Kappajots: Moral Minds and Incomplete Nature

The wife knows me. This year, for Christmas she got me books and nerdy t-shirts. All of which just happen to revolve round the theme of combining contraries or resolving false dichotomies (here's looking at you Batman/Bruce Wayne graphic).

At the top of the reading list right now is Moral Minds by Marc Hauser and Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon. I've just barely cracked the bindings on both, but they seem to be exactly what I've been looking for. Each is written by a scientist who is arguing against the mechanistic assumptions inherent to materialism and (gasp) proposing alternatives. Dr. Hauser is a psychologist (evolutionary psychologist it would seem) so his willingness to acknowledge possible objective universals or give a place of primacy to the nonmaterial is a bit less surprising than Dr. Deacon, but both push their respective disciplines up against the limits of materialism, then press beyond it.

To back up, the past year has been largely transitional in both a personal and intellectual sense. It was my first year of marriage, my first year in a new career, a year in which I intellectually acknowledged my atheism or at least agnosticism for the first time, and a year where, for the first time, I had to deal with the intellectual consequences of living in a materialistic paradigm. Alot of firsts. The last, though, I have to say, has been the least satisfying. Materialism has a distinct advantage over the pentecostal/charismatic background that I was coming from in the sense that it paints an internally consistent picture of the universe (is descriptively sound), but it only took a month or two in the company of some smart folks to reach the limits of that description. Materialism very quickly runs headfirst into several explanatory problems that can't easily be shrugged off.

To expand, materialism assumes as it's primary axiom that everything that exists or could potentially exist from bullets to trees to clouds to xrays to dark matter to is material in nature (ie that its made of detectable particles or energy). It concedes that there are potential material things that are beyond our technical ability to observe (say, strings of string theory, branes, dark matter particles or dark energy bosons) but assumes that this lack of ability is not because of an inherent nonmateriality but because of other qualities of these objects (very very small size, exotic particles, etc). It's been a phenomenal paradigm to operate the natural sciences within for a long time because of it's great predictive power in regards to natural events. Any energy or material relationship that can be quantified has and these quantitative laws both describe and predict the way things are going to behave down to tee.

The issue, though, that materialism quickly runs into is that it can't account for us. We, as conscious beings, and all of our ideation, are a huge blind spot that materialism has been trying to incorporate into itself for years.

For the first time, technology has developed to the point that we can crack open the skull and observe the brain as the mind thinks. Neural interaction, being an observable phenomenon has crashed into the material paradigm of scientific investigation. The implications of a strict materialistic view of the universe have been obvious for some time, but the current intellectual climate and emerging technologies have only served to underline them. Namely, if everything can be reduced to quarks, bosons, and their various interactions, does that mean that we ... not just our bodies, but our minds ... are made up of quarks, bosons, and their various interactions? If so, then how can we have any causal effect on the universe around us. How can we claim ownership over any of our thoughts or actions if, at the base, each neural impulse in our body is the result of a mechanistic exchange of energy between atoms?

How can the words on this page mean anything or refer to anything in a materialistic universe (or, two put it another way, how can ideas, morality, and language exist in a universe where without teleology ... where electrons are spinning and forces are interacting, but that is it)? Can an electron, or even a group of electrons refer to an apple or a shovel or anything really?

More formally, the arguments are framed this way.

In a materialistic universe everything is made up of material substances.
Ideas are not made up of material substances
Therefore, ideas don't exist or materialism is an incomplete theory.

Or,

According to materialism, everything that exists is made up of fundamental particles, energy, and laws. These interactions are the only causal effects.
Information exists as a representative system following these laws as well and composed of these particles.
Therefore, ideas cannot have causal effects in and of themselves, but only due to their constituent parts interacting.

You are composed of these mechanistic pieces following their laws as well
Therefore you can have no causal effects outside of the interactions of your constituent parts.

Therefore, free will doesn't exist or materialism is an incomplete theory.

(A note, I am admittedly poor at formal argumentation.)

To sidestep this problem, materialism has had to either go to great lengths to sidestep them with incomplete rebuttals that usually resolve themselves in mystery (see emergence) or accept materialism's incredibly unintuitive and unsound consequences (free will doesn't exist, ideas don't exist, subjective experience doesn't exist).

To get back to the topic at hand, these books both seem to be addressing this blind spot, but without conceding to dualistic or theistic viewpoint. Like I said, I've just cracked the spines, but I'm excited to see where they go.

I'll report back shortly.