Are there arguments for materialism?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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Well, considering he thought of himself as a midwife, the birthing process is quite arduous.

I’ve read that there were two brief characterizations of Xenophanes by Plato, otherwise only fragments, which make a classification difficult, but also that he was a travelling poet who criticised the stories about the gods told by other poets and encouraged his fellow citizens to respect the gods and work to safeguard the well-being of their city. Interesting that you see him as an ancient Voltaire. I looked it up and found he was also a reflective observer of the human condition, a practitioner of the special form of ‘inquiry’ introduced by the Milesian philosopher-scientists, and a civic counsellor. Quite a man.

I’m not an expert of Greek classics in any way, despite their early influence on me via my teacher, but as I said, the change of venue led to a dark phase in which I was virtually disconnected from my source of inspiration and found no equivalent.

I’m impressed with your knowledge of what went on in Germany, but your being reminded of such a prominent relationship surprises me. WW1 was to a large degree a war of cultures, despite the interrelationship of the royal families throughout Europe, and similarities. The British had maintained an Empire for such a long time, spread out all over the globe, and Germany had a few colonies that weren’t particularly impressive, but also wanted to be an empire (Reich). At the time, the Jewish population were just as enthralled by the idea as anyone else, and was also the opinion that the “Dichter und Denker” of Germany qualified them as a great nation, despite a latent antisemitism (after all many of these great people were Jews).

I think that there has been a lot of inquiry done in Germany in form of “Antinazification”, and though it is right to acknowledge his achievements “… his relationship to Judaism was one of the most precarious aspects of his character. In a letter to Franz Liszt of 18 April 1851, he confessed that his “resentment of this Jewishness” was “as necessary to his nature as gall is to blood”. Over the years, this resentment took on more and more features of a persecution mania that was not covered by any facts (his main opponents were almost never Jews, but conversely he repeatedly received significant support from Jewish friends, mentors and supporters), so that one can speak of a downright obsession. Nowhere is it expressed more clearly than in Wagner’s letter to King Ludwig II of 22 November 1881, in which he confesses: “that I consider the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it: that we Germans in particular will perish because of them is certain, and perhaps I am the last German who has known how to maintain himself as an artistic person against the Judaism that already dominates everything”.”
bpb.de/apuz/160065/richard- … semitismus

Having read that you have read his biography, you may have other information than I do. But the influences around at that time were many, definitely more than immediately after WW2, and then they came more from the West.

Well, I would point out that you did quote me as saying that I believe there is an inherent but restricted consciousness in each life form. Sentience is for me a higher awareness or self-awareness, but I concede that they are both used as synonyms. It goes back to the discussion of metaphysical idealism earlier in the thread, with consciousness being the “ground of being” as it were, out of which all matter emerges, including all creatures.

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Well, the invitation is still out there. [-o<

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In the Phaedo by Plato, Socrates says " I heard someone who had a book by Anaxagoras out of which he read that mind was the disposer and cause of all and I was quite delighted at the notion of this which appeared admirable." Socrates went on to say that he was disappointed that Anaxagoras didn’t develop that proposition further.

24 centuries later with the development of modern physics, the physicist Max Planck said “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything we regard as existing postulates consciousness.”

13 years later, 3 years before he died Planck went further. He said, “as a physicist and therefore as a man who spent his whole life in the service of the most down to earth science namely the explication of matter, no one is going to take me for a starry-eyed dreamer. After all my exploration of the atom then let me tell you this there is no matter as such. All matter arises and exists only by virtue of a force which sets the atomic particles oscillating and holds them together in that tiniest of solar systems the atom. We must suppose behind this force a conscious intelligent spirit. This spirit is the ultimate origin of matter.”

Max Planck quoted by Iain McGilchrist on YouTube video and verified on Google and Wikipedia.

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“Everything we talk about, everything we regard as existing postulates consciousness.”

I must confess, sir, that I find this talk of ‘consciousness’ most confusing, and can’t be quite sure what the gentleman means.

However, if the gentleman were to point at a fellow awaking from a coma, for instance, and say ‘he has gained consciousness’, I believe I would understand. But I can make no sense of the use of this word to represent an object you or I might possess. The notion is strangely Cartesian.

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Consciousness is reading these words.

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I have bought the “Matter With Things” already and I must say that his book carries on his arguments from the “The Master and his Emissary” without actually repeating his last book, despite still arguing from research on the relationship of the right and left hemisphere of the brain. He says that the brain cannot “emit” consciousness, but instead “permits” consciousness. By that he means that our brains are interactive facilities for consciousness. He rejects “naïve” Idealism, but what he is saying sounds a lot like what Kastrup is saying.

