Why is strict materialism a hard sell for many in our dualist-dominated culture? Okay, so some are understandably pulled by the attractive idea of an immortal soul. Others just feel that there has to be more to all this than the interplay of matter and energy in a vast, unblinking universe. But attractions aside, what are typical objections to a material-only existence?
It may be instructive to ask why people objected to the idea of a round Earth, to the prospect that Earth orbits the sun, or to the concept of evolution (see Daniel Quinn’s “three dirty tricks“).
Part of it, we must recognize, is good-old-fashioned ignorance. If unaware of the observations in conflict with the stale stance, or insufficiently observant, there would seem to be no need to switch trains. The old view serves quite well enough, and even engenders a certain fondness or comfort. Also contributing is that incomplete grasp of the new idea (perhaps poorly delivered or too unfamiliar) favors its premature rejection—after which entrenchment more likely obtains. But then again, most changes in worldview at the cultural scale happen via generational replacement rather than by changed individuals.
I’ve noticed in the demotion of Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet that many objections come down to: “but they taught me in school that Pluto is a planet, dammit.” In other words, we tend to adopt a rigid foundation of “factual” information that gets locked in at an early age and is damned hard to shake loose later in life. But that’s part of how well-adapted brains develop and work. Plasticity in early life serves us well to build a sense of the world, and rigidity serves us well later in life to retain and pass along hard-earned lessons.
For some matters, deeply-lodged understandings are thoroughly integrated into worldviews, and require a great deal of effort to disgorge. Quite frequently, an increase in complexity erects a serious barrier to acceptance. It’s just easier to imagine a flat earth sitting as still as it feels—being circled by the sun, moon, and stars—than complicated geometries of 3-D orbits following invisible gravitational cues. It’s far easier to tell a story about God creating Earth and all its life being created in six days than to follow the convoluted history of astrophysics and evolution leading from the Big Bang to the first self-replicating molecules to newts and geese (too complicated for any human to fully track, in fact).
These lessons also apply, I believe, to rejection of the prospect that materialism is the “only” game in town. It can be hastily misunderstood, run counter to deeply-felt personal experience, and present such overwhelming complexity as to invite simpler and more satisfying retreats as a form of impatience and undue demand for “truth.”
Not Lego
As alluded to in the previous post, a common misimpression is that matter is inert, so that building from matter is like using lifeless Lego blocks. Life and conscious experience can’t possibly arise from all-dead ingredients, the word-thinking goes. Sure, one can build fancy and impressive structures out of these blocks (especially having become so specialized that a modern Lego kit contains mostly one-off pieces—not like the Lego of my youth!), but such an assembly could obviously never spring to life. I fully agree: a Lego construction (or any electronic/mechanical device) will never become a viable organism. It’s a thoroughly preposterous idea!
But under this painfully insufficient “Lego” model—I mean, it’s really appallingly short of reality—no wonder materialism seems dead! In contrast to rigid/fixed Lego blocks, real atoms are buzzing gobs of charge that literally jump at the chance to interact and bond via electromagnetism. Atoms are very grabby and sticky: seldom found alone. Obviously liquids and solids are self-attracting aggregates of atoms, but even gases are generally molecular rather than single atoms—the self-satisfied noble gases being the only exception. Note that these “inert” exceptions do not participate in biological organisms. Life itself rejects Lego blocks, and that tells us something.
Different molecular arrangements of atoms form different profiles for attracting select molecules. This is the basis of proteins and DNA and lots of other chemical/biological structures. Life avails itself of these interactive capabilities (using standard physics) in innovative ways that mostly have us scratching our heads trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
Even the word “avails” above would seem to imbue Life with an extra-material agency, but this interpretation is unnecessary, borne of language limitations. The subtle trick is hidden in the deep underbelly of evolution. Feedback has preserved those arrangements that realize advantage in novel (initially accidental) material arrangements. What looks like proactive agency is complex behavior shaped by success in feedback.
Complexity
The complexity of Life, the Universe, and Everything is so utterly overwhelming as to preclude end-to-end understanding. I’ve already mentioned simple systems like three-body problems and helium atoms that defy exact calculation, but at least numerical methods can step in to provide useful approximations and demonstrate strict adherence to the rules of the road for somewhat-more messy arrangements. Highly-interactive large systems soon outstrip computational ability. The air particles in a room are far too numerous and vigorous to possibly model numerically (∼1036 collisions per second—the outcome of every collision being sensitive to sub-picometer offsets). Luckily, emergent, aggregate measures like temperature and pressure capture the essence of the statistically-robust result. It is similarly impossible to predict the shapes and trajectories of all the shards of a dropped coffee mug. It doesn’t take much complexity at all to bust our capabilities (also sensitive dependence on initial conditions, or chaos, stymies clockwork calculability, as does quantum uncertainty and associated indeterminacy). When it gets to something as complicated as Life, we can absolutely forget crafting a full account. Even designing a single novel protein to accomplish a novel job is beyond our means. We’re just not nearly smart enough and patient enough and vast enough (in time and space) to keep up with the universe.
