Reality is anchored by a principle known as The Primacy of Existence; “Something that has objective existence in Reality exists independent of any observation.” This is quite obviously a materialistic notion and I also believe this idea is the key to most objections to Materialism. The wish that things having subjective existence could somehow be or become things having objective existence is one of the mantras of the “A-Materialist.”J'C: "The only problem I have with materialism and the Primacy of Existence is, as I told Blü on a different thread, that it is boring. I have no interest at all in the subjective having an objective existence. I am quite happy with it being subjective. Art, music, fiction, myths, gods, and rituals all mean exactly nothing to the materialist since they admittedly exist only in the minds of those that can understand them. Each understanding of the subjective entity is subtly or grossly different, but people can agree on some of the important features of the entity. God may be supernatural, natural, imaginary, or a delusion in rare cases, but it is at the very least something that someone, lets call them a believer, finds to be important in their lives. One can argue all night that God has no material existence. (Not with me. I stipulate it in the first few seconds and everybody gets pissed. The materialists go off and rub the belly of the material Buddha, and the Buddhists go off in another corner to discuss the issue of non-material suffering. I go read a novel.) I find it much more interesting to find out why an intelligent, rational person can and does find God to be important in their lives."
exploringinside
A tree falls in the forest. Who cares whether or not the compression waves in the atmosphere qualify as noise or not. It just doesn't matter. I think this was ultimately my problem with Chemistry which was my boyhood choice of a career that lasted through my Sophomore year in college. I just couldn't get worked up about how a rocket went up. It was much more fun to deal with the absolutely subjective and political issues of getting someone to buy it so it could go up. If a car salesman thinks hesh is selling a material object, hesh had better find a job in a factory building cars. What heah is selling is prestige, practicality, social status, or political correctness. They all work to move the iron. Some of the worst salespeople are materialists, they try to sell the technology, the intercooler, and the V4. They might as well try to sell the frame. It does not work.
15 comments:
Thank you JC for providing more evidence that indicates my belief is true. The human fascination with the imaginary, the fantasy, the dream can and often does overwhelm the cold, hard, narrow focus of the faculty of Reason, doing its job, analyzing and directing reactions to the perceptions of the real world.
"Emotion puts its hands on its hips, tapping one foot, face scowling and says, "Reason! You never let me have any fun!!" Reason, staring back with an equally large scowl says, "Emotion!! You get exactly as much latitude as I think you deserve at any given time!! When nothing important is "on the line," I turn you loose to have all the fun you want. But when I decide you must curb your enthusiasm and not interrupt me, you will Stifle!!!"
"I find it much more interesting to find out why an intelligent, rational person can and does find God to be important in their lives" - and this sentiment is actually an example of a very rational point-of-view. Whether or not you wish Reality would conform to your whims, the fact remains that much of humanity has entertained such aspiations and acted as if their whims alone could remold Reality into their desired configuration.
You are quite welcome. But please do not confuse reason with acceptance of the Primacy of Existence. One may reason quite rationally on the subjective. One can discuss art rationally without bothering with the brush strokes or the colors used. One can discuss the emotional content of the art without once mentioning anything material about it. One can even discuss rationally whether the emotion generated by the art is real. Certainly the reality will be subtly or grossly different among people, but generally the basics can be agreed on. Starry Night may be beautiful, or it may be frightening, or ugly, but most can agree that Van Gogh was trying to grasp the entire universe on a small canvass. You materialists can talk brush strokes and pigments all you want to, but you will never understand the universe.
And if you think a Materialist is dry, dull and boring as a rule, then that is a bias I would not expect from you. The dreamer stares at a photograph of Starry Night in a magazine and let's their mind wander the Cosmos; the Materialist finances, builds and sustains the museum that displays Starry Night for all who wish to view it in person and they sit on a bench in the presence of that wonderful painting and let's their mind wander the Cosmos.
As for your equating whims with wishes to affect the Primacy of (material) Existence. There certainly are a subset of those who believe that their subjective reality can affect the material world, but I would hope that this is a primitive manifestation of subjective reality. Some of us are OK with the fact that subjective reality is a completely different from objective reality and can move easily between the two realities. If I get sick I have my doctor diagnose the problem in objective reality and prescribe an objective treatment for the disease. But as my daughter-in-law the doctor says "Believe in your doctor and everything she tells you to do will work." If objective reality says placebo, the placebo will work.
