The Matrix of Materialism: Fallacies in reducing everything to a common physicalist denominator
The ‘scientific revolution’ in the Western world, occurring roughly from the 17th century onwards, can perhaps be counted among the most influential shifts in human psyche to have ever come about in history as we know it. One of the core presuppositions of the novel approach to reality proposed was that nature should now be investigated in abstraction from many important mental structures guiding our ‘commonsense’ interaction with it. The conscious observer and evaluator of theories was to be systematically and dualistically excluded from the system which was to come under scrutiny. The system was pronounced to be, for the methodological purposes of the novel approach, devoid of any intrinsic connection, in terms of the structures of intelligibility, with the conscious observer herself.
The most widespread model of viewing reality prior to the ‘scientific’, in the West, was the broadly Aristotelian one. On this view, in order for external reality to be known, there has to occur a correspondence between the intrinsic features of the mind and intrinsic features of reality. When we intuitively apprehend a thing or an event, it is quite easy for all the four Aristotelian causes to come about precisely because our minds, as is revealed in our most immediate self-examination, are also intrinsically built towards a recognition of those causes. Hence, when I take even the most casual observation of my dog called Barry, I can quite easily and intuitively recognize: his material cause (the matter which he is made of), formal cause (the structure which maintains Barry’s actual identity through time), efficient cause (that which made Barry – in this case, his dog-parents, etc.), and final cause (the inherent purposes of Barry as an organism, such as life itself, reproduction, nutrition, and of course pleasing his two-legged owners as the best dog in the world). Importantly, this basic metaphysical picture of the world was further included, in the mediaeval West, within a religious synthesis, and became the basis for a philosophical backbone of much of Christian faith for centuries. In the religious interpretation of Aristotelianism, God is related to Barry as, ultimately, all the causes apart from the material (for most thinkers in that tradition). ‘God’ was therefore conceived not as a quasi-finite entity ‘on top of’ and therefore ‘adjacent to’ the existing physical order, but rather a necessary and basic ontological truth within a picture of the world which tended to almost blend the physical and metaphysical together. God, as the ultimate efficient cause, was maintaining Barry, alongside all of the Universe, in existence. (In other words, God was the reason why there was anything rather than absolutely nothing, logically speaking). As the formal cause, the divine Mind was granting the stability of identity and structure in time, and also the formal intelligibility of reality to finite minds, such as human ones (though not restricted to humans). As a final cause, God was the ‘end of all ends’ for all particular finite beings and for all creation in general, so that any natural goal-oriented characteristic of Barry was ultimately set towards a consummation in God.
The basic methodological move of the early pioneers of the scientific revolution was not to discard the Aristotelian model completely, but rather to ‘bracket out’ formal and final causes (to use Edmund Husserl’s famous expression in a very different context). Initially, nature was not professed to be devoid of any stable macro-identity and finality, but rather the approach was tuned in such a way that it did not take those factors into account. This method, however, as almost everyone is ready to admit, yielded very powerful practical results. We gained large amounts of new knowledge about the world by putting Nature under examination as if there was no intrinsic metaphysical identity and purpose to it, and, furthermore, as if there was no supreme ontological principle granting Nature’s existence, form, and purpose – God. The new science focussed almost exclusively on the inner workings of discernible natural objects, rather than on grand questions pertaining to the nature of existence, identity, and purpose. Under the spell of the incredible pragmatic success story of the new science, however, its character as a method rather than a basic metaphysic was quite quickly forgotten.
Because science in modernity was based on a dualistic separation between the attending mind and the ‘distilled’ observational reality being attended to, the advent of a new mechanistic metaphysics quickly led to a diastasis between the sphere of ordinary conscious mental activity, replete with macroscopic identities and purposes; and, on the other hand, the ‘material world’, which has arisen precisely as an abstraction from those intuitive epistemic qualities. What emerged was a difference between, in Wilfrid Sellars’ famous phrase, the ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’. The former is the world we ordinarily inhabit through our conscious sense-perceptions, thoughts, and other mental activities; whereas the latter is the world of, ultimately, sheer physically measurable quantities, such as energy, force, mass, momentum, etc.
