Q&A: Question About a Materialist World
Question About a Materialist World
Question
We tend to say that in a materialist world there is no free choice. That is, in a materialist world the actions in our brain are deterministic, or at the very least random, and so on. I want to write down something that occurred to me, and it is even more extreme than that. After all, in a materialist world, where there is only matter and forces acting on matter—say, the law of gravity or the electromagnetic force—it does not really matter whether that matter is the matter that makes up the human body or a chair. They are both the same thing. The world never really "cares" about us, and simply acts on our body the way it acts on a chair. But what is the amazing thing? The amazing thing is that although the world never cares about us, the arrangement of the atoms in the world creates consciousness. It creates a thinking human being. That is really astonishing! It is astonishing to think that right now, when I press on the keyboard, in a materialist world, the world does not care about me at all; rather, the atoms in my body are simply operating, and yet they still produce something that has thought. This idea is more extreme than lack of free choice, because it actually says that all our consciousness, emotions, thinking, and so on are a kind of "side effect" of the world. What do you think? Is what I am describing really the materialist world, or have I gotten a bit carried away with this idea?
Thanks. *By the way, I am a dualist, thank God.
Answer
I did not understand what exactly you are trying to claim. The wonder of the emergence of consciousness and mental capacities is indeed a wonder. So what? If you want to argue that it is not plausible that all this was created (emerged) from matter alone, I completely agree, but I did not see any new argument here.
Discussion on Answer
Apparently you did not understand. You tried, but you did not succeed (in explaining).
From a materialist perspective,
we live in a world with matter. Matter interacts with other matter, collides, moves, is attracted to other matter, and so on.
We too are matter. Every living creature is matter, like a chair.
Properties that characterize a living creature, such as metabolism for example, are ultimately just matter behaving according to the natural order. In this context, one could say that the universe is "indifferent" to us. It has no intention or purpose behind these processes—everything proceeds according to the laws of nature, without planning or attention. My movements, such as raising a hand or pressing a key, are the result of material interactions exactly like the movement of leaves in the wind. So if we look at any pattern of action, we will see that it is not essentially different—atoms move and operate within the constraints and laws of nature.
But the amazing thing is that this nature creates, without intention, solely from its laws and from the way it operates, a human being who thinks, and so on. The point is that a human being is no different from a chair! And yet there is still something different in him, "without intention" on the part of nature.
I will not repeat what I wrote above.
I did not understand what you mean.
I want to argue that the formation of our thoughts, the actions we perform, and so on are only a side effect of the material universe, which simply runs on its own (that is from the materialist point of view). That the universe does not "care about us."
In other words, if we simplify everything, my hand is ultimately just atoms, operating exactly like the atoms of a chair, and consciousness and what we call "typing" on a keyboard are ultimately just a pattern of atoms in nature, but materially they are no different from a chair.
(It is a bit hard for me to explain, but the first paragraph is the closest I have managed to formulate it.)