April 25, 2006
Games we materialists play when you aren't looking
Living in California as I do, I have a lot of friends who have ideas about the physical world that on their face seem ludicrous to a scientifically-minded materialist like myself. For example, people I love and respect think that some people have the ability to heal by adjusting a patient's "energies" without touching him, others think that spells and witchcraft have power beyond the psychological, and even more think there's some "guy" up in heaven that controls what happens here on Earth and that 2000 years ago His son rose from the dead. Since I respect these friends a great deal I've been looking for common ground, and have started playing a game with myself where I try to translate these beliefs into a form that a philosophically-minded but skeptical materialist like myself can accept.
I mean translate literally — I look for meanings of the words my believer friends use that make the belief plausible in my own world-view while compromising their actual beliefs as little as possible. There are some limits to the game — no amount of translation is going to make the claim that one can change the weather just with one's mind any more palatable to me. But there is a surprising amount of room to maneuver. For example, I've heard some describe the energy manipulated by reiki practitioners as "electricity," but when pressed it's clear that's just a metaphor for something else — they don't actually mean that this energy can be measured with a voltmeter any more than a physicist talking about an electrical "current" thinks you could steer a boat down a river of the stuff. The goal of my private game then is to answer the question, "a metaphor for what?"
The fun part of this game is that when I'm being honest with myself I rapidly wind up at logical impasses in my own philosophy as well. My latest conundrum has to do with belief in some sort of soul, a "thing" that is a fundamental part of and unique to every living being (or at least every person), and that persists after that person has died. So the game is to come up with something that is (a) something fundamental to the identity of an individual person and yet (b) still exists after the body has turned to dust. As I cast about for things in my own world-view that might fit the bill (including things like "the patterns of memories left in surviving friends and family" and "the combination of genes and upbringing one leaves in one's own children") I started to recognize that the idea of a soul is an answer to a basic philosophical question left unanswered by materialism, namely "when we see an object at two points in time, what features are necessary such that we recognize the two viewings as the being of the same object?" I've always heard this called the Granddad's Axe problem:
I've got my Granddad's old axe. I've replaced the handle twice, and the head three times, but it's still my Granddad's old axe...
We can certainly accept that Granddad's axe is still the same axe even if we paint it or sharpen it, and might even accept it's the "same" axe after we've replaced both the head and the handle if we use it in the same way, it evokes the same memories of Granddad that it did before, etc. What about people? It's been said that every molecule in a person's body is replaced after a decade or two, and certainly I'm very different in both appearance and thinking than I was when I was 12. Am I still the same person I was then, even with all those changes? If so, why do we connect the atoms that made up that child then with the person sitting here typing this now? And if not, is there some 12-year-old boy living today who, based on similarity to that boy of 24 years ago, is more deserving of the title?
Materialism (or my understanding of it at least) doesn't offer any answers to these questions, nor does it feel the need to do so. The philosophy simply suggests that there are patterns that exist in the world at different points in time, that they follow certain rules, and that any vocabulary that accurately describes those patterns is equally valid (though potentially more or less practical and comprehensible). Unfortunately, just calling such a pattern "soul" doesn't get us any further — that just amounts to saying "yes, you are the same person as you were when you were 12, and we'll call the thing that binds those two defined entities together your soul."
Posted by bug to Mind and Brain at April 25, 2006 11:22 PM | TrackBackWell, materialism does look for answers to Grandad's-Axe type questions, but they are answers of the form "because we're wired and taught to do so in the following ways." Unless you wish to define materialism in ways that exclude cognition, which it sorta sounds like you do, but I can't figure out why.
And, to be fair, no religion I know of simply labels the "soul" and forgets about it. They go on to make various claims about souls. (I don't assert here that the claims are accurate or supported by evidence, merely that it's not just a labelling exercise.)
But your basic point still stands. And yeah, it's been my experience that if I "listen in tongues" respectfully, a lot of the sorts of assertions you're talking about here become reasonable... even if I still don't think they're true, I can discuss them respectfully.
Posted by: dpolicar at April 26, 2006 2:13 PMI have started playing that game myself. It's actually fairly interesting - I used to dismiss a lot of stuff completely as being completely bogus and unscientific. But as I've gotten more experience at translating between systems, I'm starting to grasp the central ideas that are just basic descriptions of human nature expressed in non-scientific ways.