Not to mention, of course, that this ensuing separation also had profound consequences on Western theological self-understanding. Given that the basic ‘correlation’ (as the speculative realists would say) between mind and world was severed, God was no more the guarantor of the existence of the world, its intelligible form, and its final purpose. Since the ontological question was hijacked by natural science as radically separated from phenomenal experience, God was now to be sought either as some kind of supreme entity to fit an existing scientific explanatory model for the Universe (i.e., to ‘account for’ some feature of the Universe), or to be understood through the lens of subjective experience disconnected from the ‘cold’ truths of the meaningless ‘real’ world.
This is a brief theologico-philosophical genealogy of how the Western intellectual world has landed with the ‘materialist’, ‘physicalist’, or for that matter ‘naturalist’ ontologies. Physics was pronounced to be the science dealing with fundamental building blocks of all reality, and its orbit of interest demarcated what is to be considered as ‘material’, ‘physical’, and, therefore, ‘ultimately real’. But it is only an illusion of wishful thinking to suppose that the allegedly ‘neutral’ method of science is capable of answering metaphysical questions regarding fundamental ontology. Ontological reductionism, as a doctrine arguing that all what there is are ‘ultimately’ some foundational particles or energy-values which are arranged in various ways to form more complex structures, by itself does not have much scientific confirmation, let alone simple empirical proof. No one has ever actually demonstrated by scientific standard that a very complex natural system, such as a living organism, can be wholly explained through an examination of all of its constituent fundamental physical building blocks. Indeed, there are actually increasing numbers of working scientists, particularly in biology, who explicitly eschew the total finality of physics in all ontological considerations, such as Stuart Kauffman or Michael Levin. Philosophers adhering to naïve scientistic presumptions would do well to recognize that the claims of actual science are far less far-reaching than their physicalist ‘metaphysics’ would expect. Physicalism itself, therefore, should be assessed as any other philosophical standpoint. I will show in the following analyses that it fails the assessment miserably.
One caveat before I commence the proper part of the critique. Many philosophers and some scientists who see strict physicalism and materialism as problematic venture to espouse positions more sympathetic to the diversity and complexity of phenomena to be studied scientifically or otherwise, such as ‘non-reductive physicalism’ or ‘liberal naturalism’. According to those doctrines, even though perhaps there ‘is’ ultimately only that what physics studies, more complex scientific modes of analysis (such as biology, psychology, linguistics and others) have a degree of ontological standing on their own because they are, in some mysterious way, ‘emergent’ from or ‘supervenient’ over the supposedly fundamental level of physics. In such discourses, the separation between ontology and epistemology instituted by modern mind-world dualism dreams of an almost eschatological closure of the distance between the two. Even though now we cannot fully reduce psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, and we have to resort to non-reductionist approaches, there will be surely a day in the future when that will be achieved, because surely it is possible, and only the limitations of our scientific method and cognitive capacity prevent us from this consummation of physicalist metaphysics. Some more radical emergentists or ‘supervenientists’ argue that we may well never be able to reach this state of physicalist plenitude and eradication of all other knowledge, since some spheres of existence are in principle resistant to reduction. Those latter types postulate, however, that irreducibly emergent or supervenient layers of reality are somehow connected with their physical base. Needless to say, both positions have neither much scientific support (in earnest, science itself should not endorse much metaphysics due to the inherent tentativeness of its conclusions and capacity for paradigm shifts), nor much philosophical coherence. If by ‘physical’ and ‘natural’ one assumes that which is ontologically reducible to whatever physics is currently investigating, then one should also hold that it is both in actuality and in principle possible to explain literally everything by virtue of the appeal to those modes of causation proper to the physical and the natural. One should then not resort to a magical invocation of ‘emergence’ or ‘supervenience’ to save any sciences less ‘fundamental’ than physics. Nor will it help to claim that we are only calling some fundamentally physical state by using spiritual, social, or psychic language, because, of course, language itself would have to fall under the razor of physicalist explanation. As we shall see, under the physicalist fantasy there is actually no one to do the calling and no meaning to it at all.
