Layers & Levels Chapter Six: Materialism Revisited

Imagining that this Series is now at the point of crossing out of the innermost ring and about to form the intermediate ring which curves down and then creates the outermost ring (see Punto 3), I thought it a good time to review the materialist perspective on reality because in a way it is the background of this whole exercise even though the main thrust thus far is presenting examples of non-materialist thinking. Or put another way: materialism is what the material is crossing over, just as when the logo transitions from the inner to the intermediate ring this is a place where the line crosses over itself.

Materialism is a big topic and, as is so often the case, a term which means different things to different people at different times in different contexts so I will not here attempt to survey all of them. The main point here is that it is a worldview with a certain notion of ‘reality’.

First lets look at a standard definition, this from Britannica.

Materialism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.

That’s what I mean by the term though I would substitute the word ‘facts’ for ‘reality’. Interestingly, Britannica quickly goes into some of the problems with this view, including that which is called ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness, a phrase coined by Terrence McKenna decades ago and there is an interesting wrinkle with something called ‘dialectic materialism’, adopted in Marxist thought last century and purporting to be a higher order of view compared to ‘vulgar materialism’, but which IMO ultimately boils down to the same sort of thing.

Materialism depends upon the generally unacknowledged assumption that self and other, or observer and observed, are separate. This separation is axiomatic to the notion that only the physical is real because each physical object is similarly separate from every other such. If you break them down, complex forms comprise a multitude of individual (separate) particles making Reality something put together like a giant Lego construction of bits and pieces in space, which latter is regarded as some sort of void conveniently there to accommodate all apparent forms. Moreover, just as space is somehow there but non-existent because without form, so also with mind or consciousness.

We could take words like space, mind or consciousness and bundle them all into the word ‘experience’. If we look at our actual life every moment involves some sort of experiencing; but according to the materialist assumption, such experiencing is a non-existent fantasy which doesn’t ‘really’ happen. Maybe this doesn’t sound like a big deal until we consider that this assumption devalues so many valuable aspects of living such as:

Thoughts, feelings, memories, relationships, cultural traditions, beliefs, spirituality, artistry, loyalty, courage, nobility, sacrifice and so on ad infinitum. Because when you boil materialism down, essentially it posits that reality is comprised of lifeless, mindless physical particles. As such, it is a world without principles or values, only fit for robots. Which is why materialism is one of the most important issues out there.

I first started contemplating this when following the debates about Darwinian evolution versus ‘intelligent design’. I grew up assuming that Darwin’s theory was essentially correct and never gave it a second thought; but on reading a few articles about the debate, I learned that the whole theory depended upon ‘random genesis’ wherein genes just jostle around chaotically spitting out random variations, some of which survive whilst others don’t. But first: where do we see all these random variations? If we look around we see that creatures are remarkable stable in both the plant and animal kingdoms; only rarely do anomalies arise – people born with three legs or two heads and such – but these are clearly defects not passed down to their offspring as Darwin’s theory suggests. So though many of the comparisons between species – how so many animals have five fingers and toes for example – make the theory sound plausible, if you go down to its underlying assumptions it doesn’t add up. Clearly living organisms have some sort of intention and motivation, the ability to solve problems – like how ivy manages to climb up a wall by feeling out tiny cracks and protuberances, like how ants build sophisticated underground cities, like how wolves hunt in packs and so on. Clearly responsive intelligence is part of living reality and to posit it as some sort imagined irrelevance or mindless, random happenstance is simply wrong.

But more importantly, and again, it devalues so much of our experiential life as unimportant, irrelevant. Put another way, we are reduced to being mindless machines in a mindless mechanical world. Political systems based on this assumption are bound to end up de-humanizing us whilst damaging the inter-related webs of life which are living, interdependent dynamics wherein none of the participants, if you look at it carefully, is actually a fully independent, autonomous thing, or mere agglomerations of mindless, mechanical particles.

Speaking of the latter, is that not what the Five Skandhas description posits, namely that our experience comprises five layers or level of bundled-together elements? Well, yes, but not really because the constituent elements involved are experiential, not merely physical. The first Skandha of form, for example, involves experiencing three-dimensional space in which various different forms arise. We experience this dimension, similarly with feeling, categorization, intention and a resultant stream of individuated consciousness, aka ‘me’.

This Chapter is not about solving the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ rather pointing out that the underlying materialist assumption and mentality most of us live with posits the world as no more than some sort of lifeless machine making us all no more than biological machines, including plants and animals of course, living in a larger machine comprising rocks, air, water, planets, solar systems and so forth. And this mechanical view has gradually taken over most modern societies and resulted in an overly mechanistic view of reality, which includes both ourselves and our lives, and which devalues too many aspects of human experience, in so doing engendering increasingly dehumanizing civilizations.

But if you don’t start with this assumption, you can develop many other ways of thinking, feeling and living and since many traditions in the world have indeed started from different assumptions, there is a reservoir of perspective describing reality from a non-materialist point of view, which is what this Series has been introducing in somewhat simple fashion.

I’ll end this Chapter with an excerpt from an Article I wrote last year which I like:

If you were to ask a scientist to describe the movie you are watching on a screen, the scientist could talk about radio waves or internet EMF signals and various different pixels of light with different frequencies on a screen and sound waves emanating from a speaker diaphragm and suchlike but that same scientist would also have to admit that his science cannot perceive the story being told on that screen. Science doesn’t understand stories, nor can it hear symphonies or any music as such. That means that science doesn’t see feelings, emotions or meaningful experience. Science cannot see love or hate, disappointment or triumph. Science, in other words, doesn’t perceive most of what matters to us as living beings leading what we call ‘our lives.’ So science can see and do many great things, but not everything, including many of the most important experiences involving that which is most important in our human life journeys. Put another way: science has no regard for many things which we regard as most meaningful because science doesn’t ‘do’ experience and since we inhabit what on this blog is often called an ‘experiential continuum,’ science only perceives a narrow band within a far larger spectrum moreover often in ways, as per the example above about watching a movie, that are somewhat outside, or alien, to that experiential continuum.