Let’s talk about worldviews and the sensibilities appropriate to them. A worldview is some thesis about the nature of reality: materialism, solipsism, monotheism, pantheism, transhumanism, etc. A sensibility is an emotion or a complex of emotions about life.
Your thesis is: rationalist materialism is the correct worldview; its critics say negative things about its implications for sensibility; and some of us are accepting those implications, but incorrectly. Instead we can (should?) feel this other way about reality.
My response to all this is mostly at the level of worldview. I don’t have your confidence that I have the basics of reality sorted out. I have confidence that I have had a certain sequence of experiences. I expect the world and the people in it to go on behaving, and responding to me, in a known range of ways, but I do not discount the possibility of fundamental changes or novelties in the future. I can picture a world that is matter in motion, and map it onto certain aspects of experience and the presumed history of the world, but I’m also aware of many difficulties, and also of the rather hypothetical nature of this mapping from the perspective of my individual knowledge. I could be dreaming; these consistencies might show themselves to be superficial or nonsensical if I awoke to a higher stage of lucidity. Even without invoking the skeptical option, I would actually expect an account of the world which fully encompassed what I am, and embedded it into a causal metaphysics, to have a character rather different, and rather richer, than the physics we actually have. I’m also aware that there are limits to my own understanding of basic concepts like existence, cause, time and so forth, and that further progress here might not only change the way I feel about reality, but might reveal vast new tracts of existence I had not hitherto suspected. On a personal level, the possible future transmutations of my own being remain unknown, though the experience of others suggests that it ends in the grave.
So much for criticism at the level of worldview. At the level of sensibility… it seems to me that Dawkins grasps the implications of his worldview better than Watts (that is, if one reads Watts as an expression of the same facts under a different sensibility). There is agony as well as wonder in the materialist universe. Most of it consists of empty cosmic tedium and lifeless realms occasionally swept by vast violences (but of course, this is already a strong supposition about the nature of the rest of the universe, namely that it’s a big desert), but life in our little bubble of air and water can surely be viewed as vicious and terrible without much difficulty. That we come from the world does not mean we will inevitably manage to make our peace with it.
Mostly you talk about various forms of nihilism and self-alienation as emotional errors. I think that both the nihilism and the “joy in the merely real” come from a sort of subjective imagining and have very little connection to knowledge. The people for whom materialism threatens nihilism at first imagine themselves to be living in one sort of world; then, they imagine another sort of world, and they have those responses. Meanwhile, the self-identified materialists have been having their experiences while already imagining themselves to be living in a materialist world, so they don’t see a problem.
Now in general I am unimpressed (to say the least) with the specific materialistic accounts of subjectivity that materialists have to offer. So I think that the reflections of a typical materialist on how their feelings are really molecules, or whatever, are really groundless daydreams not much removed from a medieval astronomer thrilling to the thought of the celestial spheres. It’s just you imagining how it works, and you’re probably very wrong about the details.
However, I don’t think these details actually play much role in the everyday well-being of materialists anyway. Insofar as they are mentally healthy, it is because things are functioning well at the level of subjectivity, psychological self-knowledge, and so forth. Belief that everything is made of atoms isn’t playing a role here. So the real question is, what’s going on in the non-materialist or the reluctant materialist, for their mental health to be disturbed by the adoption of such a belief? That is an interesting topic of psychology that might be explored. I think you get a few aspects of it right, but that it is far more subtle and diverse than you allow for. There may be psychological makeups where the nihilist response really is the appropriate emotional reaction to the possibility or the subjective certainty of materialism.
But for me the bottom line is this: discussing rationalist materialism as a total worldview simply reminds me of just how tentative, incomplete, and even problematic such a worldview is, and it impels me to make further efforts towards actually knowing the truth, rather than just lingering in the aesthetics made available by acceptance of one particular possibility as reality.
My response to all this is mostly at the level of worldview. I don’t have your confidence that I have the basics of reality sorted out… I could be dreaming; these consistencies might show themselves to be superficial or nonsensical if I awoke to a higher stage of lucidity… I’m also aware that there are limits to my own understanding of basic concepts like existence, cause, time and so forth, and that further progress here might not only change the way I feel about reality, but might reveal vast new tracts of existence I had not hitherto suspected.
I think I see what you’re saying. However, I feel that hoping for ultimate realities undreamt-of hitherto is giving too much weight to one’s own wishes for how the universe ought to be. There is no reason I can think of why the grand nature of reality has to be “richer” than physics (whatever that means). This reality, whether it inspires us or not, is where we find ourselves.
Now in general I am unimpressed (to say the least) with the specific materialistic accounts of subjectivity that materialists have to offer. So I think that the reflections of a typical materialist on how their feelings are really molecules, or whatever, are really groundless daydreams not much removed from a medieval astronomer thrilling to the thought of the celestial spheres. It’s just you imagining how it works, and you’re probably very wrong about the details.
Well now, I hope you were being facetious when you implied materialists believe that feelings are molecules. You are allowed to be unimpressed by materialist accounts of subjectivity, of course. However, you should seriously consider what kind of account would impress you. An account of subjectivity or consciousness or whatever is kind of like an explanation of a magic trick. It often leaves you with a feeling of “that can’t be the real thing!”