There are a number of very considerable philosophical problems facing any committed materialist and physicalist. Primarily, of course, there is the issue of mental and conscious experience itself. Since the physicalist and mechanical-materialist picture of the world was achieved through, as Alfred North Whitehead would say, ‘bifurcating’ the mental capacities of the subject from the inert characteristics of the object, it is now well-nigh impossible to reconcile such exclusion which enabled the achievements of science to begin with. Under the Aristotelian paradigm, it was not the case that the mind was somehow floating over matter in a disembodied fashion (as per the foundationally modern Cartesian dualism), but rather that all matter was already teleologically oriented in a proto-mental way, in order to culminate in the emergence of mind, intelligibility, and intelligence. But because, as we have seen, the modern mechanistic way of thinking programmatically excluded any form, purpose, and mentality from nature, then it cannot possibly re-apply this analysis to that realm on whose exclusion the mode of analysis was itself predicated.
Take one famed example: the presence of qualitatively subjective conscious experience. If the world is thought as consisting of only complex systems of mindlessly interacting fundamental elements (whatever, again, those elements are thought to be), which are programmatically nominated as ‘objective’, then almost by definition such a description will resist any notion of qualitatively private, introspective, and subjective experience of anything, the famed Thomas Nagel’s ‘what it is like’ to be something. However much external informational input is provided about, say, Barry the dog enjoying his evening meal, it will never be possible from that to derive the way it subjectively is to be Barry enjoying his evening meal. This will only be available for Barry’s private and conscious experience of being such an individual conscious agent called Barry.
Another, the perhaps even more pernicious obstacle is the presence of irreducible mental intentionality in virtually every conceivable mental act. Intentionality is a feature of mental states which are directed towards objects, real or imaginary, true or untrue, under a particular aspect. It is the quality of ‘aboutness’ which defines basically every mental act – my consciousness can be about some sensuous object I apprehend at a given time, if I focus on it; or I can think about some object even if it is not at all in my direct sensuous vicinity. And it is not difficult to guess that all intentionality is irreducibly teleological and formal, that is, oriented towards some other thing in order to grasp that thing as that intelligible identity.
One could multiply further examples of mental activity utterly inexpressible in material terms, yet most accessible to us under most cursory of introspections. The basic message is that physicalism and materialism, because they have arisen as philosophical methodologies through a deliberate exclusion of mind and formal and final causality from the picture of the world, are elementarily unsuited towards investigation of mental phenomena whose very essence, predictably, entails mind as well as formal and final causality. It is, moreover, of little help to the materialists to claim that consciousness and mind are somehow ‘illusions’ or ‘epiphenomena’ springing from mindless and unconscious mechanical processes (as absurd as this language seems on face value – to whom would the illusion appear?). Even were consciousness an illusion, it would still be an illusion which is subjective and intentional. Even if consciousness and mind were faculties which did not actually reflect what is going on in the body and in the brain, but rather mere residues of physical activity, it would still be the case that this material and physical order somehow produced the illusion or epiphenomenon of something which it cannot, by definition, create.
But this is just the beginning of materialism’s insuperable explanatory deficiencies. Given that under a consequential physicalist ontology mind, consciousness, and intentionality must all be done away with on account of their failure to fit a pre-determined paradigm, all possible realms of abstract mental capacities must also face severe ‘deflation’, or be outrightly forced out of existence. First, given that ‘matter’ and ‘the physical’ are a priori approached as detached from any normative status, normativity itself is banished from a physicalist picture. Nothing in particular has more intrinsic value than anything else, and no act can ever be subject to a moral evaluation. The famous Humean distinction between normativity and existence (‘is’ and ‘ought’) arose precisely at the advent of a lifeless, mechanistic vision of the material world as set against the value-generative will of individuals. Yet physicalism pursued with true fanatical ardour, as we have seen, is forced to deny such abstract capacities as reasoning, truth-seeking, volition, or even conscious thought itself. They are names for intrinsically private experiences, for which we can surely find neural correlates in the brain and further correlates throughout the organism, but which, because of their categorically different nature, can never be explained by those physical correlations. So there is no subject or will which wills any sort of value; there even is not any sort of subjectively qualitative experience of pleasure or pain which might vindicate an application of ethics of a more utilitarian character. All that exist are valueless, completely normatively neutral, accidental interactions of whatever is defined to be ‘matter’. Because the universe is viewed a priori as indifferent to anything, and we are part of the universe, then we should be indifferent to ourselves. There never exists any motivation for any action, nor any intrinsic prohibition.
