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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28149 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)

Interesting subject.

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.

I’ve heard Dennett speak about this and I’m still not sure I fully understand his position, but isn’t it just a version of the classical materialist ‘agency’-centered definition of free will?

Free will represents the material, social or other bounds of behavior that inhibit the execution of the brain’s probabilistic output. If I generate an LLM output and then reply ‘sorry, that’s not what I want, you need to give me another answer’, this is the digital equivalent of trying to exercise my free will to break into the White House and being stopped by the police. This isn’t a new conception of what freedom means, it’s the classical conception of liberty. The more ‘liberal’ (ie ‘free’) we are, the fewer restrictions we impose on biologically willed behavior. Sometimes these are political/social, sometimes these are raw material realities, like someone in a wheelchair being unable to exercise their desire to stand up and walk. Free will is the ability to execute the output of our language model in the material world. The initial output itself (desire) is unaffected. (This is obvious when we bring up, say, why we don’t have the ‘free will’ to fly like a bird; we are bounded by material reality; free will is execution, not thought.)

Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think.

There are a huge number of mysteries still in the universe, including forces and existences likely beyond our comprehension. But I am confident they all exist within some kind of material reality, even if it is one we don’t (and possibly can’t) understand. The materialist conception doesn’t even necessarily prohibit some kind of spiritual existence, a soul of some form, a God, an all-loving, all-knowing being beyond and above us (the simulation hypothesis, which would allow for such a God, can be framed in materialist terms). It doesn’t prohibit heaven or reincarnation (all possible with sufficiently advanced technology/magic). It just says that if they’re real they’re going to be systems, they’re going to function in a predictable way, they’re going to be based on laws of the universe whether we understand them yet or not. It is unclear to me why even some form of Mahayana Buddhism, for example, would be incompatible with classical materialism in this context.

You make some good points here, although I still fail to grasp the idea of materialistic free will.

I think that even in rarefied philosophy circles, materialism is used constantly as a motte and Bailey. The Motte is the claim you’re making, that materialists just want to find laws and systems et cetera to explain phenomena. Which yes is an extremely defensible position, but on the other hand prescribes or denies basically nothing as you readily admit.

However, the Bailey of materialism is that God, ghosts, big foot, aliens, or whatever supernatural force or being can’t possibly exist because we know stupid bullshit like that doesn’t fit under our materialist understanding of the world.

I suppose a more accurate term could be something like reductive materialism or mechanistic materialism but eh I think people get the point. Thanks for clarifying.

I still fail to grasp the idea of materialistic free will.

There's nothing to grasp. Materialistic free will, AKA soft determinism, is an extremely convoluted and complex (and ultimately sophistic) web of reasoning created by very intelligent people who found the (obvious) conclusions of hard determinism to be repugnant, and so use their brainpower to maneuver around it as best as they can. They do this mostly by fiddling with definitions until they have bamboozled themselves into believing that they have proved something. Once you have accepted determinism, free will cannot exist, not in the way one usually thinks of it. The only way you can get around the free will problem is to:

  1. Reject determinism - I have never seen anyone do that successfully.

  2. Posit the existence of a soul which is outside the currently understood laws of the universe - and there are too many commonsense objections to this that I cannot resolve.

Soft materialism is in a category of beliefs that I have labelled as 'so absurd only the very clever could convince themselves to believe it'

I don’t think that’s charitable. ‘Soft determinism’ is merely an acknowledgement that ‘free will’ and freedom/liberty in general the way they’re colloquially used don’t mean some kind of conscious override of the weight of deterministic history, but rather refer to much more mundane limitations in the material world on individual human will.

The animal whose desired path is blocked before them has no free will. The animal whose desired path is unblocked has free will. This is an entirely workable and normal conception of what ‘free’ means. Cf “you are free to go”, cf the constitution etc etc.

Can you execute a given desire? If you can, then in that instance you have free will for that task. No complex argument around determinism or the process by which you came to your desire is necessary.

I mean, its oppositional, but I don't think it's unfair. When you follow determinism to it's logical conclusion you come to realize that everything that an animal or human does is a product of their brain structure, their surroundings, their sensory inputs, etc. Essentially, the human brain is a computer, and like all computers (all physical things, really.) it is deterministic. So, you declare "there is no free will! everything is predetermined, even my very thoughts!" And you are correct.

But then, along comes a soft determinist to say "Aha! but if we redefine free will in such a way that it instead represents the preferences of one of these deterministic machines and it's ability to have agency in this universe then free will does exist!" Well okay, yeah, I suppose, but all this really is is sleight of hand. You've twisted the concept of 'free will' until it no longer represents what it did before you learned of determinism. I accept the logic, I don't accept that you've demonstrated anything profound. Under this paradigm, a computer that wants to contact a server, and succeeds, has free will. But we don't think of smartphones as having free will, for obvious reasons.

But then, along comes a soft determinist to say "Aha! but if we redefine free will in such a way that it instead represents the preferences of one of these deterministic machines and it's ability to have agency in this universe then free will does exist!"

Is it, in fact, a redefinition at all? It seems to me that ‘free will’ is really about the output space for whatever computation our minds do, whether that happens on a material or spiritual level. Anti-soft-materialism arguments struggle to explain what ‘classical’ free will that excludes it is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, it is possible to suggest at the (largely semantic, of course) difference between ‘hard determinism’ and the ‘soft materialist’ positions. Consider a criminal enterprise. Someone gets arrested, volunteers everything to the cops, gets released on bail, his co-conspirators say “what the fuck man, you have free will bro, why did you tell them that?”. The point being made isn’t a complex analysis of the internal process in the mind that occurs during reasoning, it’s a straightforward exhortation that this agent was not being externally forced to do something that it did anyway. It’s clear that it refers to a way of discussing the bounds of our behavior in a material reality, not an immaterial spiritual concept, which is why we don’t talk about having “free will” to regrow a leg or jump to the moon.

Defining free will as something that happens at the intersection of deterministic machines with good but imperfect predictive ability, material reality, and the forward passage of time fits with the way the term is generally used.

I think it is a redefinition. What you are describing is something most people would call 'freedom of action', or possibly just 'freedom' - the ability of an agent to do what it wants to without external interference. But under this definition, we could say that a Roomba has free will - because it can do what it wants (clean floors), but a prisoner does not, because he is unable to do what he wants (leave prison). This is very much at odds with how most people would use the term.

I agree that agents can make decisions to perform actions to alter the world. What I don't agree is that an agent - any agent - had the capability to make a decision other than the one that it ended up making. This is what most people would mean when they talk about free will - it's the idea that your snitch could have decided not to tattle, which is something that determinism rejects. the choice to snitch appeared unforced, but it was in fact as deterministic as was my Roomba's 'choice' to hoover my floors every day at ten o'clock.

whatever computation our minds do, whether that happens on a material or spiritual level.

I think i know what you're getting at here, but for the avoidance of doubt, determinism denies the possibility of spiritual decision making. The deterministic argument is:

  1. in the universe, material interacts with material by way of deterministic causality
  2. the human mind/brain is part of the material universe
  3. therefore, the human mind/brain operates by deterministic causality.

In such a universe, “free will” more properly means the ability to consider multiple courses of action, and to reject any given potential choice based on conscious reasons, such as moral principles. In practice, our human wills are constrained by unconscious (“subconscious”) reasons, and not perfectly free.

FYI, I’ve had great success consciously removing unwanted reasons from my unconscious using Fourth Step tools from the Twelve-Step recovery method. I feel more free now than ever before.

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