A Tear in the Materialist Fabric

A Tear in the Materialist Fabric
The most difficult aspects of the materialist stance I have found lay in what we regard as the self. I have written before of how the notion of a soul, able to transcend the death of the body may, on swift consideration, appear uplifting, reassuring and positive. Further, deeper thought reveals that an eternal soul would render life less valuable; a phase we pass through, like puberty yet, when life's brevity is held up to eternity it becomes minuscule. It is no coincidence that once the spread of atheist philosophy grew, a higher value became attributed to life. This transference of the unit of currency from souls to lives was culturally the key step to greater peace. The concept of what constitutes a self is ever changing and varies from person to person, but, on the whole understandings of neuroscience having failed to locate a soul, has delivered a soul free consensus amongst the scientific community. Still religious people out number rationalists globally but at the fore front of western thinking the super natural is increasingly seen as superstitious. Religion often is passed down from parents. Whilst traditionally we may refer to a Muslim child or a Christian child or indeed an atheist child, below a certain age it would be ridiculous to attribute these beliefs to the child. Without wishing to cause offence, circumcision for religious purposes can be seen as barbaric. To see a new born baby in all its purity and innocence and to find ones first impulse is to mutilate its genitals, with no knowledge of Jewish cultural history, is tricky to construct a supportive argument for. At what age a human becomes sufficiently aware to develope a theory of existence will vary, but it's hard to think any under five could possibly have developed such sophisticated reason. So it is easy to see why many see the imposition of super natural beliefs on a child as a form of abuse. The fear of eternal damnation and hell fire frequently lingers in rational adults who were brought up in a strictly religious environment. An intuitive faith in the transcendence of the soul, life after death, may be hidden in secular company but early learning can be virtually impossible to erase however rational the adult becomes. Despite evidence of seeing a lifeless corpse, never meeting a dead soul, brain damage causing the alteration in the person, Alzheimer's, all evidence science has found so far suggests that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain and central nervous system. Despite this, there has also been no serious idea of how meat could think. How an awareness can arise from matter. Pet and fmri scanners have revealed shifting processes that are neural correlates to thoughts taking place. Many people believe the mystery of consciousness will always remain a mystery. An interesting shift in a handful of scientific thinkers opinion has taken place in recent years. That rather than consciousness being emergent from matter, the supposition of consensus, the opposite may be the case. It can be argued that the only thing we know for certain is that we are conscious. Foundation stones from which we have built our reality beliefs such as time and space are proving to be far more slippery than we once thought. They are not solid as we perceive them to be but flexible, our perception of them is but a functional process of dealing with and negotiating existence. It is through consciousness that we must know anything. So instead of regarding the pillars of physics that support our reality, perhaps we should be looking the other way. That matter, the universe, us, are only existent because of consiousness. Quantum physics has shown, at molecular level, matter can be dependent on a consious viewer. The famous double slit experiment that has been replicated many times shows that a potential doesn't become particle or wave until someone or something looks at it. Accepting this would be our greatest conceptual leap as a species so far. It would be a paradigm shift bigger in significance than the shift from creationism to Darwinian evolution. I can imagine either being right. I have written about both. To progress further I should back one horse or the other. To establish ones belief with any conviction, one must apply tests, thought experiments. Though I have had debates with people who think otherwise, I still don't think we can believe things just because we choose to. I would like to believe in a heaven waiting for me for example. It isn't by choice I believe what I believe. I am certain life would be far easier were God real for me. I am in truth, not jealous but glad for freinds of faith. Such security must be a wonderful reassurance. An opiate beyond all medicine. From my own perspective I often wonder how deep others faith is. If one was certain of a heavenly afterlife it would eliminate fear of death. I am sure most suicide bombers must have faith to be able to carry out their acts. And it is this test I apply to my own beliefs. To add to Ockhams Razor I use the Clifton Suspension Bridge test. To measure whether I believe something I ask, would I trust my life on it. If not, then I can't claim to truly believe. I suspect that should I step from Brunels masterwork I would plunge to my death however I may find wings burst out of my back with which I catch the air and rise from gravities straight line downward in a graceful parabola settling in to a kestrel like hover, surveying the estuary to the Bristol Channel before sailing above the clouds as I made my way home. We may hover in suspended indecision on moral questions but our most fundamental principles of reality rarely trigger, if we are to be honest to ourselves, such agnosis. These pillars go beyond speculation. They are rooted solidly in our subconscious. From these pillars we react. These are our survival pillars that require a solidity for our animal reactivity to work from. When the tiger pounces we have no time to think. Our days are full of movements, decisions, actions that we have no time to consider. These beliefs, I believe, override the deepest religious faith. Despite our reason or desire wishing ourselves to be non sexist, non racist, in split second reaction tests it is common to find we don't believe what we claim to. There are things we would like to be but aren't.
Few these days despute the reality of transsexuality. Even thinkers regarding themselves as devout in their disbelief in dualism may find this disrupts their conviction. Descartes myth of the ghost in the machine, the idea of a mind that pilots the vehicle of the body, has been abandoned by most contemporary philosophers. The idea of a homunculus, a little man inside our heads holds little interest for thinkers today. Yet only through dualism, only through a seperate mind or soul could certain concepts find footing. To be a man born in a woman's body surely requires dualism. It takes considerable psychological evaluation to be accepted for a sex change operation yet, in contemporary modern medicine it is presumably considered fact that one can be of a different gender to ones body. I have not researched whether the more intuitive psychiatric treatment to realign the mind with the reality of the body is practiced greatly. Certainly the media isn't attracted to it if so. There exists an anomaly. And how far does the anomaly stretch? A man believing he is a dolphin born in a mans body, however deep his conviction, would be subjected to psychiatric treatment to realign his mind with his human body. Doctors would not inject him with dolphin hormones, cut his arms to approximate fins, insert tail implants. I have no moral stance on this, no ethical position. But it seems to me we are having our cake and eating it. Maybe here is an example of an early step in the paradigm shift to position consiousness ahead of matter. For much of the twentieth century homosexuality was not simply regarded as mental illness but deemed criminal. Now it is a rare person who doesn't believe a person can be born in the wrong body. How can we sustain the singular, non dualist stance alongside this?



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