Second, given that minds are capable of a plethora of other abstract and intentional considerations, such as linguistic usage, reasoning, or formal thought expressed in logic or mathematics, all of those hallmarks of any sort of viewpoint deemed as remotely rational also have to be spectacularly trashed. Take perhaps the most pervasive example: logic and mathematics. Especially the latter seems to be one of, if not the highest achievement of our abstract speculative capacity. Hence Eugene Wigner wrote about the famed ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences’. But under strict physicalism, mathematics, as any other linguistic capacity concerned with describing or (in this case also, sometimes) predicting the structures of the universe, is bound to be confined to the mind, and the mind is bound to be an inexistent illusion of solely mechanical processes inherent in the brain, and ultimately in arrangements of atomic and subatomic particles. So mathematics, alongside logic, cannot be inherently and necessarily true, but, as a fiction of a material brain, has to be bound up with the contingencies of human developmental process. Had we evolved differently, and if the environment dictated different capacities more prone to survival, it is possible that we would consider the sum of one and one to equal three, or the law of non-contradiction not to hold at all. This means that there are no necessary rules of rational discourse, or even a necessary idea of truth value. It does not even make sense, as Hilary Putnam mused in one phase of his career, to say that logical principles are revisable in accordance with new empirical discoveries in science. As we have seen, there is no empiricism in general, because there is not even a first-person consciousness, as a participant in the act of intelligibility, to grant any epistemic access to the world. Hardline materialists even contradict themselves when they say that a conscious mental state is what we call a correlated physical brain state, because the language of the calling has to also itself be eliminated in some kind of unimaginable gesture of transcendental self-effacement.
The history of natural science at least since the famed breakthroughs in the 17th century, of which I have written above, has sometimes been described as a steady de-centralization of humankind’s place in the world at large, a majestic feat of opposing any prior anthropomorphisms. Perhaps, argues the materialist, the same fate is awaiting the small leftover field of minds – what we now imagine as irreducible to some antecedent and more basic physicalist mode of causation will finally yield to it. Science, it is said, yields verifiable, testable, and repetitive conclusions, in contrast to armchair abstractions of speculative philosophies, even if, or perhaps particularly when, they are considered using the originating source of philosophy – mind. So, one day perhaps, science will show how we are all ultimately physical and natural, only that we have a pervasive conscious tendency to perceive ourselves as accessing some supernatural realm of abstract thought, in which, in contrast to science, we never reach any sort of verifiable conclusions. But this is a false supposition for at least two reasons. Firstly, it again ‘bifurcates’ artificially between the lifeless, mindless and mechanistic natural world, and our supposed tendency towards exceeding nature through abstraction, speculation, and metacognition. Yet we are also an integral part of nature, and since we have an inherent tendency towards abstraction, speculation, and metacognition – in short, if we have an orientation towards transcendental ends exceeding the physical – then even if this tendency were to be somehow be an illusion, this illusion would still be an integral part of nature. Hence, one would have to ask what brought about such a nature in which a meaning-seeking transcendence of nature is generated. Any inherent orientation towards an end, or even basis for generating an illusory capacity towards end-directed orientations is impossible under a paradigm defined by mechanical, aimless, lifeless and mindless ‘matter’. Even if speculation, metacognition or transcendental orientation towards value were to be illusions (which would be itself near impossible to demonstrate), or at a disconnect from some supposedly deeper and unconscious processes within the brain which are ‘really’ in control, then those illusions themselves could not be generated by something qualitatively different. Optical illusions, for instance, are illusions, but that does not mean they can be generated by something other than light. Only a system which would somehow already have a potential towards a realization of mind, intentionality, and consciousness would be able to render explicit an illusion of mind, intentionality, and consciousness.
