Ask HN: Are You a Materialist?

[sbaiddn]

Title says it all. Do you believe in philosophical materialism?

If so, do you believe we're in a Turing machine of some sort? Are you a finitist?

If you are not a materialist, what metaphysical thing do you believe in? A Being Creator? Spirits? Do you believe in ghosts and fairies?

[preordained]

No. I'm not sure I understand either the appeal or the intuition behind that position. The logic, I can grasp, once you've "gone in" and accepted a premise that we're in some multiverse where the uninhibited numbers make a simulation like ours, so to speak, inevitable. Why that's the type of premise that speaks to one, is beyond me. Okay, maybe I was wrong just now, I think I do understand. It's about not being beholden to anything. Not a creator, or a design. You might be meaningless if you're a random happenstance, but there is no blueprint or conductor guiding your destiny. There is an impulse to associate meaning with tyranny, because if you are meant for anything, it has been without your say.

[ofalkaed]

Materialism allows for a creator and spirits and ghosts and fairies, it just says that if they exist they are not supernatural, just natural.

[AnimalMuppet]

The rest of what you say is true, but not a creator. If the creator created the material universe, then the creator is not material. If the material universe was there first, then the creator isn't really a creator, just some kind of organizer.

[p1esk]

If we create a VR world with intelligent beings then we are the creator for the beings, and both we and the beings are material. Right?

[cpersona]

We would not be material or natural to the inhabitants of that VR world. They couldn’t prove our existence.

[p1esk]

The relationship between the VR beings and the creator (us), would fall into one of the three scenarios:

1. They don't know about anything outside of their VR world. They could have made up fairy tales or religions about what could have possibly created their world. They would be completely unaware about our existence. This could be our case - we ourselves don't know if we're living in a simulation.

2. They have been able to infer enough from the peculiarities of their reality to suspect they are living in a simulation, and that there are beings which have created the simulation.

3. They know they live in a simulated world, built by us. We made contact with them and told them all about our world and how we made their world.

You can argue that, in the first scenario, something that "does not exist" is not "material" or "natural". But this would be strictly their ignorance or misconceptions. It does not change the reality that both we, and them, are material beings. In fact, if you insist on this argument, you might already be assuming that our world is not entirely material, because it would follow that our subjective opinions define reality.

Scenarios 2 and 3 clearly allow the possibility of them perceiving us as equally material beings.

[ofalkaed]

So where did the creator come from? Why does the creator of our universe have to be bound by our universe? Being creator suggests there is more which materialism does not rule out, just says that the more is not supernatural and that we come from the same stuff as it, that we were created in its image as the Christians would say.

[Dracophoenix]

> Being creator suggests there is more which materialism does not rule out, just says that the more is not supernatural and that we come from the same stuff as it

This was Spinoza's position on creation.

[Dracophoenix]

> If the creator created the material universe, then the creator is not material.

If the universe was created by a lone demiurge, then creator and the created would both be material.

[markus_zhang]

I'm torn between a materialist and Lev Shestov. It's a lot of struggle.

[askafriend]

All this Gucci on, call me what you want.

The only spirit I believe in is Dom P.

[adyashakti]

nope; consciousness is Absolute this was determined thousands of years ago no amount of atheistic fantasies will change it

[AnimalMuppet]

No.

If you start from a materialist position (including from the modern scientific position), then you are inevitably faced with some kind of reductionism. If all that exists is matter and the laws of physics, then all you can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics - nothing more. You're just a collection of atoms that obey the laws of atomic physics, assembled into molecules that obey the laws of biochemistry, assembled into neurons that obey the laws of neurology.

There is no room for choice or free will in that view. But equally, there is no room for love. (Especially love in the highest sense, of choosing to do what's best for the other, because you can't choose anything. But even in the sense of attraction, that's just neurons and biochemicals doing their thing.) There is no room for beauty as a real thing - it's just what hits our neurons a particular way. There is no room for truth as truth. (There are things that we find convincing, in our hardware that evolved to get a good enough answer fast enough, rather than to find actual truth or to do pure logic correctly.)

There is not even room for personality. All you can be is the impersonal plus complexity - that's all "personality" can be. There is nothing more for "personality" to be but the artifact of complexity.

But that doesn't match our experience. We all experience love, even though the logic of our position says that love doesn't exist. We all make choices, even though logic says we don't actually choose. We all experience beauty and we all long for truth. And we all long for personal contact - to touch each other as persons, not just as complicated machines. We can try to live within the logic of the materialist position, but it doesn't actually fit who we are as human beings.

It's kind of like when you put a t-shirt on backwards. It covers all the places that need to be covered, but it doesn't fit right. And no matter how much you try to wiggle it around and adjust it, it just doesn't fit.

I suggest that the materialist position doesn't fit who we are as human beings, and that the lack of fit is telling us something. Either we are the products of random chance, thrown up in and by an impersonal universe, with aspirations of personality that can never be fulfilled, or we are not actually what our philosophy says we are. And I think it's the latter.

So I invite you to consider the alternative to the materialist position. If the beginning of it all was someone, rather than something impersonal, then it is possible that we could be truly personal, rather than just the impersonal plus complexity. Then we also could be able to make real choices, and to really love, and to know real truth and beauty. We could be what humans have always thought we were. But you can never have that as long as you hold to the purely materialist view.

For this to work, it really had to begin with someone. It can't be like some polytheistic creation myths, where something impersonal gave origin to the first gods, because then by the same logic the first gods can't really be personal. Their personality can only be an artifact. So you really are pushed to someone who was there before the physical universe.

For a much longer and better treatment of this, see the first chapter of He Is There And He Is Not Silent, by Francis Schaeffer.

[quickthrower2]

This argument requires a very human centric view of the universe. But it doesn’t address: at what point of complexity from microbe to ant to rat to dog to chimp/dolphin to human do we start getting the higher qualities. Is it only humans who can do love, personality and so on?

Also you can have all those qualities such as love in a materialist view as emergent properties.

And who says we have free will? Or at at least will that is decoupled somehow from the matter that we are made of.

[wruza]

I’m completely okay with all the things you listed and chaotically deterministic (so to say) physics of our bodies, brains included.

But that doesn't match our experience

Which to me is just a part of inner workings. Confusion, delusion, perception shifts, all looped back to ourselves. Brain does many hard jobs to produce what we call subjective reality. You don’t even need love (not sure which role it ought to play here) to see that it’s all an inner mirage.

[ddgflorida]

Agreed, thanks for the thoughtful answer.

[throwiepshkins]

multidimensional materialism with a Creator and associated "spirit" entities residing in other dimensions.