Like when I went to a kundalini yoga class with a friend a while ago. Most of the stuff they say, if I interpret it literally, seems bogus to me. But I recognized some core concepts in the spiel that made sense to me. I'm blanking at the moment on the specific example, of course. But I'm finding it fascinating that the older I get, the more value I can find in almost anything, because I'm starting to see connections all over the place. Pretty soon I will be one of those spacey Californians who believe in the interconnected energy of all things.
Posted by: Perlick at April 27, 2006 10:00 AMWell, I finally come to visit my brother's blog (I am procrastinating from completing some grading) and read this far. I may be one of those people Brad has to deal with-- though I don't know if he's talking about me. When talking about religion, and frequently politics, I remind myself of Dr. Zhivago; my views get so subtle they almost dissappear in all the noise. I find the way I wrap my mind around spirituality (which is really secondary to the experience), is really down this path, but farther. I take a post-structuralist view of spirituality-- meaning that we understand within ideas and language, and the desire to pretend to be a completely external observer discovering truth is a fundamental mistake (post-structuralism really parralels science here). This can be summed up in two statements that make those that were raised to fear christianity (like myself) shudder: 'who are you to say there is no god?' and 'don't we all live through some sort of worship and faith'. Once the immediate visualization of encountering some book touting, wet eyed, trench-coated individual on the street corner passes, these questions really cut to the epistemological matter: what can we know (or, what is the remainder between what we have to 'know' and what we are able to).
Posted by: GARhodes at April 29, 2006 9:39 PMWRT Dave's comment: My materialism includes cognition. When I say materialism doesn't provide answers to these questions I mean it doesn't answer the question "am I the same person I was 20 years ago" rather than "why do we humans think we know the answer to that question and what heuristics do we usually use to answer it?" (As you say, the answer to the latter question is usually along the lines of "because we're wired this way, and here are some good evolutionary reasons why that might be the case.")
I've only identified two of the claims that most(?) religions associate with souls, namely that they're uniquely associated with a person throughout that person's life and that they continue to be associated with that person after his body has turned to dust. Are there other claims you'd add as fundamental to the general understanding of the word?
(BTW, I really like the concept of "listening in tongues.")
And to Geoff — Welcome! I wasn't thinking about you WRT to needing to translate... our philosophies aren't always the same but I think we both speak the same native language when it comes to explaining them. For me the game started when I was trying to figure out what the heck this "energy" thing was that so many of my Bay Area friends talk about. In the end, I concluded that everyone was using the same set of words and metaphors to describe a very diverse set of world-views. (Recent philosophical discussions with some thoughtful devout Christian coworkers and a recent trip to Santa Cruz brought it all back to mind again...)
Posted by: Bug at April 30, 2006 3:44 PMHey brad - "listening in tongues" isn't my phrasing, it's melted_snowball@LJs, although I'll take credit for independent origination of the concept. I like it too.
WRT cognition - Fair enough. Your original phrasing of the question left unanswered ( "when we see an object at two points in time, what features are necessary such that we recognize the two viewings as the being of the same object?") seemed like a basic cognition question, which is what confused me... I get what you mean, now.
I could quibble that "materialism" answers the "am I the same person I was 20 years ago?" question too, but I'd agree that it does so only by defining "person" as a social construct to be studied anthropologically, whereas you meant to refer by it to some kind of objective thing that exists without reference to anyone's beliefs.
WRT beliefs about souls - well, if you're looking for claims that all or even most religions would agree to, I can't come up with many. But most religions make specific non-universally-agreed upon claims. Eg, some people believe souls reincarnate and others don't, but for those who do to say that two individuals share a soul is do more than content-free labelling, it's to make a statement that could be wrong. (Which is not to imply that it makes a testable statement. As far as I know it doesn't, though I don't claim to be an expert on the matter.)
Eg, some people believe souls reincarnate and others don't, but for those who do to say that two individuals share a soul is do more than content-free labelling, it's to make a statement that could be wrong.
I don't think I'd call it content-free labelling, but I do think that the two statements I was Alexander The Great in a former life and my soul once inhabited the body of Alexander The Great are isomorphic, and that introducing the word "soul" in the second statement doesn't actually add any insight. The added word simply labels the rationale behind the identity relationship expressed in the first statement, without any more indication of what that rationale might be.
Posted by: Bug at May 1, 2006 12:43 PM