Secondly, our discovery of those de-centralizing aspects of science presupposes the practice of science, which in turn presumes several mind-related metaphysical assumptions. It is quite misleading to think of metaphysics as a discipline involved with objects sequentially and spatially ‘next to’ physical objects. Already Nicholas of Cusa, one of the most insightful Christian theologians, argued that God is non aliud – ‘not another thing’ alongside things. Rather, metaphysics asks and attempts to answer questions regarding the nature of the world such that the practice of science, and therefore the findings of science, are possible. Therefore, it inquires about what it means for the world to be at all, what it means for it to be intelligible, etc. But metaphysical considerations undergirding the practice of science, and therefore fundamental trust in the veracity of its outcomes, are properly discernible only once the presence of irreducibly truth-oriented mental capacities are asserted. And since this already entails entering the domain of value, which is aprioristically excluded from the physicalist picture, then under physicalism it does not even make sense to do science. The scientific enterprise, with all of its successes and struggles, is already part of a much broader teleological direction which, with all its successes and struggles, strives towards the plenitudes of modes in which the world intelligibly discloses itself to us. It is already a metaphysical decision to artificially fix the world such that science is the dominant way of asserting the truth. One already, being close to self-contradiction, metaphysically decides for a world such that what ‘works’ is closest to the possible definition of what ‘really is’. Yet pragmatism, metaphysically, has to always be laid upon an ultimately non-pragmatic foundation, else we end in an infinite regress of ‘X works because Y, Y works because Z, etc. ad infinitum’. What works only works because it already exists, and it exists because it is intelligible to the mind to which it comes as a knowable existent and which the mind discovers to work. (Not even to mention that invoking pragmatism or pragmatic heuristics is already claiming a teleology, because ‘to work’ always means ‘to work for some end’.) The way science has made the universe much less anthropocentric is simultaneously the way in which it underscored the capacity of human reason to access greater and greater layers of the world’s so multifarious and stupendous complexity. It is reductionist materialism, paradoxically, which, distrustful of the power of the rational orientation towards infinite truth, encloses reason within ready-made and dogmatically presupposed paradigms. It is really difficult, well-nigh impossible, to disentangle the fundamental comportment consciousness has towards the world from what that world itself is. But that is not a feat of any human mindful consciousness, but rather the world such that it, in consciousness, generates a reflection of itself directed transcendentally at value, beauty, truth, and knowledge.
The most lethal strike against materialism, however, is the spectre of mereological nihilism which ceaselessly haunts it. Materialism as an idea was devised in order to follow-up the disentanglement of external reality ‘in itself’ and our awareness of external reality, such that, ontologically speaking, all of that which appears to phenomenal consciousness is only an emergent and epiphenomenal result of relations between ‘foundational’ building blocks of reality – fundamental physical particles. In theory, such liberation of objects from dependence on consciousness is the foundation of objective science. In practice, it destroys objectivity itself, because the idea of object has to be denied. If that which exists is only the fundamental building blocks of matter which are in incessant flux, then who determines when particular objects come to be, persist, and disappear? What particularly makes two things: a table, and a stone lying on the table, two separate and separable entities? Finally, what to make of the ‘turnover’ of almost all fundamental particles in any concrete object? Some studies show that in a living human being, as much as 98 percent of atoms are exchanged in a timespan of a year. What then, under mechanistic materialism, makes any human being (and also any other being) a continuous entity throughout his or her life? As Peter van Inwagen convincingly argued, a committed materialist will find it difficult not to eschew the idea of a discrete and continuous identity of objects. If what makes an entity persist with a concrete identity through its internal changes is its intelligible and by definition immaterial form, which is the totality of explicable laws and relations guiding the arrangement and behaviour of matter at multiple levels of complexity, then a materialist really devoted to his or her cause would have to deny the existence of that form. What results is a materialistic ‘mereological nihilism’, according to which the only things in existence are mereological simples – the basic building blocks of all reality. What we usually call objects are only accidental arrangements of those fundamental physical particles at a given instance; arrangements which almost immediately pass and vanish into other arrangements.
