Dressed in his famous white “dontcaredam suit” Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he related the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were lying in port in St. Louis, the writer had a most remarkable dream:

In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.

Twain awoke, got dressed, and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized “that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream. Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him a huge overdose of opium for the pain. Normally, the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised sixty dollars to put Henry in a special metal one. Twain explained what happened next:

When I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.

Now who of us would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it all as a series of coincidences? Twain certainly could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were all too many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they work. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.” Finally, Twain gave in, allowed his name to be attached to his own experiences and ideas, and published this material in Harper’s magazine in two separate installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).”

Again, there are almost endless examples of these types of phenomena occurring, which are unfortunately decried by any scientific establishment that exists today.

However, traumatic transcendence isn't the only explanation. Another reasonable explanation for our inability to capture these occurrences in experiments would be that they are mediated by an intelligent, non-human agent of some kind such as a ghost, demon, angel, God or gods, et cetera. In fact, this is the claim straightforwardly put forth by most believers in the supernatural throughout history. Which of course is essentially all humans before the last century.

If these other beings did in fact cause supernatural events to happen, or at least need to give their 'permission' so to speak for the normal laws of physics to be suspended, well then of course we wouldn't be able to predict when it would happen. We still aren't even good at predicting human behavior, outside of pacified and corralled Westerners who are manipulated 24/7 by intense media designed to change their behavior.

Another idea to explain supernatural phenomena, while a bit more 'out there,' is actually one I find quite compelling. Bacon outlines it as such:

In traumatic transcendence, we see reality responding to an acute state of consciousness in some individual. However, there may also be a sense in which this happens “chronically” in response to states of collective consciousness. This leads to a startling conclusion, one that forms a central theme of Kripal’s work: culture directly affects the real by mediating and constraining the kinds of consciousness experiences which people are capable of having. In a very literal sense then, the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age.

We did not simply realize the truth of secular materialism, we “realized” it.

Crucially, this is not something that one can simply opt out of by adopting some facile belief in the supernatural. To live in this age of disenchantment is to operate within an episteme of doubt and suspicion; this makes it almost impossible to obtain those states of consciousness which require absolute metaphysical belief of some kind. The spell was broken once we began compulsively “looking over our shoulders at other beliefs” (Charles Taylor).4

This idea is actually explored quite a bit in fantasy and science fiction - for instance Warhammer 40K has a similar world, where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs do affect material reality, and enough of those together can cause a planet or part of the universe to operate drastically differently than others.

It's worth considering, at the very least.

Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think. I'll end with another block quote from Kripal, as he says it better than I ever could:

As Aldous Huxley pointed our long ago in his own defense of “mystical” experiences, we have no reason to think from our ordinary experience that water is composed of two gases fused together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing water to extreme conditions, by “traumatizing” it, and then by detecting and measuring the gases with advanced technology that no ordinary person possesses or understands.

Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality. Yet when we subject matter to exquisite technologies, like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see quite clearly that matter is not “material” at all. But—and this is the key—we can only get there through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost billions of dollars, necessitated the participation of tens of thousands of professional physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, and required decades of preparation to inflict it and then analyze its results. Hence the recent discovery of the “God particle,” or Higgs boson at CERN.

We invested our energies, time, and money there, and so we are finding out all sorts of astonishing things about the world in which we live and of which we are intimate expressions. But we will not invest them here, in the everyday astonishing experiences of human beings around the world, and so we continue to work with the most banal models of mind—materialist and mechanistic ones—that is, models that assume that “mind equals brain” and the psyche works like, or is, a computer. What is going on here? Why are we so intent on ignoring precisely those bodies of evidence that suggest that, yes, of course, mind is correlated with brain, but it is not the same thing. Why are we so afraid of the likelihood that we are every bit as bizarre as the quantum world; that we possess fantastic capacities that we have so far only allowed ourselves to imagine in science fiction and fantasy literature? (The Flip, pg. 38)

I think this whole post is confused in very common ways about what it means for something to be material vs scientific vs transcendental.

ESP being real wouldn't disprove science.

It would mean that individual scientists failed to notice something for a long time, possibly it would more intensely highlight the type of problematic resistance to paradigm shifts that we already know the entrenched scientific establishment can be prone to.

But it wouldn't break the notion of cause and effect. It wouldn't break the notion of learning through induction. It wouldn't break Bayesian updating on evidence.

Basically, it might embarrass specific individual scientists who fell down on the job, but it wouldn't break the Scientific Method. It wouldn't invalidate known and proven-reliable relationships between different types of sensory experiences (like the experience of letting go of a rock and the experience of seeing it fall). It wouldn't break the process by which we acquire knowledge, or any of the knowledge which we acquired by using it correctly.

ESP would just be one more natural phenomenon for us to study and learn about. If it had weird properties that made it resistant to being studied, that's fine; the insides of black holes are also difficult to study, and the Uncertainty Principle is a real bitch. We might have a hard time learning about ESP, but that doesn't make it a non-scientific process.

Nor would disproving materialism break science. Maybe there exist both physical and mental objects, maybe all objects are mental constructs and our experience of a physical world is just a hacked-together perceptual interface to let us manipulate those purely-mental objects efficiently. Lots of scientists have contemplated natural systems like that and how to investigate and model them with science.

So long as the non-materialist 'true' universe still works by cause and effect, so long as it is possible to gather sensory inputs from it that correlate in any way with 'true' features of it, you can still do science at it. And if it doesn't, then you have to explain why the hell our sensorium appears to present such a world so reliably, which gets you all the way back to the problem of Solipsism and all the arguments against it.

Neither ESP nor non-materialism would disprove or break science.

Science can only be broken by proving that its process for noticing statistical correlations between sensory experiences is in some way incorrect, or unreliable in some specific domain, or etc.

And that takes a lot more than discovering some weird new thing we didn't think existed... that happens all the time.

Furthermore, neither ESP nor non-materialism would prove the existence of supernatural entities such as Gods, nor would it prove any one specific religion or their teachings to be correct. Discovering that you were wrong to deny the existence of one thing does not prove the existence of all other thing you ever denied; reversed stupidity is not smartness.

And even proving the existence of a specific religion's specific God or Gods would not prove that modern-day science-influenced cultural and political movements are wrong. Even if it were proved that a God exists and it dislikes what we're doing, you'd still have to argue why we should replace our utility function with its, whether we should give into its threats about hell or it's emotional blackmail about being our creator, etc.

I'm not saying your position is as unsophisticated as 'Seems like there's some evidence for ESP being real, that probably means that scientists are wrong about vaccines and we shouldn't take them, and also we all need to start obeying God's will as defined by the convocation of Canterbury in 1870 right now before it's too late.'

But it does rhyme with that argument. I think it's making the same types of incorrect leaps in logic.

I think this whole post is confused in very common ways about what it means for something to be material vs scientific vs transcendental.

You're probably right in that I assumed a lot in the post. To clarify, when you say things like:

Neither ESP nor non-materialism would disprove or break science.

I'm more arguing that our culture, and indeed the mainstream scientific apparatus, operates based on a sort of materialist, reductionist Scientism framework. Often when rationalists talk about materialism vs non materialism they get bogged down in these definition games, and to be fair it's for a somewhat good reason.

Regardless, the average scientist doing actual work in the world today, publishing papers that lead to policy interventions, diverting government funds, organizing society, etc, is a materialist by action. Even though a ton of people say they're Christian, in reality they act like materialists. That's what I'm getting at.

So yes you can say okay in an edge case True Science would survive proof that materialism is false, and I'd agree. Sadly our world doesn't run on True Science, it's a motte that never has and never will exist.

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