Q&A: Materialism
Materialism
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Lately I read an article about the explanations that exist for the feeling of love. I saw in them purely materialist explanations, with no metaphysical intervention at all. Is love really something that feels real and metaphysical, while apparently this only seems to be an illusion according to the results of experiments and brain scans? Where, then, does the spirit enter the picture? If, after all, a physical explanation is found for everything (except consciousness, of course, which in my opinion is something entirely spiritual, and I find it very hard to understand how materialists explain that), then at the end of the day—where can I find the soul?
Answer
There are explanations for everything on earth. But materialist explanations do not offer an explanation for love; they describe the way it occurs. Just as we walk with our legs, think with our brain, and love with the amygdala. The question of who makes the decision is a different question.
See at length in my book The Science of Freedom.
You are asking a question about consciousness. And the fact that you are asking specifically about love raises the concern that the mind-body problem is unfamiliar to you. There is no difference at all between the experience of love and the experience of hearing, seeing, thinking, understanding, or any other experience that you have. They all take place in your consciousness.
Already in the distant past, some wise Greeks understood that the soul or mind (as opposed to the body) is connected to the motion of atoms—something that, in the smartphone age, an average educated person does not understand. In any case, even at this stage of the complexity of the soul or mind, the explanations for it do not deserve to be called materialist. These are matters related to information theory, not chemistry. And there is no principled difference between what a computer can do and what a brain can do.
But here you are asking about consciousness, which is aware of certain parts of the soul or mind (that is how it seems). For that there is no explanation, and no direction toward an explanation.