According to van Inwagen, living beings constitute an exception from the otherwise universal razor of mereological nihilism, because they have to be considered as complex organic totalities. But, in principle, there is little reason to entertain this distinction, as exempting the universe from the foundationally categorizing role of consciousness almost certainly also results in the loss of a boundary between animate and inanimate matter itself.
Mereological nihilism results from a persistent materialism which denies the existence of knowable forms. In order for there to be an object of any inquiry, scientific inquiry notwithstanding, the matter forming the object has to also have a persistent formal character, so that the object can be distinguished both from the interconnected web of other objects, and also as a coherent and persistent totality despite changes at the micro-level. But that form itself, the inherent relational structure at multiple levels of complexity (depending on the object) is not material, it only exists as it is incessantly ‘filled’ by matter in various ways and in at various levels. Since a fanatic materialism denies whatever is immaterial, however, it also has to deny the existence of intelligible composite totalities in favour of a wholesale mereological nihilism.
The consequences are multiple and fatal. If mereological nihilism is true (which it cannot coherently be), there are no complex objects beyond the level fundamental physics describes – objects which we encounter in both commonsense existence as well as in scientific inquiry – such as trees, tables, humans, planets, galaxies, stars, dogs (sadly, including Barry). There are no observers of reality to perform science at all, and there are no possible rational means to understand reality. A mereological nihilist might respond that though there are really no objects, an object is just a name for a temporary ensemble of particles arranged ‘table-wise’ or ‘Barry-wise’. But this will not do, since for mereological nihilists humans and other conscious creatures, who recognize the arrangements as composites arranged in some manner, themselves do not exist apart from accidental arrangements of particles. So, in mereologically nihilist materialism, all must disappear all the way down: all objects, meanings, truths, consciousness, ideas, values, rationality, life itself, mathematics and logic, all sciences and all other subjects of knowledge. Ontology is completely flatlined to consist only in momentary aggregations of fundamental particles. There are no means by which to assess which aggregation precisely constitutes what, or perhaps even to distinguish between aggregations.
Materialist mereological nihilism is obviously incoherent, since it denies the reality of reason and consciousness to study and assess anything in science and through other means, it denies the reality of logical and mathematical principles, and even stable laws and regularities of nature guiding the patterned behaviour of anything more complex than whatever is considered most ‘fundamental’. It only ‘leaves out’ the existence and accidental movements of most fundamental elements of nature. Yet even if it were to be accepted, this doctrine still suffers the problems related to the nature of fundamental building blocks of reality themselves. Firstly, it is not clear what really lies at the smallest possible scales in the universe, and many physicists now suggest that spacetime itself might be emergent from some elusive more fundamental reality, which makes itself accessible to scrutiny solely through mathematical forms. Second, it might turn out that ‘fundamental’ reality is composed equally importantly of structures and relations then of discrete ‘things’, such that the process of reductive explanation in terms of smaller and smaller scales does not give a picture higher-order structural and relational totalities. It seems more and more the case that the very existence and basic character of various small building blocks of matter is dependent upon relations which those elements have with other elements both at their levels and in harmony with structures at higher levels. Third, as is well known, the realm of quantum physics is, on the one hand, endowed with extremely high predictive power, but on the other hand, very resistant to any sensible explanation in terms of ordinary causal reasoning employed at larger scales. The study of quantum physics alone does not explain that much about macro-reality, since that realm is wrought with indeterminacies, seeming actualizations of hidden potentials, mind-blowing phenomena such as entanglement, etc. And fourthly, the quantum realm, or whatever order of reality is pronounced to be most ‘basic’ by the physicalist ideology, is at the same time the very realm where a successful illusion of mind’s disentanglement from ‘objective’ external reality has never been actually accomplished. The whole problem with the quantum sphere is that it seems to shatter the standard and alleged independence of the act of observation and measurement from the event in reality itself.
