[Author’s note: This is the first of a series addressing Monism and Dualism as they relate to Atheism. The next in the series will address Mental Monism.]
This is the beginning of a series of short articles that will cover the various ideas of MIND, what it is and what it is not thought to be. The idea of mind and its relation to transcendence vs. its attachment to the specifically material neurological glob called the brain has been a mainstay of both philosophy and of science. It also is central to the debate between Theism and Atheism.
Monism has many variants, all based on the idea of unity or oneness. For example, if the highest type of existence is counted, there would be only one, not more than one. So the argument of Monistic Mind reduces to a more basic question, that of, “what is the highest level of existence?”
The entire Monist concept, ultimate unity, appears to be a philosophical non-essential, yet one that philosophers cannot seem to avoid. It even appears that Dualism conflicts with Monism not in the fundamental of unity, but at the level of existence where that unity exists.
What is there that leads away from a multiplicity of superior existences, and restricts the realm of possible existences to just one, unified, all inclusive category?
In fact, Monism works downwards, too, with the underlying constitution of all existence thought to be just one. There is a “God Parable” that asks, if there were not a firm base for existence, how would God have known where to begin? [Note 1]. Without a constitutional monism, an infinite regress conundrum exists.
So does all existence cohere at the top level, or at the bottom? Or both?
Material Monism: Philosophical Materialism / Naturalism
This discussion will be limited to three monisms, partly because there are too many to cover outside of a book or at least a chapter, and partly because these are the three most pertinent to Atheism and are the ones that interest me. The three under consideration here are Material Monism, Mental Monism, and Neutral Monism.
Material Monism insists that unity is acquired at the physical, material level, and that nothing exists beyond that: the material level is the highest level of existence. The evidence for this is negative only, in the sense that no non-material reality can be detected by human sense perception, therefore there is no non-material reality. In other words, the materiality of human senses provides inductive proof of lack of the existence non-materiality. Once the Material Monist “Law” of Existence is established, of course, many hypotheses may be deduced from that law. Here, I am concerned mainly with hypotheses of the human mind.
Material Monism contains the idea that the mind is the brain, and the brain is the mind – they are necessarily one and the same. The brain and mind emerged more or less together through the process of random mutation / non-random selection known as evolution. The mind is seen as a self-assembled massively parallel computer, running at somewhere around 100 Hz, and consuming roughly 100 Watts.
For the Material Monist, all concepts and percepts are physical electrochemical manifestations within the neural glob, and consciousness is nothing more than an accumulation of these physical electrochemical manifestations: an information awareness, in essence.
Consequences of Material Monism:
There are secondary consequences (besides Atheism) for belief in Material Monism:
Human Non-Exceptionalism: Humans are merely a host for DNA, a means for the molecules to replicate themselves within this particular environment.
Human minds generate physically from the ionic transfer within the structure that houses them; minds are replicable in AI programs which will become as conscious as humans, and might present a possibility for transferring human consciousness from a frail body to a robust machine for extended or perpetual life.
Conversely, humans are ethically equivalent to animals or less, due to environmental damage to their host planet.
Natural Non-Exceptionalism:
What appear to be exceptional physical law characteristics are not extraordinary at all.
The consistent order found in the operation of the universe is not exceptional; multiverse theories can account for all possible conditions.
The set of circumstances surrounding the life that appears abundantly on this planet are purely accidental and are in no way exceptional; in fact, no matter where we find ourselves living and existing, it is accidental that the conditions are just right for our existence. That we exist at all is determined by the pre-existence of suitable accidental conditions favorable to our existence; there is no other reason or purpose.
Multiverse theories cover for all intricacies, all organization, and the vastly improbable rarity of conditions for life, much less intelligence. Yet there is no empirical evidence for any universe other than ours, string theory notwithstanding [Note 2].
Reductionism:
Materialist Monism is seen to be reductionist in its very premise, reducing all types of reality to one single, monistic, material existence. This includes all types of experience as well as material entities and abstracta such as logic, mathematics, art, beauty, ethics, and philosophy in general.
Because Materialist Monism is reductionist in its conception, there are subordinate reductions that are required to follow necessarily. Reduction eliminates arguments not by successful refutation, but by attempting to eliminate the argument from the debate.
Anentropy of living beings is reduced by inserting the complexity of self-organization into self-animated, self-sustaining, biomechanical self-replicators; complexity is no more than is needed to compete in the existing environment. There is no essence of life, beyond the existence of these replicators, which manipulate the form of an organic host (plants, animals, humans) as environmentally selected for successful replication. This reduction is even to the point of reducing intentionality and creative, abstract non-physical philosophies to mere ionic disturbance in the neural pathways in the physical brain. Whether these ionic disturbances have, or produce, meaning, is disputable.
Consciousness is denied as an exceptional experience, and is reduced to an agglomeration of ionic sensory inputs combined with ionic memory input of similar sensory inputs for comparison: consciousness is merely a mechanistic awareness of inputs from sensors.
The lack of any credible probability for abiogenesis actually having occurred is either ignored or hand-waved away by reducing it to unproven chemical necessity. Life is no different from non-life, except in the form of its constitutional molecules. Once replicators occurred, they successfully continued replication and evolution; there is nothing exceptional about either the process or the product.
The problem of intentional behavior exhibited by humans, as opposed to determinate behavior of non-living objects, is reduced to environmental determinism (you behave the way your environment instructs you to behave), with a slight amount of intent admitted, to be explained at a later time by Scientism.
Reductionist Scientific Monism: Scientism.
Scientism is a subcategory of Material Monism. It is the concept that, since all existence is material, then science can describe and formulate all of existence; there is no existence exempted from scientific capabilities. While Material Monism is a metaphysic, it attempts to justify itself with the co-option of empiricism as a basis, a practice that fails logic outright.
Since science, as defied by empirical, experimental empiricism, agrees voluntarily that it is not able to measure or experiment on non-material existences, science is unable to address the question of whether there are existences that are outside the material realm.
This position is hotly disputed by some Philosophical Materialists, who insist that if it exists, it is material; therefore, science can be believed to some day find a way to measure it. However, this objection is a faith statement without empirical experimental verification or any possibility of falsification. So empirical science remains outside the realm of ultimate existence determination, and Scientism is false.
Conclusion
Materialist Monism exists as a concept only because it is successful in reducing certain problematic issues to an absurd extent without ever being forced to address them head-on. This in turn produces an easy system of rationalized beliefs, which ignore the logical difficulties of dealing materially with a non-limited set of real existence. Materialist Monism limits complexity by ignoring it, thus producing a simplistic model for belief. This is a belief of convenience, not of rationality, nor of empirical science.
The Material Monist “Law” of Existence referred to above, is based on both the inductive fallacy and the proof of a negative fallacy, as well as the inability to provide falsification, making it a metaphysical belief statement and not an empirical finding. This means that any hypothesis that is deduced from such a “law” is doomed from the start.
A more complete analysis will follow the investigation of the types of Monism, coming here soon…
Note 1: Stanford Plato; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/
Note 2: String theorists currently hope to find “escaped gravity” that would indicate a contact of some sort with another universe; the idea is for a proof of concept that the universal “branes” collided, causing our universe to explode into existence. But is that what it actually would prove? Skepticism of such double and triple layers of unknowables is warranted.
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