I think that both the nihilism and the “joy in the merely real” come from a sort of subjective imagining and have very little connection to knowledge. The people for whom materialism threatens nihilism at first imagine themselves to be living in one sort of world; then, they imagine another sort of world, and they have those responses. Meanwhile, the self-identified materialists have been having their experiences while already imagining themselves to be living in a materialist world, so they don’t see a problem.
Doesn’t this support simplicio’s thesis? If there’s little connection to knowledge—which I take to mean that neither emotional response follows logically from the knowledge—then epistemic rationality is consistent with joy. And where epistemic rationality is not at stake, instrumental rationality favors a joyful response, if it is possible.
Let’s talk about worldviews and the sensibilities appropriate to them. A worldview is some thesis about the nature of reality: materialism, solipsism, monotheism, pantheism, transhumanism, etc. A sensibility is an emotion or a complex of emotions about life.
Your thesis is: rationalist materialism is the correct worldview; its critics say negative things about its implications for sensibility; and some of us are accepting those implications, but incorrectly. Instead we can (should?) feel this other way about reality.
My response to all this is mostly at the level of worldview. I don’t have your confidence that I have the basics of reality sorted out. I have confidence that I have had a certain sequence of experiences. I expect the world and the people in it to go on behaving, and responding to me, in a known range of ways, but I do not discount the possibility of fundamental changes or novelties in the future. I can picture a world that is matter in motion, and map it onto certain aspects of experience and the presumed history of the world, but I’m also aware of many difficulties, and also of the rather hypothetical nature of this mapping from the perspective of my individual knowledge. I could be dreaming; these consistencies might show themselves to be superficial or nonsensical if I awoke to a higher stage of lucidity. Even without invoking the skeptical option, I would actually expect an account of the world which fully encompassed what I am, and embedded it into a causal metaphysics, to have a character rather different, and rather richer, than the physics we actually have. I’m also aware that there are limits to my own understanding of basic concepts like existence, cause, time and so forth, and that further progress here might not only change the way I feel about reality, but might reveal vast new tracts of existence I had not hitherto suspected. On a personal level, the possible future transmutations of my own being remain unknown, though the experience of others suggests that it ends in the grave.
So much for criticism at the level of worldview. At the level of sensibility… it seems to me that Dawkins grasps the implications of his worldview better than Watts (that is, if one reads Watts as an expression of the same facts under a different sensibility). There is agony as well as wonder in the materialist universe. Most of it consists of empty cosmic tedium and lifeless realms occasionally swept by vast violences (but of course, this is already a strong supposition about the nature of the rest of the universe, namely that it’s a big desert), but life in our little bubble of air and water can surely be viewed as vicious and terrible without much difficulty. That we come from the world does not mean we will inevitably manage to make our peace with it.
Mostly you talk about various forms of nihilism and self-alienation as emotional errors. I think that both the nihilism and the “joy in the merely real” come from a sort of subjective imagining and have very little connection to knowledge. The people for whom materialism threatens nihilism at first imagine themselves to be living in one sort of world; then, they imagine another sort of world, and they have those responses. Meanwhile, the self-identified materialists have been having their experiences while already imagining themselves to be living in a materialist world, so they don’t see a problem.
Now in general I am unimpressed (to say the least) with the specific materialistic accounts of subjectivity that materialists have to offer. So I think that the reflections of a typical materialist on how their feelings are really molecules, or whatever, are really groundless daydreams not much removed from a medieval astronomer thrilling to the thought of the celestial spheres. It’s just you imagining how it works, and you’re probably very wrong about the details.
However, I don’t think these details actually play much role in the everyday well-being of materialists anyway. Insofar as they are mentally healthy, it is because things are functioning well at the level of subjectivity, psychological self-knowledge, and so forth. Belief that everything is made of atoms isn’t playing a role here. So the real question is, what’s going on in the non-materialist or the reluctant materialist, for their mental health to be disturbed by the adoption of such a belief? That is an interesting topic of psychology that might be explored. I think you get a few aspects of it right, but that it is far more subtle and diverse than you allow for. There may be psychological makeups where the nihilist response really is the appropriate emotional reaction to the possibility or the subjective certainty of materialism.
But for me the bottom line is this: discussing rationalist materialism as a total worldview simply reminds me of just how tentative, incomplete, and even problematic such a worldview is, and it impels me to make further efforts towards actually knowing the truth, rather than just lingering in the aesthetics made available by acceptance of one particular possibility as reality.
I think I see what you’re saying. However, I feel that hoping for ultimate realities undreamt-of hitherto is giving too much weight to one’s own wishes for how the universe ought to be. There is no reason I can think of why the grand nature of reality has to be “richer” than physics (whatever that means). This reality, whether it inspires us or not, is where we find ourselves.
Well now, I hope you were being facetious when you implied materialists believe that feelings are molecules. You are allowed to be unimpressed by materialist accounts of subjectivity, of course. However, you should seriously consider what kind of account would impress you. An account of subjectivity or consciousness or whatever is kind of like an explanation of a magic trick. It often leaves you with a feeling of “that can’t be the real thing!”
Doesn’t this support simplicio’s thesis? If there’s little connection to knowledge—which I take to mean that neither emotional response follows logically from the knowledge—then epistemic rationality is consistent with joy. And where epistemic rationality is not at stake, instrumental rationality favors a joyful response, if it is possible.