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The nature of human thought is such that at the bottom of everything that is explained there must be a first principle that remains unexplained. So far for science that takes us to the quantum level. Max Planck and some other physicists that studied the quantum phenomenon first hand concluded that mind was a better candidate for the first and irreducible principle than matter.

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Speaking of consciousness I equate that with the logos which in the prologue to the Gospel of John the author states is the light which enlightens every human being. That’s the light of consciousness in which Rene Descartes saw clear and distinct ideas like “I think therefore I am.”

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This remains to be the mystery of our existence and something that causes us to ponder on the nature of existence for millennia, which over time has provided us with thousands of ideas, metaphors, allegories, symbols, mythologies, legends, and traditions. And still we are confronted with materialism in many forms, despite many voices like those you have mentioned, pointing out the fact that it is a dead end.

Yes, I can equate with this, and I am coming to think that it really is down to how we think, what hemisphere we give preference to, that defines our way in the world, how we interact, how open-minded we are, and how generous we are intellectually. The world seems to be manoeuvring itself steadily into a corner, instead of figuratively spreading out into the vastness that is becoming ever more apparent.

The was a time when the candle in the dark was representative of how a person felt themselves to be. The single light of assuredness in the vastness of unknowing was saying that something to hold on to was desperately needed, but now we are in denial of the fact that this vastness of ignorance still exists. It is like the failure to accept the shadow, or the pathological unacceptance of the lame arm, by a patient with a right hemisphere haemorrhage. We fail to accept that we are still in this darkness, and we are blocking out the light that is available to us.

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According to McGilchrist consciousness must be seen as a building block of the universe. Consciousness is pervasive and it can change its nature, it’s manifestations. Matter is a phase of consciousness analogous to H2O which has phases as a liquid or solid or gas. Matter is an element in consciousness that provides resistance. Resistance is absolutely essential to creativity.

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Alfred North Whitehead took up the concept of quantum theory in his book science in the modern world and developed it in the direction of a general theory of time. If the steady endurance of matter is conceived as a vibratory ebb and flow of an underlying energy or activity than the system forming the primordial element is nothing at any instant.

The lapse in time is the essence of material. The endurance of objects requires the display of an emergent pattern.

Endurance is the repetition of pattern in successive events. Time according to Whitehead is the “sheer succession of epochal events”.

“ There is a rhythm of process whereby creation produces natural polarization, Each pulsation forming a natural unit of historic fact”.

Process is the fundamental actuality. Each separate individual matter fact must somehow be describable in terms of process.

“There is a rhythm of process whereby creation produces natural pulsation, each pulsation forming a natural unit of historical fact.”

The phrase “each pulsation forming a natural unit of historic fact” can apply equally to Planck’s “quantum vibrations” or Alfred North Whitehead’s “actual entities”.

How do you suppose Max Planck’s Quantum vibrations might be related to Ian McGilchrist’s concept of the resistances necessary for the existence of anything? Is it the fact that to exist always entails polar opposites that repel each other?

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This sounds a bit more like Kastrup than it does McGilchrist, although the latter entertained the metaphor of the radio, he doesn’t assume metaphysical idealism but rather identifies the right hemisphere as the receiver of whatever stimulus it may be, uncritically scanning the horizon and allowing the received stimuli to appear to contradict each other at first, but employing the left hemisphere to clarify and categorise, and thereby update and qualify the impression on the right hemisphere.

In his metaphors, Kastrup employs the physics of the vortex, as a descriptive method of a movement in a movement, capable of self-reflection, and therefore normally unaware of the broader movement. There is also the metaphor of the membrane, twisting and turning, forming and shaping, which is also a description of physical phenomena in which, of course, follow physical laws.

The disconcerting aspect about matter in the universe is its ratio to “dark matter” and “dark energy”. In the standard Lambda-CDM model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of the universe contains 5% ordinary matter and energy, 27% dark matter and 68% of a form of energy known as dark energy. Thus, dark matter constitutes 85% of total mass/energy, while dark energy plus dark matter together constitute 95% of total mass–energy content.

Knowing, as we do, that broken down, even the 5% of ordinary matter disappears and only form is left, made up of considerable space between the smallest particles, indeed colloquially it is “nothing”.

As I said above, McGilchrist is very much concerned with the workings of the brain, rather than its effect in the material world. He does however quote others:

However, that sheer succession of [epochal] events is a definition of time seems obvious to me, although I probably wouldn’t have thought of it that way. And that “There is a rhythm of process whereby creation produces natural pulsation, each pulsation forming a natural unit of historical fact”, seems to me to state the truth of it, although why the two statements exchange pulsation for polarization eludes me. However, it is not my field of knowledge.

