This website is devoted to the art of rationality, and as such, is a wonderful corrective to wrong facts and, more importantly, wrong procedures for finding out facts.
There is, however, another type of cognitive phenomenon that I’ve come to consider particularly troublesome, because it militates against rationality in the irrationalist, and fights against contentment and curiousity in the rationalist. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it perverse-mindedness.
The perverse-minded do not necessarily disagree with you about any fact questions. Rather, they feel the wrong emotions about fact questions, usually because they haven’t worked out all the corollaries.
Let’s make this less abstract. I think the following quote is preaching to the choir on a site like LW:
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
-Richard Dawkins, "God's Utility Function," Scientific American (November, 1995).
Am I posting that quote to disagree with it? No. Every jot and tittle of it is correct. But allow me to quote another point of view on this question.
“We are not born into this world, but grow out of it; for in the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”
This quote came from an ingenious and misguided man named Alan Watts. You will not find him the paragon of rationality, to put it mildly. And yet, let’s consider this particular statement on its own. What exactly is wrong with it? Sure, you can pick some trivial holes in it – life would not have arisen without the sun, for example, and Homo sapiens was not inevitable in any way. But the basic idea – that life and consciousness is a natural and possibly inevitable consequence of the way the universe works – is indisputably correct.
So why would I be surprised to hear a rationalist say something like this? Note that it is empirically indistinguishable from the more common view of “mankind confronted by a hostile universe.” This is the message of the present post: it is not only our knowledge that matters, but also our attitude to that knowledge. I believe I share a desire with most others here to seek truth naively, swallowing the hard pills when it becomes necessary. However, there is no need to turn every single truth into a hard pill. Moreover, sometimes the hard pills also come in chewable form.
What other fact questions might people regard in a perverse way?
How about materialism, the view that reality consists, at bottom, in the interplay of matter and energy? This, to my mind, is the biggie. To come to facilely gloomy conclusions based on materialism seems to be practically a cottage industry among Christian apologists and New Agers alike. Since the claims are all so similar to each other, I will address them collectively.
“If we are nothing but matter in motion, mere chemicals, then:
- Life has no meaning;
- Morality has no basis;
- Love is an illusion;
- Everything is futile (there is no immortality);
- Our actions are determined; we have no free will;
- et
- cetera.”
The usual response from materialists is to say that an argument from consequences isn’t valid – if you don’t like the fact that X is just matter in motion, that doesn’t make it false. While eminently true, as a rhetorical strategy for convincing people who aren’t already on board with our programme, it’s borderline suicidal.
I have already hinted at what I think the response ought to be. It is not necessarily a point-by-point refutation of each of these issues individually. The simple fact is, not only is materialism true, but it shouldn’t bother anyone who isn’t being perverse about it, and it wouldn’t bother us if it had always been the standard view.
There are multiple levels of analysis in the lives of human beings. We can speak of societies, move to individual psychology, thence to biology, then chemistry… this is such a trope that I needn’t even finish the sentence.
However, the concerns of, say, human psychology (as distinct from neuroscience), or morality, or politics, or love, are not directly informed by physics. Some concepts only work meaningfully on one level of analysis. If you were trying to predict the weather, would you start by modeling quarks? Reductionism in principle I will argue for until the second coming (i.e., forever). Reductionism in practice is not always useful. This is the difference between proximate and ultimate causation. The perverse-mindedness I speak of consists in leaping straight from behaviour or phenomenon X to its ultimate cause in physics or chemistry. Then – here’s the “ingenious” part – declaring that, since the ultimate level is devoid of meaning, morality, and general warm-and-fuzziness, so too must be all the higher levels.
What can we make of someone who says that materialism implies meaninglessness? I can only conclude that if I took them to see Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," they would earnestly ask me what on earth the purpose of all the little dots was. Matter is what we’re made of, in the same way as a painting is made of dried pigments on canvas. Big deal! What would you prefer to be made of, if not matter?
It is only by the contrived unfavourable contrast of matter with something that doesn’t actually exist – soul or spirit or élan vital or whatever – that somebody can pull off the astounding trick of spoiling your experience of a perfectly good reality, one that you should feel lucky to inhabit.
I worry that some rationalists, while rejecting wooly dualist ideas about ghosts in the machine, have tacitly accepted the dualists’ baseless assumptions about the gloomy consequences of materialism. There really is no hard pill to swallow.
What are some other examples of perversity? Eliezer has written extensively on another important one, which we might call the disappointment of explicability. “A rainbow is just light refracting.” “The aurora is only a bunch of protons hitting the earth’s magnetic field.” Rationalists are, sadly, not immune to this nasty little meme. It can be easily spotted by tuning your ears to the words “just” and “merely.” By saying, for example, that sexual attraction is “merely” biochemistry, you are telling the truth and deceiving at the same time. You are making a (more or less) correct factual statement, while Trojan-horsing an extraneous value judgment into your listener’s mind as well: “chemicals are unworthy.” On behalf of chemicals everywhere, I say: Screw you! Where would you be without us?
