Arguments for materialism.
Try arguing against a speeding bullet
This is argumentum ad lapidem, an informal logical fallacy used unsuccessfully to try to refute Berkeley.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
— Walt Whitman
It seems you and maybe Kastrup, are using “materialist” or materialism in the more colloquial sense of being fixated on material goods, consumption, etc., rather than in the strict philosophical sense of metaphysical naturalism. But I think that one can be a thoroughgoing metaphysical naturalist and still prefer to look up in perfect silence at the stars.
It is strange, but not once have I used the term Metaphysical naturalism, ontological naturalism, philosophical naturalism or antisupernaturalism. Instead, I used materialism, as in “a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being, and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter”. I do believe that this is also the sense in which the people I have quoted understand materialism as well.
I can understand you quoting Whitman, referring to my use of the phrase “look up”, and of course I agree with Whitman in illustrating his preference for learning about nature by being in nature, but it is more about the abstractness of “the proofs, the figures that were ranged in columns, the charts and diagrams” and being told to add, divide, and measure them. These things have value of course, and Felix and I have had an ongoing fascination about numbers recurring with respect to the heavenly bodies. It is all okay, as long as we can look up and get the whole picture.
I was asked early on, why I posted in the Religion and Spirituality Forum. Well, you have probably found out. I have been trying to point this out in the quotes I have been using. I believe that what Kastrup, McGilchrist, Sheldrake, and many others are on to, is what was subject to mythology in the past, because the ancients understood (perhaps better than we today) that we can only talk about these subjects using metaphors. It would be good if people would better understand that science does use metaphor extensively, but in conversation, I often have the feeling that they don’t. Kastrup (as I quoted) made a point about metaphors, if you remember.
The thing about McGilchrist’s book, which helped me further my learning on the same subject as a nurse, is that he managed to create a coherent image of brain activity, demonstrating the complexity of consciousness on different levels. But above all, he reveals the tendency of society in the west to prefer left hemisphere particularity over the large picture of the right hemisphere, but the former is somewhat stunted and not suitable as a basis of a worldview. Which brings us to where we are.
I like this trope. It evokes the image of a speeding bullet spiraling through flesh. I could see it on a human scale.
Then I tried to imagine it on a quantum scale. Subatomic particles interacting.
Then I imagined it from the point of view of an unfiltered unlocalized mind. A perfectly fitted procrss in the pulsating organic kaleidoscopic whole.
It’s effectiveness as an argument seems to rest on conventional view of a bullet’s physical effectiveness on the human scale. Here we can only address those effects in language. And the language only has meaning to a mind. And each mind is embedded in a particular localized point of view. The point of view implied by the trope assumes what it seeks to prove. It’s an emotional appeal to naive realism.
To me the point of Whitman’s poem was to elevate the larger, more holistic picture of the right hemisphere over the more analytical left hemisphere, though he would not have known about the different functions of the hemispheres at the time. More generally his poem is seeking the bigger picture, the mystical experience, over the reductive science experience.
Your posts sometimes seem to talk about materialism is the more colloquial sense. I myself use Metaphysical Naturalism for the more philosophical sense of the term, but if you prefer the term materialism for the philosophical sense, fine.
I agree that science uses metaphors extensively and that science constitutes a modern mythology, as I have argued elsewhere. But it should be understood that “myth” does not mean “untrue.” It means a narrative or meta-narrative.
For some, that evokes this:
Peter: What branch of physics were you involved with?
Lloyd: Something much more terrifying than blowing up the planet.
Peter: Really? Is there anything more terrifying than the destruction of the world?
Lloyd: Yeah. The knowledge that it doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s all random…resonating aimlessly out of nothing and eventually vanishing forever. And I’m not talking about the world. I’m talking about the universe. All space, all time just a temporary convulsion. And I get paid to prove it.
Peter: Do you feel so sure about that when you look out on a clear night like tonight and see all those millions of stars? That none of it matters?
Lloyd: I think it’s as beautiful as you do…and vaguely evocative of some deep truth that always just keeps slipping away. But then my professional perspective overcomes me and a see more penetrating view of it…and I understand it for what it truly is…haphazard, morally neutral, and unimaginably violent.
That take on materialism.
And then of course the take from those who argue that this entire thread is unfolding only as it ever possibly could have unfolded in the only possible world/reality there could ever have been if the cause and effect interactions of matter in the human brain are interchangeable with the cause and effect interactions of matter in, say, an exploding volcano.
Arguments against materialism:
Try seeing the world through the eyes of the person who sent it.
We’ll need a context of course.
That and the Creator.
That’s a powerful mythology that can grab the imagination and take it into the proverbial black hole.
