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Error and Loss
A Licence to Enchantment
Ashley Curtis
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Error and Loss
A Licence to Enchantment
Ashley Curtis
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About This Book
Error and Loss digs out and exposes a fundamental assumption deeply buried both in common thought and in materialist philosophy: that reason transcends its evolutionary pedigree, allowing us to speak coherently of a reality divorced from all experience.As we have moved from a religious to a scientific explanation of our cosmos this error has led directly to a terrible lossâthe disenchantment that pervades our age. Yet when we dare to stare the error in the face all variants of materialism self-destruct, and the world we live in, the world of trees and rocks and stars and animals and other human beings, receives its once unquestioned magic back.Error and Loss is a philosophical work of play and parable and paradox, a detective story that uncovers what has deadened our connection to our universe, then offers up both restoration and a reconciliation with the thought of ages past.
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Chapter 1
SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
With no expression, nothing to express.
â Robert Frost, Desert Places
By scientific materialism I understand any conception of the cosmos as an indifferent, value-free physical reality that can exist, and has existed, independently of any consciousness. This cosmos is described increasingly accurately by models of the physical sciences which currently see it as composed, at its most basic level, of particles interacting in space-time via a small number of fundamental forces. These forces and particles have, in the course of vast amounts of time, given rise to circumstances in which life, including conscious and human life, has emerged and developed via a purposeless algorithm (natural selection) that, at base, involves nothing more than the particles moving and reacting as prescribed by fundamental forces. Scientific materialism accordingly sees the cosmos as devoid of any meaning or value except that which conscious living creatures (most notably ourselves) create for it and sees the very tendency to create meaning or value as itself a result of the neutral algorithm which has produced us and our consciousnesses out of inert matter.3
This brief precis has, of course, left out almost all of the details of the materialistic science that scientific materialism purports to represent. This is because scientific materialism is not materialistic science but a statement on a meta-level about materialistic science. It says that, whatever the details of the current version of materialistic science are (and these will change as we come closer and closer to the complete truth, a âTheory of Everythingâ), materialistic science can, or will, give a complete description of the universe in the sense that everything, from love to lightning, muons to music, religion to racing cars and creation to consciousness, may ultimately be derived from nothing more than the interactions of particles in an indifferent, independent, meaningless universe. It does not claim that the social sciences or studies in the humanities or economic theory are invalid; nor does it claim that the most fruitful explanation for rush-hour traffic is to be found by looking at the quarks and leptons in the drivers and the cars. It does, however, claim that whatever the relevant level of explanation, it is hierarchically reducible to a next lower one, and so on, all the way down to the quarks. Meaning, value, beauty, consciousness, lifeânone of these require any more âingredientsâ for their making than basic particles interacting according to basic forces, and basic particles and basic forces are indifferent, value-free and in themselves meaningless.
These are very strong statements that are to be found nowhere in materialistic science. Materialistic science does not make these kinds of statements; instead it creates physical and/or mathematical models with which to explain and predict phenomena. These models are sometimes physical and visibleâas with, say, the workings of the solar system; sometimes physical and invisible, as with the model of an electric current as the flow of electrons within conductors; sometimes they are neither, as with the mathematical models of quantum mechanics or in theories requiring fabrics of more than three dimensions. With these latter the âexplanationâ side comes up a bit short perhapsâI cannot âpictureâ what is happeningâbut at least the mathematical models provide a means for getting from certain initial conditions to certain verifiable results (including probabilistic results).
Materialistic science is, by definition, materialisticâthat is, it explains and predicts phenomena on the basis of models ultimately composed of particles and physical forces. It makes no claim, however, to completeness. It does not claim that it does, will or can explain everything. It is, in fact, profoundly uninterested in hypotheses that are not testable by its methods. Is the universe in itself value-free? Does consciousness continue after death? Is the Bach Chaconne in itself beautiful? Does God exist? Science has no opinion on these matters because science is in the business of testing hypotheses empirically and none of the hypotheses just mentioned can be tested empirically.
Scientific materialism, on the other hand, is interested. It holds that God does not exist, that the universe is in itself value-free, that the Bach Chaconne is beautiful insofar as human beings find it so but no further and that consciousness does not continue after death. One could give an endless list of such questions in which science has no interest but to which scientific materialism provides strong answers.
Materialistic science is in the business of testing hypotheses empiricallyâby doing so, it has arrived at a great number of models that are successful at explaining and predicting a wide variety of phenomena in terms that ultimately can be reduced to the interaction of particles via fundamental forces. Scientific materialism, on the other hand, is a world-view that makes a great number of claims about untestable hypotheses. In particular, it claims that materialistic science tells, or will tell, the whole story.
It is ironic that scientific materialism, which makes the kind of claim that science never would, has put over the fiction that it rests on the laurels of science. Science works so well, it claims, that scientific materialism must be the only valid world-view, the picture of the ultimate reality. How has this confusion come about?
One answer lies in a caricature of intellectual history that is widely held to be valid. According to this caricature, religion at one point claimed to know a whole plethora of âtruthsâ that turned out to be testable by the methods of science. As the results of one of these tests after the other came out contrary to the tenets of religion, a war developed between âscienceâ and âreligionââand science kept winning the battles (the geocentric solar system, the age of the earth, the origin of species, etc.).4
The results of this caricature are surprisingly far-reaching. Since religion represents a world-view and since science, according to the caricature, defeated (and keeps defeating) religion in battle after battle, it seems only reasonable that science must also represent a world-viewâand, further, the victorious one. That science explicitly and carefully does not represent a world-viewâthat this is, indeed, precisely the reason for its extraordinary successâeasily gets lost in the apparent logic that world-views must do battle with world-views. Scientific materialism, eliding its differences with science proper, now smoothly slips into the gap and claims victory.