What about the final fate of the universe, to take another example? Many of us probably remember the opening scene of Annie Hall, where little Alfie tells the family doctor he’s become depressed because everything will end in expansion and heat death. “He doesn’t do his homework!” cries his mother. “What’s the point?” asks Alfie.
Although I found that scene hilarious, I have actually heard several smart people po-facedly lament the fact that the universe will end with a whimper. If this seriously bothers you psychologically, then your psychology is severely divorced from the reality that you inhabit. By all means, be depressed about your chronic indigestion or the Liberal Media or teenagers on your lawn, but not about an event that will happen in 1014 years, involving a dramatis personae of burnt-out star remnants. Puh-lease. There is infinitely more tragedy happening every second in a cup of buttermilk.
The art of not being perverse consists in seeing the same reality as others and agreeing about facts, but perceiving more in an aesthetic sense. It is the joy of learning something that’s been known for centuries; it is appreciating the consilience of knowledge without moaning about reductionism; it is accepting nature on her own terms, without fatuous navel-gazing about how unimportant you are on the cosmic scale. If there is a fact question at stake, take no prisoners; but you don’t get extra points for unnecessary angst.
Let's talk about worldviews and the sensibilities appropriate to them. A worldview is some thesis about the nature of reality: materialism, solipsism, monotheism, pantheism, transhumanism, etc. A sensibility is an emotion or a complex of emotions about life.
Your thesis is: rationalist materialism is the correct worldview; its critics say negative things about its implications for sensibility; and some of us are accepting those implications, but incorrectly. Instead we can (should?) feel this other way about reality.
My response to all this is mostly at the level of worldview. I don't have your confidence that I have the basics of reality sorted out. I have confidence that I have had a certain sequence of experiences. I expect the world and the people in it to go on behaving, and responding to me, in a known range of ways, but I do not discount the possibility of fundamental changes or novelties in the future. I can picture a world that is matter in motion, and map it onto certain aspects of experience and the presumed history of the world, but I'm also aware of many difficulties, and also of the rather hypothetical nature of this mapping from the perspective of my individual knowledge. I could be dreaming; these consistencies might show themselves to be superficial or nonsensical if I awoke to a higher stage of lucidity. Even without invoking the skeptical option, I would actually expect an account of the world which fully encompassed what I am, and embedded it into a causal metaphysics, to have a character rather different, and rather richer, than the physics we actually have. I'm also aware that there are limits to my own understanding of basic concepts like existence, cause, time and so forth, and that further progress here might not only change the way I feel about reality, but might reveal vast new tracts of existence I had not hitherto suspected. On a personal level, the possible future transmutations of my own being remain unknown, though the experience of others suggests that it ends in the grave.
So much for criticism at the level of worldview. At the level of sensibility... it seems to me that Dawkins grasps the implications of his worldview better than Watts (that is, if one reads Watts as an expression of the same facts under a different sensibility). There is agony as well as wonder in the materialist universe. Most of it consists of empty cosmic tedium and lifeless realms occasionally swept by vast violences (but of course, this is already a strong supposition about the nature of the rest of the universe, namely that it's a big desert), but life in our little bubble of air and water can surely be viewed as vicious and terrible without much difficulty. That we come from the world does not mean we will inevitably manage to make our peace with it.
Mostly you talk about various forms of nihilism and self-alienation as emotional errors. I think that both the nihilism and the "joy in the merely real" come from a sort of subjective imagining and have very little connection to knowledge. The people for whom materialism threatens nihilism at first imagine themselves to be living in one sort of world; then, they imagine another sort of world, and they have those responses. Meanwhile, the self-identified materialists have been having their experiences while already imagining themselves to be living in a materialist world, so they don't see a problem.
Now in general I am unimpressed (to say the least) with the specific materialistic accounts of subjectivity that materialists have to offer. So I think that the reflections of a typical materialist on how their feelings are really molecules, or whatever, are really groundless daydreams not much removed from a medieval astronomer thrilling to the thought of the celestial spheres. It's just you imagining how it works, and you're probably very wrong about the details.
However, I don't think these details actually play much role in the everyday well-being of materialists anyway. Insofar as they are mentally healthy, it is because things are functioning well at the level of subjectivity, psychological self-knowledge, and so forth. Belief that everything is made of atoms isn't playing a role here. So the real question is, what's going on in the non-materialist or the reluctant materialist, for their mental health to be disturbed by the adoption of such a belief? That is an interesting topic of psychology that might be explored. I think you get a few aspects of it right, but that it is far more subtle and diverse than you allow for. There may be psychological makeups where the nihilist response really is the appropriate emotional reaction to the possibility or the subjective certainty of materialism.
But for me the bottom line is this: discussing rationalist materialism as a total worldview simply reminds me of just how tentative, incomplete, and even problematic such a worldview is, and it impels me to make further efforts towards actually knowing the truth, rather than just lingering in the aesthetics made available by acceptance of one particular possibility as reality.
Doesn't this support simplicio's... (read more)