Five years ago I believed that everything in the world could be reduced to physical matter, a philosophical position known as “materialism”. I now reject materialism, an increasingly popular position in philosophy, and wish to share my reasons why.
The Mind-Body problem brings us the biggest questions of materialism, in fact questioning the very foundations. As someone in the field of psychology, this is where my studies have been focused. I want to use the well-known examples of placebos to illustrate my first point. Placebos, by definition, are something that does not cause physiological change, and generally is not intended to cause physiological change. Yet its effects are so great that we actually have to test against placebos. The change in placebos comes from the belief that a placebo will help in the first place, which then can actually cause change in one’s body. As a materialist I assumed that the brain simply induced the change, but this makes no sense. By definition no change should be occurring in the brain when taking a placebo. It is the idea of it that leads to change. Recently studies have been showing that placebos can be used, without deception, to help reduce things like pain and anxiety. If we argue that this happens because the placebo causes physiological change, we are assuming that mind-body problem has been solved by physicalism, only then answering the question. This is fallacious. Until we have this evidence of the brain creating the change, we have to remain at the default position which is dualism (or is it…).
As a materialist I often argued that damage to the brain impacting personality was evidence of the mind arising from the brain. This again assumes reductionism before even answering the question. The radio metaphor – that a damaged radio does not imply a lack of radio waves – clearly shows that the brain damage argument simply shows correlation. This is not to say that the brain and mind are not connected in some way. Taking drugs will change how one’s brain is currently functioning, thus affecting the mind, but the “self” still remains the same. Even in the most surreal of trips, things will be determined by the foundations of the “self”. Psychedelic trips could/should be interpreted using the individual’s mannerisms, thoughts, obsessions, etc and so on.
I don’t want to make this run too long so I would like to make one final point for now, and let others arise through debate/discussion. Any understanding of any possible external world relies on one observing and interacting with it through the internal world. As a materialist I saw the “self” as reduced to simply physiological processes, yet I can know this “self” far more directly than any physiological processes. Hell, I’ve known my “Self” every remembered second of my life, but I’ve never even seen a human brain with my own eyes, or touched one. A rejection of the “self” is logically impossible, because we can never even ponder a single thing without reliance on that “self”. “I exist” is an axiomatic statement for any self-aware individual who says it. “The brain exists” relies on understanding an external world – one that we have no self-free way of proving it exists – through the self.
In short, materialism cannot show how ideas or beliefs can precede physiological changes, it only suggests a correlation between brain and mind, and it has to ignore a logical axiom in order to reduce the “self” to “matter”.
The Mind-Body problem brings us the biggest questions of materialism, in fact questioning the very foundations. As someone in the field of psychology, this is where my studies have been focused. I want to use the well-known examples of placebos to illustrate my first point. Placebos, by definition, are something that does not cause physiological change, and generally is not intended to cause physiological change. Yet its effects are so great that we actually have to test against placebos. The change in placebos comes from the belief that a placebo will help in the first place, which then can actually cause change in one’s body. As a materialist I assumed that the brain simply induced the change, but this makes no sense. By definition no change should be occurring in the brain when taking a placebo. It is the idea of it that leads to change. Recently studies have been showing that placebos can be used, without deception, to help reduce things like pain and anxiety. If we argue that this happens because the placebo causes physiological change, we are assuming that mind-body problem has been solved by physicalism, only then answering the question. This is fallacious. Until we have this evidence of the brain creating the change, we have to remain at the default position which is dualism (or is it…).
As a materialist I often argued that damage to the brain impacting personality was evidence of the mind arising from the brain. This again assumes reductionism before even answering the question. The radio metaphor – that a damaged radio does not imply a lack of radio waves – clearly shows that the brain damage argument simply shows correlation. This is not to say that the brain and mind are not connected in some way. Taking drugs will change how one’s brain is currently functioning, thus affecting the mind, but the “self” still remains the same. Even in the most surreal of trips, things will be determined by the foundations of the “self”. Psychedelic trips could/should be interpreted using the individual’s mannerisms, thoughts, obsessions, etc and so on.
I don’t want to make this run too long so I would like to make one final point for now, and let others arise through debate/discussion. Any understanding of any possible external world relies on one observing and interacting with it through the internal world. As a materialist I saw the “self” as reduced to simply physiological processes, yet I can know this “self” far more directly than any physiological processes. Hell, I’ve known my “Self” every remembered second of my life, but I’ve never even seen a human brain with my own eyes, or touched one. A rejection of the “self” is logically impossible, because we can never even ponder a single thing without reliance on that “self”. “I exist” is an axiomatic statement for any self-aware individual who says it. “The brain exists” relies on understanding an external world – one that we have no self-free way of proving it exists – through the self.
In short, materialism cannot show how ideas or beliefs can precede physiological changes, it only suggests a correlation between brain and mind, and it has to ignore a logical axiom in order to reduce the “self” to “matter”.