Finally, however, even if the physicalist self-contradictorily and self-effacingly admits of all-embracing mereological nihilism, and completely denies the possibility of inquiry into any stable object apart from some supposedly ‘foundational’ elements (whatever those happen to be or to be discovered in the future), that still does not aid them against rather profound and nearly religious metaphysical conclusions. For, as mereologists like Jonathan Schaffer argue, unqualified mereological nihilism simply entails basic mereological monism. If what there is are only those elements of reality at the most ‘fundamental’ stratum, whatever that is, and there are no real and substantial formal determinations of object-level composites, then what there really is, is a single total object, namely the whole Universe itself. We are back with some kind of immanentized Platonic One of an almost religious character; the simple substance of the world which is itself the unchanging source of all apparent multiplicity. But if it were hypothetically the case that only existing substance is the subsisting Totality of uncountable particles in constant relational flux, then it is basically the case that, from our perspective (which somehow is itself illusory), everything, considered as every discrete thing, is an illusion of ever-extensive depths of foundational particularities. Yet is that really much different from the claim of some religious and even theistic traditions that everything positively ‘springs up’ from the single and all-encompassing Totality? If everything is an illusion, maybe even including what we currently think of as ‘fundamental’ (since, due to the paradigmatic tentativeness of science we will perhaps never know what is truly ‘foundational’), then is anything an illusion? What is the genuine difference between a wholescale ontological flatlining, and wholescale ontological affirmation? If anything becomes a matter of pragmatic description of some epiphenomenal level of reality, then is anything actually pragmatic? Maybe we are here actually experiencing another horseshoe effect – namely, that very opposite doctrines surprisingly share many similarities. There is little we have beside philosophical speculation to really adjudicate between such grand, sweeping metanarratives.
The Universe we know clearly has creatively evolved towards being self-apprehensive. To mind and consciousness, it gives itself as an intelligible and structured totality. Through mind and consciousness, it becomes explicit as an intelligible and structured totality. This does not mean that the Universe somehow is ‘centred’ on that infinitesimally small part of it on which (as far as we know) consciousness and mind render the Universe knowable to itself. However, without risking a lapse into something approaching an endorsement of a wholescale simulation hypothesis, we simply have to take it for granted that ‘matter’ is only something relative to a much more fundamental conscious reality of minds and observers. There is simply no reality without a concomitant, or sometimes even prior, act of observation, conceptual structuring, and intentional linguistic exchange within a community of sense. The endless process of abstracting from the data of sense and inferences of the mind into a supposed reality completely purged from consciousness and mind ends up in an inversion of orders, whereby it is ‘day-to-day’ reality itself, full of discrete objects, qualitative experiences, and intelligible structures, that becomes an illusion from some kind of completely unknown and unknowable noumenal stratum. Materialism ends up in a world presented in the Matrix film series, because it can articulate neither the real existence of formed objects persisting through shifts in inner constitution, nor the existence of the observers of reality, nor the properly ontologically basic union between the inner creativity of the mind and external intelligibility of the world. It is a world of a simulation in which we even do not know what the unsimulated reality is, and we cannot even trust whether the supposedly unsimulated reality is not itself a part of a simulation. It is the furthest away from a ‘common-sense’ view of the world as it can be.
The only way to avoid lapsing into the Matrix of materialism viable is to include in one’s picture of the Universe the irreducible presence of consciousness (as the physicist Roger Penrose suggested), mind, and the intrinsic isomorphism of the intellect with the qualitative and quantitative aspects of external reality. Most probably, given staggering developments in natural science, logic, philosophy, and mathematics, a simple return to premodern and Aristotelian vision as it stood centuries ago will not do. That is a separate question, however, from whether a new post-materialist and post-physicalist metaphysical paradigm will not have a place for a renewed understanding and appreciation for the final ontological co-existence of perfect being and perfect knowing, which warrants the intelligibility of reality and which constantly brings all things to existence such that they can be manifest and become known. I am of course speaking about, and humbly drawing attention to, the Absolute.