I couldn’t find any reference in Kastrup’s book on materialism either, although it is implicit in his metaphors, in the way I described above.

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And yet McGilchrist did say it here youtu.be/p8sHIXL9zMQ beginning @2:10

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Thanks for bringing my attention to this talk in which many things were stated that we have spoken about. He is referencing his new book as well as a past work that he has done. Unfortunately, I haven’t got around to starting the new book, but in what they were saying, there is an approach to metaphysical idealism, even if he doesn’t call it that, and the metaphors that Kastrup used. In particular the “actualisation of the potential” is what made me look up, whether in reference to poetry, comedy, or even physics, and the emergence out of the unconscious into existence.

So I will obviously have to hurry up and get into the new book, because I suspect there are a lot of exciting things in there.

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“Underlying the superficial multiplicity, we are one single reality: God”

Alan Watts

Or don’t call “it” God. I put it in quotes because X transcends the categories of “thou” and “it”,

Universal Consciousness | John Horgan & Bernardo Kastrup [Mind-Body Problems]
wwwyoutube.com/watch?tv=9qddYjS84Dw

06:32 Why Bernardo thinks the mind-body problem is not as hard as it seems
14:01 Bernardo’s spiritual, intellectual, and psychedelic history
20:41 God, metacognition, and the Universe
27:58 The consolations of Bernardo’s philosophy
36:25 Bernardo: The Universe has multiple personality disorder
49:21 The narcissism of a human-centered Universe
57:25 Why John thinks we’ll never solve the mind-body problem

John Horgan (Stevens Center for Science Writings, Mind-Body Problems) and Bernardo Kastrup (Scientific American, Why Materialism Is Baloney, bernardokastrup.com)

Recorded May 12, 2019

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I love Horgan’s authenticity.

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“… comprehending is better than understanding because comprehending you encircle it everything there is to know about self and world, about what’s really going on. I think I am with you, that it’s fundamentally beyond us to be sure, but I do think that on the basis of what we know, in terms of our logic, our values, you know: parsimony is better than inflationary hypothesis, and Occam’s razor, and on the basis of the empirical evidence that we have accumulated thus far. On the basis of all this I think there are such things as the best hypothesis and worse hypothesis, and the problem is that there is always behind any culture, any civilization, there is always the working hypothesis, and it is the working hypothesis that sets the tone for how people think and how people live. I mean, in the West we live in a society of rampant consumerism. I mean, we are so immersed in this consumerism that we lost the ability to be to be shocked about it, we’ve lost the ability to see how inconceivable this is. I mean, each one of us lives in a way that only Kings would have lived only 500 years ago or even 400 years ago, and why is that so? Because, you know, if the working hypothesis of a culture, that subliminal thing, that even if you say I don’t agree with it, I’m a Christian and a dualist, you know underneath that layer of your mind that’s telling you that, there is another layer and that layer, that’s what you really believe in, is telling itself matter is all that exists, so the only game in town is to accumulate objects as fast as I can, as much as I can, because at the end of the day I’m dead and then nothing will matter anyway.
I mean, this is the operating system we are running on as a culture, even if not individually, and even the people who think that they don’t bind to this story behave as if they did, because in a subliminal layer of mind, that’s the operating system. That’s the little demon running in there and I think that’s very dangerous, because our current working hypothesis for Western civilization, which now dominates the entire world - you go to China and you look at how they live, their God is money - if that’s the value system of Western civilization running there, it has dominated the world. And what is underlying this value system of our Western civilization it is not the best hypothesis on the table, given logic, and given the empirical evidence, and I think that is tragic. Even though we cannot be sure, we know enough to know that our working hypotheses is not the best one. It’s a dead end and it has percolated through our entire culture, through an entire way of life, through the economy, through politics, it’s everywhere. It’s like a virus and I think it’s very important that we try to at least reduce the extent of the infection.
I don’t think this is the reason to choose idealism. I think the reason to choose idealism is the logic of it the empirical evidence, but if it is the best option, I think we only have to gain if we will replace mainstream physicalism with it.”

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Kastrup connects materialism as a human value with metaphysical materialism. What he calls “a working hypothesis” is what Charles Taylor calls a “cosmic imaginary”–a worldview resting on presuppositions that operate as the basis of the collective consciousness of our age. It is the dominant pre-philosophical worldview we were born into. Even when one entertains the propositions of metaphysical idealism there it is lurking in the margins of consciousness ready to be corroboratted by the world system in which we are enmeshed. It takes psychedelics to shock some out of it. Others will be mesmerized by Maya throughout the long dream they call life. For them the myth of rebirth holds out hope.