You keep confusing emotion, dreaming and fantasy with subjective reality. The materialist can be as much of a fantasist as any religious nut. By the way I don't find materialists to be dry, dull and boring. Just materialism. The genius of Van Gogh is not in the paint, it is in the subjective truth of the art which works just as well in a magazine or on the internet as in the museum.
I am sorry....Materialism may be very very very boring but that does not make it false, nor does it lift more "attractive" idealisms above it. Stop equating Materialism with over-reductionism and I'll stop equating excessive subjectivity with emotionalism.
I never said materialism was false. I use it all the time. One can't deal with most of the things in the world without it. In fact the most boring thing about materialism is not only is it true but in a few steps you can prove it.
Conceptual reality is neither above or below material reality, it is just more interesting.
Exploringinside wrote:
"I find it much more interesting to find out why an intelligent, rational person can and does find God to be important in their lives" - and this sentiment is actually an example of a very rational point-of-view. Whether or not you wish Reality would conform to your whims, the fact remains that much of humanity has entertained such aspiations and acted as if their whims alone could remold Reality into their desired configuration.
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An intelligent person can come to experience that the human need for "meaning" is not found in secular life and analysis. It requires a higher form of reason and emotion.
Simone Weil was a highly intelligent atheist that gradually came to just this conclusion:
"To believe in God is not a decision we can make. All we can do is decide not to give our love to false gods. In the first place, we can decide not to believe that the future contains for us an all-sufficient good. The future is made of the same stuff as the present....
"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©
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If one has this inner "need" they can experience the insufficiency of the associative mind to answer what they are called to from the depths of their being. If not, then they are content with secularism. This "need" doesn't determine if one is a rational person or not since what we call rational people can either have or not have this need.
Welcome to the Blue Roads, Nick A! Thank you for your thoughtful commentary:
An intelligent person can come to experience that the human need for "meaning" is not found in secular life and analysis. It requires a higher form of reason and emotion.
J'C: Stipulated. For many and perhaps if history guides us most people can not find meaning in secularism and analysis. Materialists and skeptics have a particularly hard time since they refuse to admit as evidence of meaning the spiritual component of their own and others thinking. By spiritual I mean that thought component that is validated only by the "Aha - That feels true" You note I did not say "is" true, as there is no internal validation procedure, and I reject faith validation.
But this internal validation procedure does not necessarily lead to God. Some of us do not yearn for an ultimate good, we are quite content to find meaning in the good we find in our meaningful society, that is, those people living and dead who can trigger that "Aha - that feels true" spiritual response, and find purpose in expanding that meaningful society and contributing our part to the Aha moments of others in that society with the expectation that eventually we will be one of the dead members still contributing.
It is not all good and beautiful, but we can seek out the good and beautiful and do what we can to minimize the effects of the bad. Incidentally I do not include death, of myself or others as a bad thing. It just means our active contributions are over. But when when I need to get something off my chest, I replay in my mind my late sister's angry version of the late Rachmaninoff's C# minor Prelude and whatever it was is no longer important.
Hi J
I'm leaving shortly for a Christmas visit but before doing so I'd like to reply. You said:
J'C: Stipulated. For many and perhaps if history guides us most people can not find meaning in secularism and analysis. Materialists and skeptics have a particularly hard time since they refuse to admit as evidence of meaning the spiritual component of their own and others thinking. By spiritual I mean that thought component that is validated only by the "Aha - That feels true" You note I did not say "is" true, as there is no internal validation procedure, and I reject faith validation.
I've had a lot of difficulty conversing with atheists. For some reason emotional hostility would make it impossible.
I've been involved with an experiment in conversing with people on a one to one basis by interviewing them. Recently I've been interviewing Thuse from the Richard Dawkins Forum.
http://onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/
Just click on "Interviews and one one one discussions" and look for "Atheism with Thuse."
It has been helpful for me to experience our differences some of which are imaginary when we discuss them. One big problem is being open to this remark by Simone Weil who was once a Marxist and atheist and admired by Leon Trotsky. She became a Christian mystic. She wrote:
Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.
- Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 417
This is far easier for me to accept since I've experienced a bit of this transition. Yet I am interested how you and other atheists would react to her observation.
Is it difficult for an atheist to be open to the possibility that something has not opened in them as of yet to experience the real meaning of the essence of religion? Does it seem too elitist to consider? Yet IMO the atheist is quite right to react to the imagination of those who call themselves religious. Atheism then is a necessary purification.