For some personalities, a framework they can’t completely understand is unacceptable. To me, such an attitude is terribly unfair, and even arrogant or self-aggrandizing. The actual universe as it exists and as it has evolved for billions of years is under no obligation to configure itself simply enough that primate brains are capable of getting it all in a few hours or even a lifetime of pondering. Physicists are accustomed to not getting their way. The universe does what it does, repeatedly ignoring our ideas for how we might like it to work, handing us something unexpected in its place—upon which we are grudgingly forced to acknowledge weird and unwelcomed ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics. We don’t make the rules, but try to read and interpret them as correctly as we are able. Fabricating in our brains how we want something like mind or consciousness to work is essentially worthless, having practically no chance of matching reality. It’s working backwards from an assertion/affinity rather than struggling to follow breadcrumbs laid out and leading to unexpected (sometimes unwanted) places.
Machine Aversion
Finally, a common and predictable objection to the materialist framework is rejection of the notion that humans are mere machines. The objection itself betrays a dualist foundation, demanding/asserting two standards: a “lower” one for mere matter (note my leaning on the word “mere”).
This topic is central enough that we’ll return to it in the next post, after laying out more of the materialist perspective on how sentience can arise. For now, suffice it to say that comparing living beings to the machines we build is like comparing a pebble to a landscape. Both are made of matter, and the pebble will contain basically a full sampling of atoms found in the landscape, but the landscape has a heck of a lot more going on: vastly more elaborate and interactive structures. We don’t say that the landscape can’t be material in origin because so is a pebble and there’s no comparison in terms of complexity.
In other words, pathetic machines (technological devices) that can’t come close to the achievement of living beings are so unlike marvelous machines of life that comparison becomes nearly meaningless. It’s our restricted mental models (and domains asserted by language) that cause the disconnect, not material reality that’s at fault.
Maybe a few more disparate comparisons will help. Sticking to machines humans fashion and utilize, one could compare a smart phone to a simple stick used as a lever. Both are machines in the standard sense, but the lever doesn’t come close to capturing the complexity of a smart phone—in either material arrangement or function (relatedly). On the life side, imagine a segment of RNA or DNA—even just three base pairs long (a codon), defined by a particular arrangement of something like 50–60 atoms. Now compare to an entire living organism. Both are part of Life. The RNA segment, when immersed in a bath of appropriate materials, will selectively grab a particular amino acid (facilitated by a translator key). This is already dazzlingly complex, but on the “inside edge” of what we can track based on first-principles understanding of attractive/repulsive forces operating between atoms and molecules. Yet, it absolutely pales in comparison to the staggering complexity of the whole organism, whose tens-of-millions of codons (and protein products) interact to a baffling degree.
The point is that even if we can understand one end of the comparison spectrum, in trying to grasp something toward the other end we find ourselves hopelessly adrift without once crossing some ontological gap. A gap in understanding all-too-easily can be interpreted (or asserted) as an ontological gap, even if baseless. That’s the crux of it.
Thus, “humans are not machines” can either be translated to: “human biophysical complexity far outstrips that of the dumb inventions we call machines” (materialist view) or “humans cannot be cast as machines because it’s a category error” (dualist/idealist). Whose mental models are conjuring categories (under what compulsion, and using which cerebral hemisphere)? I’d say the error is in asserting/inventing categories out of our brains that the universe will ignore without hesitation.
Defining Machine
In the materialist view, then, no fundamental gap—”only” overwhelming complexity—separates living beings from simpler arrangements of atoms. Dualism flies out of a gap: the universe gets split into two aspects. We don’t have a word in English for “an assembly of atoms whose composition and structure enable emergent behaviors that a randomly-arranged pile of the same constituents would fail to accomplish.”
Some words that approximate elements of this concept are: machine; apparatus; instrument; contraption; contrivance; assemblage; hardware; automaton; mechanism; arrangement. All have connotations that present a mental block when trying to apply all the way across the vast spectrum from a single atom to a living being. But “machine” is the one that usually sticks—for better or for worse.
The “machine” objection is thus partly semantic, partly a matter of inconceivable complexity, and partly offense at the notion that something as spectacular as a living being could be “nothing but” atoms in a particular arrangement (adapted/vetted in evolutionary feedback over billions of years).
Yet, arrangement is of paramount import. Scrambling the atoms in any lifeform would obviously render it a lifeless pile: destroying its ability to function. But the same can be said for any machine: smart phone or lever-stick. Almost the entire story is in the arrangement—no matter the scale—and the ways in which that arrangement can interact with surrounding material through standard physics channels.
We’ll come back to the machine objection after fleshing out a bit more of the materialist view of how sentience could emerge from atoms in interaction (next installment).