Determinism is a possibility in both material and ideal worlds. However it is worthy to mention that that’s not how reality unfolds to consciousness. So it is the imagination picturing a view from nowhere. It shows how amazing the imagination is. For good or for ill.
Metaphysical naturalism seems compatible with spiritual naturalism and more open-ended than what is usually termed materialism. How metaphysical materialism connects or doesn’t connect to colloquial materialism is a question. I generally use the word myth the way Joseph Campbell would.
Okay, but the ideal world is thought up by the brain living in [and wholly a part of] the material world. To nature and its laws, it would all seem to be interchangeable.
And I think it might be more worthy to mention that how you think “reality unfolds to consciousness” is how some insist you were only ever able to think that it does. The imagination is no less material. And good and ill are no less one and the same thing in a world where “the cause and effect interactions of matter in the human brain are interchangeable with the cause and effect interactions of matter in, say, an exploding volcano.”
Well, to nature anyway.
Only again, unlike with the Gods, nature does not appear to be cognizant of cause and effect at all. Let alone the consequences of them for us.
That’s where things get spooky. With the Gods, ontology and teleology have a font. With nature, well, you tell me.
This is just a variant of the Naturalistic Fallacy, and can be safely dismissed. Just because the universe as a whole is meaningless or without purpose or morals does not mean that the human subset of it is, or the subset of other moral animals that are nonhuman, of which there are plenty. I’m quite content behaving morally and pursuing aims and purposes in a larger universe devoid of such properties.
The scholar weighs is. Lloyd, on the other hand, even though just a character invented by Woody Allen, intertwines an existential frame of mind rooted in the cosmological imponderables with considerably more – or less? – ambiguity.
Pood is quite content to assert that the “human subset” as he understand it need be as far as it goes to make it true. Fuck “the gap”. Fuck “Rummy’s Rule”.
That way [somehow] he can have his determinism and eat his moral responsibility too.
“Goddamnit, human brain matter is just different!!”
Somehow. And he’s got the theory to prove it.
If one wants an antidote to all this existential angst about a meaningless amoral universe, go to the park and feed the pigeons.
Pigeons are remarkable animals. Unjustly caricatured as filthy, they groom themselves constantly. They are keenly intelligent. They recognize and recall individual humans, they can count, can learn the letters of the alphabet. They can recognize themselves in mirrors. Moreover they have 320-degree horizontal vision compared to our 180-degree vision and can see millions of colors that we can’t because they have five primary color receptors compared with our three. Plus, they fly! They mate for life, dote upon their young, and grieve at the deaths of their mates, offspring, and friends.
When I feed them in the park they hop up and eat from my hand and let me pet them. That’s a spiritual experience right there. I don’t care a fig for the void amoral immensities of the universe, only for the pigeons. The pigeons mean more to me than Yahweh. Unlike the great I Am, they really are.
What the hell does the above even mean? It is just more of your gibberish. In case you forgot: I argue that causal determinism does not preclude human free will, and yes, humans have moral responsibility.
Yes, human brains are different from stones, and galaxies, and trees, and toy soldiers, and stars, and bunny rabbits, and numbers, and, oh, my, they are different from all sorts of stuff!
Did you not know that? 
There is no fallacy here.
Argue against the bullet or shut up.
You’ve just copy/paste that from somewhere without understanding what you have written as you have it completely backwards.
The bullet is an argument FOR materialism. Johnson’s argument was against Berkeley’s Idealism. I have no interest in refuting idealism as it has a great deal in it.
It is so pathetic how nasty and confrontational this place is. With a few exceptions, almost no one here discusses in good faith or practices the philosophical principle of charity. It’s just one loud, ignorant gang bang of philosophical illiteracy, personal attacks, insults and ad homs. This place is a viper’s nest. Why the hell are there rules here if they are not enforced?
I didn’t copy and paste the goddamned thing from anywhere. I knew about it because I fucking read. I have read Berkeley and the rebuttals. This is the argument to the stone.
I do not have it fucking backwards. The bullet argument is exactly the same as the stone argument. The stone argument and the bullet argument you just gave are both arguments for materialism which by definition means they are arguments against idealism. If you think that idealism has a great deal in it, then you wouldn’t use the bullet as an argument for materialism. Both the bullet and the stone are mental states under idealism, nothing more. Idealism doesn’t deny that kicking the stone or being hit by a bullet would hurt. It just says that these are mental states. Consider pain in the abstract. If I stub my toe, my toe hurts. The toe seems to be the locus of the pain. But is it? No, even under metaphysical naturalism, it is understood that the pain is not actually in the toe, it is in the mind.
From now. on if you have nothing but gratuitous insults, bugger off.
Being an outsider to all of this philosophical jargon - could someone fill me in on the precise definitions -
- Idealism == ______________
- Materialism == ______________
…and why one necessitates the lack of the other?