I'd be interested in your reaction and those of others.
Stay well
Nick
Nick A. Thanks this is worthy of a new topic.
Hi Nick,
J’Carlin had not mentioned that “fresh meat” would be available, yet here you are. I’m an old retired person with weak teeth; I hope you’re not too tough to chew.
EI
Simone Weil was a highly intelligent atheist that gradually came to just this conclusion: "To believe in God is not a decision we can make…”
In the summary of her biography, she had two “epiphanies” a year apart; if that is “gradually coming to God,” so be it.
Simone’s Encounter With Mysticism [Wikipedia]
While in Assisi in the spring of 1937, she experienced a religious ecstasy in the same church in which Saint Francis of Assisi had prayed, which led her to pray for the first time in her life. She had another, more powerful, revelation a year later and, from 1938 on, her writings became more mystical and spiritual, while retaining their focus on social and political issues. She was attracted to Roman Catholicism, but declined to be baptized; she explained this refusal in letters published in Waiting for God. During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille, receiving spiritual direction from a Dominican friar. Around this time she met the French Catholic author Gustave Thibon, who later edited some of her work.
Weil did not limit her curiosity to Christianity. She was keenly interested in other religious traditions — especially the Greek and Egyptian mysteries, Hinduism (especially the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita), and Mahayana Buddhism. She believed that all these and others were valid paths to God. She was, nevertheless, opposed to religious syncretism, claiming that it effaced the particularity of the individual traditions:
“Each religion is alone true, that is to say, that at the moment we are thinking of it we must bring as much attention to bear on it as if there were nothing else...A "synthesis" of religion implies a lower quality of attention.”
EI
Nick: An intelligent person can come to experience that the human need for "meaning" is not found in secular life and analysis. It requires a higher form of reason and emotion.
EI: I believe that each human is a unity of all their parts, mental and physical; every cell, every organ, every system; everything in a human is radically interdependent.
I believe a human’s Spirit to be a naturally occurring mental faculty. Our Spirit is a multi-functioning mental faculty:
1. The Spirit is a bridge, a mediator, to and from the “I” that is utilized by all the other faculties [Example: While Reason is performing a purely technical translation and analysis of a great Concerto, the elation and joy, welling up from the Emotions may “spill over” and cause the heart to race a little, the blood pressure to shoot up, the muscles to tense a little, etc. Reason and the Body Regulation Center complain to the “I”; Spirit mediates – “Hey “I”! Don’t overreact!! This is the feeling of Awe and Wonder; it’s good to feel this every so often, so let it go on a little while longer before you send orders to the Body Regulation Center to, “Shut it down!!””]
[Note: Dennett named the “I”The Narrative Center of Gravity. The more I read about that concept, the more I like it.]
2. Spirit keeps a person on-track toward their goals, especially when life gets tough, and the mind gets tired or confused, while the body feels unusually weak and sore. [Guts]
3. Spirit advocates for acts of benevolence, even when Reason thinks such an effort might “over-tax the systems” (or over-spend the limited budget.)
4. Spirit supports decisions, helping Reason, Conscience and Emotion negotiate an appropriate response.
5. Spirit clings to dreams and keeps them in the top level of Awareness whenever it thinks such a thing should be done.
6. Spirit always advocates for the usually silent “Intuition;” Spirit helps keep Intuition from being forgotten by the other faculties
I could go on and on....Spirit, as much as any other mental faculty, is one of the major factors of us being the Humans we are. However, Spirit is not connected to some mythical, mystical, non-material plane of existence and it is not the “Holy Spirit of God.” It is one of my missions in life to “retrieve the Human Spirit” from the Witch Doctors, ancient and modern, that have claimed the Human Spirit to be “God’s gift.” Horsefeathers!!
EI
You say "God has no material existence"
But what is material existence? Any physicalist who says he knows the answer to this question is either genuinely stupid or kidding you!
See New Empricism
But what is material existence?
Thoughts
For the purpose of this post, I am using the conventional definition:
Reality consists of that which can be sensed, especially measured, the results of which sensing and measuring will be generally consistent among materialists. Specifically excluded from this definition is fiction, imagination, illusions, and social entities AKA God no matter how well defined.
Perception issues that is are we really seeing what we are seeing? are largely ignored by materialists. the assumption being that perception issues and perceptual illusions can be corrected for.
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