Ignorance: the surprising thing materialism has going for it

There is a strange feeling I get every now and then, which is difficult to explain: sometimes, when I get objective confirmation of some conclusion I had already drawn, I get the feeling that I, in fact, hadn't really drawn the conclusion properly before; at least not as assuredly as when the confirmation comes. At that moment, the conclusion suddenly feels so much more vivid and truer that whatever reasons I had to believe it before seem hazy in comparison. I think to myself, "I thought I knew this, but only now do I really know it!" Can you sense what I mean?

Anyway, this has happened to me a couple of times over the past couple of weeks, as I found myself doing an exposé of eliminativism and illusionism—the ridiculous notions that consciousness doesn't exist. More specifically, I sought to refute the incoherent arguments of neuroscientist Michael Graziano and philosopher Keith Frankish. It was when Graziano attempted to reply to my criticisms that I got the strange feeling I tried to describe above: I thought to myself, "this guy really, really does not know what consciousness is! He just doesn't have the capacity to introspect and self-reflect enough to recognize his own raw awareness."

I am not going to repeat my rejoinder to Graziano here; it's available online. What I want to share now is how I personally experienced what he said. A part of me fully expected the kind of reaction I got from him: conceptual obfuscation, hand-waving, liberal ad hominem to replace the lack of actual argument, complete failure to address the points in contention, etc. I mean, what could one expect from someone who claims his consciousness "doesn't happen," right?

But another part of me was very sincerely baffled, surprised by the living confirmation of what had been for me, up until that point, more like an abstract conclusion from reasoning than direct experience. I mean, it's one thing to know rationally that the emperor must have no clothes; but it's another thing entirely to see the emperor standing naked right in front of you. It's one thing to know the man must be confused; but it's another thing altogether to watch him babble incoherently in front of you and think, "this is actually happening."

Graziano is a Princeton neuroscientist, mind you; a Princeton neuroscientist who made the cover of New Scientist magazine only a few months ago. And he doesn't seem able to meta-cognize his own awareness; doesn't seem to understand what the 'hard problem of consciousness' is all about and why it is unavoidable under materialist premises. Not only that, he is a Princeton neuroscientist who couldn't even weave a conceptually consistent counter-argument in his 'reply' of little more than 800 words. To me this is... well, scary. Our emperors are parading proudly in front of us, but they really have no clothes. Watch carefully, ignore the posturing cacophony around you, and you shall see it in horror.

The whole thing made me think of two old friends of mine, with whom I now have—unfortunately—little contact. Both are hardcore computer scientists: they were my colleagues many years ago. Both are very competent and knowledgeable in what they do. One is also very erudite when it comes to the arts and the classics. In summary, two highly intelligent and educated human beings. Yet, both are self-declared hardcore materialists. Both—just like Graziano—consider any non-materialist metaphysical position mystical woo.

This has always puzzled me. Only over the years did I slowly begin to realize how two otherwise intelligent people can be so biased against much more reasonable metaphysics: the problem is not that they don't understand these other metaphysics; the problem is that they don't understand materialism.

Once I made a passing comment to one of my friends, about the eliminativist idea that the brain deceives itself into thinking it is conscious. My friend looked at me with wide-open eyes, as if he had just had an 'Aha' moment, and said: "Yes! Of course! This must be it!" Here was an idea he deeply wanted to believe. "Don't you see the elegance of this explanation?" he continued. He had finally found a way to circumvent what he couldn't make sense of: the origin of consciousness.

I just stared at my friend in utter disbelief, and then had a sudden insight: "he doesn't know what consciousness is..." I thought. But then, immediately,  a deeper insight: "No, it's more than that: what he doesn't know is what matter is! He thinks it's consciousness!" It became clear to me that, when I said 'consciousness,' my friend associated the word not with his experience of hearing me say it, but instead with some private conceptual abstraction of his own mind. For him, the abstraction was so self-evident that it went completely unexamined; he couldn't even recognize it as an abstraction. And so it was impossible to continue the conversation.

Not that long ago, I was talking to my other friend while having a beer with him in my backyard. The conversation had drifted to metaphysics and I asked him: "Isn't it strange to think that, according to materialism, all this [I pointed to the flowers, bees and trees around us] is created inside our skull?" The reference, of course, was to the qualities of experience—such as colors and smells—which materialism says are created by our brains and don't exist in the world beyond our skull. He paused and looked at me as if I had just said something unholy and totally incomprehensible. Finally, with obvious exasperation, he asked: "What the hell can you possibly mean? All this stuff [pointing to my backyard] is out there; obviously it's not just inside our heads." I tried to explain what I meant, but to no avail.

It was clear that, according to my friend's private, implicit 'materialism,' colors, melodies, flavors, textures, etc., are all really out there; there is nothing else the objective world can be. I suspect that he implicitly believes the brain creates only thoughts and emotions, not the qualities of perception. This, of course, not only deviates from any coherent formulation of materialism, it is a metaphysical contradiction in and of itself (for a more elaborate explanation of this claim, see this post).

And so I finally come to my point: I think the strongest thing materialism has going for it is that most materialists do not actually understand or recognize what materialism entails and implies. Materialism is so blatantly absurd that most materialists—I strongly suspect—replace it with one or another private, implicit misapprehension of it in their own minds, which circumvents some of the absurdities at the price of internal contradictions conveniently overlooked. In other words, it is the naked implausibility of materialism that—ironically—makes it seem credible, for the implausibility forces us to unwittingly misinterpret materialism in whatever way seems to make sense to us.

Compounding the problem, many people—even otherwise intelligent ones—don't appear able to recognize the nature of their own raw awareness through self-reflective introspection. For this reason, they conflate matter with the qualities of experience, just as my friend thought of the colors, sounds and smells of my garden as the thing in itself, instead of mere phenomena produced by the brain. It is precisely this unexamined error that renders materialism plausible to them: they think the material world is the contents of perception (which is actually correct, in my view); never mind the fact that materialism states unequivocally that it isn't.

I can forgive my friends: they are computer scientists, not philosophers or neuroscientists. They are also not picking up a megaphone and shouting to the world that consciousness doesn't exist; their views are their own, they aren't interested in preaching. But when it comes to Graziano and Frankish, things are different. They truly are emperors with no clothes. Their nonsense is toxic, corrosive and pernicious, not only because it is nonsensical, but because—if believed—it could undermine the very foundations of our secular ethics and moral codes. I, for one, will persist in pointing at them and shouting as loud as I can: "Look! They have no clothes!"