A second reason that scientific materialism is in the ascendant today, however, is psychological and far more powerful. It has to do with the ubiquity of technology. While scientific and technological developments are different in kind and the process leading from a scientific discovery to a technological innovation is complex and often accidental, we all realise that in most cases, the technology would not exist without the scienceâthere would be no moonshot without an understanding of gravity, no smart phone without quantum mechanics, no hydrogen bomb without particle physics. Each piece of technology that we see or use or that somehow affects us, from televisions and cars to bombs and toastersâand our twenty-first century lives almost without exception are saturated with such objectsâeach one proclaims to us, by its very functioning, that science has got it right. The leap from âscience has got it rightâ to âscience presents the correct world-viewâ is extremely difficult to resist. And again, since science does not have a world-view, scientific materialism slides in easily, disguising itself as the inevitable world-view of a science that gets things right.
Exposure to technology is at this point almost global, crossing all lines of class, religious belief and education level. This exposure has an unavoidable psychological effect; it says that someone, somewhere, has got things figured out. When religious, shamanistic or animistic beliefs coexist with exposure to technology, a dissonance, conscious or not, is guaranteed. Successful technology means something; it is not a neutral fact to be laid down next to traditional beliefs but is a challenge to themâoften consciously unacknowledged, to be sure, but a challenge nonetheless. The fact that technology works with a consistency far exceeding that of any comparable traditional practices is inevitably lodged somewhere in the mind. And whether quarks and gauge bosons mean anythingâand they likely donâtâto the kid lusting after the smart phone, she is, in most cases, perfectly aware that it is âWesternâ science that lies behind its construction, and that this science has carefully excised from its discourse anything to do with spiritual or animistic beliefs.
To what extent scientific materialism can be said to be the default world-view that lies unacknowledged behind the professed world-views of various religious or indigenous peoples is, of course, difficult to gauge. Wherever it has not yet established itself, however, it is on its way. On some level we believe in that on which we relyâand it is a rare person, today, who does not rely on advanced technology at all. And unless the belief in what we rely on is properly placedâas this book attempts to doâthe clash of professed with default world-views will not be healthy.
The confusion which merges the successes of materialistic science with the credibility of scientific materialism does not in itself mean, of course, that scientific materialism is wrong. It only means that this sleight-of-hand justification of scientific materialism does not hold water. In the next chapter I will present a number of the standard arguments which have been used to challenge scientific materialism. I do so with the caveat, however, that while we may temporarily be convinced by one or more of these objections, I do not think that this momentary conviction will have any lasting effect on our default world-view. This is because the sleight-of-hand move âsuccessful science, therefore successful scientific materialismâ works at a very deep level within our psyches. The technological onslaught is overwhelming, and it will take something equally overwhelming, something more than a few coherent philosophical objections, to dethrone scientific materialism from ruling over our minds. I will present this âsomethingâ in chapters 4, 5 and 6. There we will see, as I have already suggested, that it is materialistic science itself which leads us directly to the Achillesâ heel of scientific materialism.
3Just as I will not differentiate between various strands of Darwinism as long as they agree on the role of natural selection described in the Preface, I will also not distinguish between the various versions of physicalism that I am generally dubbing scientific materialism. While there are salient differences, for example, between eliminative and non-eliminative physicalism, their shared assumption of the mind-independent âexistenceâ of a material world and their shared belief in a material basis for all entities taken as ârealâ qualify both as scientific materialism. For the purposes of my argument, they can thus be treated as one despite their strong disagreements on issues beyond this more general level of consensus.
4For a more nuanced reading of the âwarâ, see Karen Armstrong. The Case for God. New York: Vintage, 2010, Part Two; see also, Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 1, Section 37.
Chapter 2
FOUR OBJECTIONS TO SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands
As the street hardly understands
â T.S. Eliot, Preludes
1. Consciousness
Particles of matter interacting according to attractive or repulsive forces would seem to be able to give a convincing explanation for stars, planets, rocks, nuclear and chemical reactionsâin short, for physical phenomena. Consciousness, however, seems incommensurate with simple physical being. Consciousness consists of perception, emotions, feelings of pain or pleasureâall of those qualities which make it different to be me rather than, say, a rockâwhich make it pointless, in fact, to talk about what it is like to be a rock and yet coherent to talk about what it is like to be me.5 The possibility of experiencing something as a subject is of a different order of reality than that of being a âthingâ which merely exists. Even if, as no doubt we could if we had enough information, we were to assign a physical brain state to each possible qualitative experience of a subject so that, as in the movie The Matrix, we could produce any given experience using purely physical means, this still would not even begin to close the gap between the physical and the experiential.6
This first objection claims that experienceânot the causes of experience, i.e. the physical brain-state, but the subjective state of consciousnessâis precisely the non-physical, and its existence can hardly be explained, rather than correlated, by a physics.
A materialist will reply that we are here naively privileging consciousness. We object to consciousness emerging from a brain state while we are silent about other kinds of emerging: as when a solid, continuous table emerges from the mostly empty space of the atomic lattice that makes it up (the preponderance of material particles in a table being approximately equivalent to that of three mosquitoes in a cathedral); or when table salt, an edible white solid, emerges from a metal (sodium) reacting with a poisonous, greenish gas (chlorine); or when photosynthesis produces solid sugars out of sunlight, a gas and a liquid; or when a clear direction of time emerges on the macro-scale from completely time-reversable interactions of particles on the micro-scale.7
The critic of materialism is unmoved. For her it is one thing when physical causes produce physical consequencesâthis is materialistic. The mental is not physical, not material, and it is ludicrous to claim to have derived lived experience from the movem...