Mystery, beauty, and significance

When we "prove" or "disprove" a philosophy we are merely offering another one, which, like the first, is a fallible compound of experience and hope. As experience widens and hope changes, we find more "truth" in the "falsehoods" we denounced, and perhaps more falsehood in our youth's eternal truths. When we are lifted up on the wings of rebellion we like determinism and mechanism, they are so cynical and devilish; but when death looms up suddenly at the foot of the hill we try to see beyond it into another hope. Philosophy is a function of age.

Will Durant
The Story of Philosophy

I am a rebel by Mr. Durant's definition because I am a mechanist; a materialist; or, to shake off some rust from those two terms, a physicalist. For most of my life, it has seemed prudent to suppose that all the activities of the mind, from conscious thinking to unconscious feeling, at their core lie firmly within the domain of the same physical laws that we use to explain and predict all other interactions of matter and energy.

I read the above quoted passage from The Story of Philosophy in the section about Henri Bergson. I hadn't previously known of Bergson, and the eighteen brief pages I read about him were enough for me to dismiss him along with other non-materialists, those other wishful thinkers who so badly want the human mind to be above and beyond the natural, those who so badly want their bodily composition to be more special than rare bits of dust from fantastic explosions of long-dead stars, those who opine, however eloquently, about how life is too complex and improbable to be subject to the physics textbook.

I reject materialism's opposite, freewill, for two reasons. The first is that freewill, as an explanation for the mind, gains us no practicality; by definition it fails to help us explain the whys and wherefores. It's safer and more rational to assume that there doesn't exist freewill than to assume that there does exist freewill because its unbelief can be falsified, its belief cannot. Meanwhile, by initially rejecting freewill, we may develop a useful theory of mind that aids us in pursuits such as education and the treatment of mental illness.

The second reason why I reject freewill is that the concept reeks of psychological bias. This is no proof for materialism for sure, but it's based on the same type of simplified reasoning which I use to reject unicorns, leprechauns, and magical teapots in space—all things whose existence cannot be disproved. People believe in freewill because they want freewill to exist.¹ They dismiss materialism because they feel that as a philosophy it reduces all of life to an unbearably industrial process lacking mystery, beauty, and significance. I think this is way off. I think that materialism has greater potential for mystery, beauty, and significance and that those who reject it are missing out on a more sublime way of perceiving the universe.

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Physicalism is the idea that our minds are composed only of the same basic types of matter and energy as can be found throughout the rest of the universe and that the workings of our minds may be explained by a consistent physical process. Our mind differs little if any from a machines, however terrific and complex it may be; given our mind's initial state and its environment's initial state, one may simulate the ensuing physical interactions within and without it and so predict our thoughts and feelings with total accuracy. It is this conclusion, that our thoughts and feelings are mere byproducts of ancient natural processes, that, for so many people, rankles the spirit and defies the intuition.

Such defiance of the intuition may be for good reason, though the axioms of materialism are as solid and well supported by evidence as ever. What is not supported though is the idea that materialism allows for perfect prediction of the mind. Predictability is a misleading if not outrightly wrong deduction of materialism and is so for two reasons. Firstly, our most commonly accepted understanding of the physical laws suggests that no initial state can be known with total precision. This is the uncertainty principal, and its relation to freewill has been done over many times, so I won't cover it here.

What I will cover is the second reason, which is that supposing for the moment that we do indeed know the initial states of our mind and our mind's environment, it may still prove impossible to predict our thoughts and feelings because the interactions of matter and energy may themselves, though governed by consistent physical law, prove unpredictable.

The universe is running down. Out of a primordial seed of order, chaos continuously emerges. But what is chaos? Chaos is information. Whereas order is pattern, a whole tending toward homogeneity that may be described without describing all of the parts individually, chaos is the lack of pattern, a whole tending toward heterogeneity that may only be described by describing all of its parts individually.² If the quantity of chaos is continuously increasing then the quantity of information is continuously increasing.

Coworker Shafik thinks of a hypothetical computer that is powerful enough to simulate all of the universe, from its origin till its end. When I think of such a computer, I think of a machine that requires an ever increasing store of memory to hold the simulation's state because, at each step in the simulation, results occur that could not be predicted given the information previously known. Wholly new information is created.

Or, at least, this is one interpretation of our current understanding of the universe. It may turn out that one of the bedrocks of modern science—the idea that the universe is running down—is flawed. Or maybe ever increasing chaos is nothing more than an emergent property of an expanding universe; maybe our concept of information is flawed and what we think of as chaos is yet another predictable outcome of existing circumstances and consistent law. Maybe the workings of the mind have nothing to do with chaos at all. Materialism may be determinism; materialism may not be determinism. In light of these questions and uncertainties, does materialism not hold, as a philosophy, great potential for mystery, beauty, and significance?

Later in The Story of Philosophy, I read a quoted passage of another philosopher previously unknown to me that captures this spirit divinely.

A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion, merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror may not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into everything that we know... If you are in the habit of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have nothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher. His delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous and beautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a museum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life; but they were soon over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable those absolute little passions.

George Santayana
Reason in Common Sense

¹Coworker Shafik tells me that this, what I call "psychological bias", is correctly called argumentum ad consequentiam—appeal to consequences.

²If the idea of chaos as information seems odd to you, imagine this scenario. There exist two libraries. One library is a well ordered library with all books in their proper spots on the shelves. The other library has been ransacked, and its books have been ripped apart with their pages lying scattered throughout the library. Now I ask you: in which library do you require more information to find all the pages to the book you're looking for? In the well ordered library you need only a call number and a few signs directing you to the correct shelf. In the ransacked library you would need...