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I have read that cosmic imaginary first took shape as an inflection of prevailing Confucian and Daoist ways of understanding the natural world among monks and poets who pursued the Buddhist teachings in the mountains, however I’m sure that it began well before. Reading the book by David Graeber and David Wengrow, they make a convincing argument for the intelligence of pre-historical human beings and argue that the lack of written tradition from this time is no indication that these people were not civilised, but that much of their tradition will have been memorised, similar to indigenous people encountered from the 17th century onwards. This is similar to what the authors of “Hamlet’s Mill” inferred, showing how oral traditions have been passed down, possibly from pre-history, containing archetypes that turn up in modern culture. Hamlet is one such figure.

I think we are approaching a transitional time, mainly because, like Kastrup says, we’re in a dead end. People are destitute in many ways, and the materialist worldview is not holding up, rather it could cause a catastrophe, if the world continues. In a way, I see a reformation only possible in returning to a basic understanding, a religious expression in art, music and theatre, and a reawakening to the subtility of nature and existence. The huge importance of the competitive/cooperative nature of the natural world has to be rediscovered as the accepted foundation of existence and what I call a “schismatic individualism” needs to be overcome in favour of an “expressive individualism” with collectivist tendencies.

I found the chapter on “The science of life: a study on left hemisphere capture” in McGilchrist’s last book very enlightening, showing as he does, that we have been led astray by materialism to believe in the machine as an adequate metaphor, which estranges us from the natural world. The mystery of existence right down to the microcosmic level, with the intricacies of cellular interaction, and the lack of linear causation, but rather a fascinating concoction of everything with everything else, with an underlying in-form-ation guiding the reciprocal processes that form a multicellular organism, must send shivers down our spine, and fill us with awe. The evidence of a manifestation of intent is not just a reaction to the night sky and our environment, but also down to this microscopic dimension. Whether one deifies this intent or not is merely a question of metaphor.

I think that spiritual practice needs to extend beyond ordinary church practice to involve meditation, charitable work, pilgrimages, comparative studies, etc., which is something that we see in Europe, wherever a congregation has managed to keep its church. The widening of an ecumenical concept that acknowledges the efforts of each tradition to capture the essence of the mystery in its cultural environment is also necessary. Because of our materialist and fundamentalist interpretation of monotheism, I feel that it is the monotheistic traditions that need to move towards the Eastern traditions more than the other way around. The disenchantment of Europe was not only due to the Enlightenment, but Christianity had done its share of damage beforehand, translating any kind of pagan spirit into a devil. As Kastrup says, the spread of the value system of Western civilization couldn’t be avoided and has spread into countries where previously a non-materialist and collectivist mindset had prevailed. Its bankruptcy will presumably come about when we all realise that we are in a dead end.

In the end, the golden rule seems to be a common denominator upon which we can build, similar to the “maximal demand” of Taylor, as well as the universality of compassion and respect for ordinary human flourishing. Kastrup doesn’t believe in the Catholicism of his mother, but he still lays emphasis on the mental or spiritual components of experience and renounces the notion of material existence. For him, the mind or spirit as the most essential, permanent aspects of one’s being, and could serve as another foundation for the way ahead.

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Somewhere we were discussing Schopenhauer’s alleged pessimism. I thought you might find it interesting to read Schopenhauer’s own thoughts on the distinction between optimism and pessimism.

In volume II of World as Will and Idea chapter XVII Man’s need of metaphysics, page 372, he discusses “the fundamental difference of all religions… in the question whether they are optimistic or pessimistic , that is, whether they present the existence of the world as justified in itself, and therefore praise and value it ,or regard it as something that can only be conceived as the consequence of our guilt, and therefore properly ought not to be, because they recognize that pain and death cannot lie in the eternal, original, and immutable order of things, in that which in every respect ought to be. The power by which Christianity was able to overcome first Judaism, and then the heathenism of Greece and Rome, lies solely in its pessimism, in the confession that our state is both exceedingly wretched and sinful, while Judaism and heathenism were optimistic. That truth, profoundly and painfully felt by all, penetrated, and bore in its train the need of redemption.”

It was in that mood of pessimism that modern existential philosophy was born. Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche and the twentieth century existentialist all had their renditions on existential alienation, estrangement, and dehumanization. Although he became deeply critical of Schopenhauer accusing him of nihilism, Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche was greater than any other philosopher. Schopenhauer claimed to be truer to the transcendental idealism of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason of 1781 than Kant was himself in subsequent editions. Schopenhauer published the first edition of his masterpiece The World as Will and Idea when he was 30 and never swerved from it over his lifetime. He died on 9/21/1860 at the age of 72.