Does Matter Exist?

A Dialogue On Materialism, Panpsychism, and Idealism With Some Help From Spinoza and Tamil Advaita

Well, I am a naturalist, a scientific materialist.

So you say, but I doubt it.

You doubt it! What do you mean?

Well, I’ve met a lot of people who believe themselves to be materialists, but few of them actually are.

How so?

Ok. So, to begin with, what is matter?

The phyical stuff things are made of. You know, atoms.

But don’t you see that matter can’t be made of atoms?

What do you mean?

Well, its as though I asked you what matter is and you said, you know, “tables, chairs, lampshades…” That’s the stuff that’s made of matter, right? Not what makes up matter?

Right.

So atoms— like, protons, electrons, neutrons, they can’t make up matter. They must be made up of matter. Right?

Right, that’s true.

So then— what is matter?

Well, its the substance that makes up everything— subatomic particles…

Quarks?

Yes, quarks. Superstrings. Whatever. Those are the fundamentals.

Same issue, though, don’t you see?

Uh-huh. I see your point. So its all just energy, than?

Well, what is energy?

The energy…..the force, I guess, which makes things move, gives them shape.

Ok, so it’s a force. What is a force?

Hah. Ok, I think I need a drink.

No, seriously, a force is something that changes things, right? We recognize a force because it has effects, changes things. Could we say that a force is itself change? That would make it just like energy. According to physics, energy is really just activity. It’s really just change. Like when something heats up, that just means that the particles it is made of begin moving faster. Everything that happens, on all scales of reality, are really just things moving around or changing their speed, slower or faster.

Ok.

So basically, we still don’t know what matter is. Everything is change, movement— which is all we really mean by “energy.” But we don’t know what is changing, what is moving, or what is moving it. Is movement moving movement? Maybe. But what it moving? Something must be moving, something must make up the stuff that is moving.

Yes, that something is “matter.” That’s the substance that everything is made of.

Ah, “substance”! Now, as a lover of Spinoza, you’re talking my language. Let’s not go down that rabbit hole yet though. Ok, so is this substance alive?

No. It makes up things which are alive…. but its not itself alive. Maybe to become alive it needs to move around in a different way, or change its speed!

Uh-huh. So if something is moving slowly, its dead, but move it faster and it becomes alive? That’s not how it works. You can move the molecules in a dead body faster and it doesn’t come to life. Actually, that’s called cremation. So how, then does life come from non-life?

I don’t know. I think life results from a certain form of organization. The matter itself is not alive unless it becomes organized in a certain complex way.

Ok, and is it conscious?

No. It gives rise to consciousness, but its not alive.

Can you tell me anything else about it except for the fact that it makes up everything, and that it is not alive or conscious?

Not at the moment, no.

Ok, so basically we don’t know what this “matter” is, can’t even visualize it or describe it, but what you’re saying is that its defining features are that it is dead, and unconscious, and yet it makes up living, conscious beings, though we have no idea how it does that?

I guess so. It does sound strange when you put that way. Mysterious, at least.

Right. Mysterious, or another possible word for it: not clearly defined and basically incoherent would be another. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So tell me, how do you think dead, unconscious matter generates conscious, living beings?

That is the great mystery. It evolves that way. At a certain level of organization, life and consciousness result.

Uh-huh. Have you ever seen it happen?

No.

Has anyone ever seen it happen, that something apparently dead and unconscious became living and conscious?

Uh, no.

Ok. So materialism amounts to believing that something we can’t conceptualize or define does something we don’t understand and have never seen, in a way we can’t explain. Sounds like God!

Uh……

Ok, leave God aside. The key aspect, as far as we’ve seen, of the theory of matter is the belief that whatever matter is, it is not alive or conscious, and so then reality, at its heart, is dead.

We might also note that this way of looking at things came to be popular during as time period where a new way of life characterized by organizing society purely according to material power and resources, exploiting nature as though it were dead and meaningless, and seeking technological solutions to every problem while undoing all traditional moralities, spiritualities, and hierarchies came to be. All of this facilitated everything becoming, as Marx said, “liquid” and convertible into pure capital in the interests of the wealthy class that came to control the world. Does that seem like a coincidence?

Ok, that’s interesting, but you’re making some pretty sweeping claims there. Conspiracy theory much?

I am making sweeping claims, and they’re not essential to what I’m saying. Ok, let’s back up. Let’s consider what matter is again. Let’s abandon the theoretical. You said its made up of particles, atoms, which are made up of subatomic particles. I said that no one has any idea how these particles, if they are dead and unconscious, could give rise to life and consciousness. Well, what if they don’t?

If they don’t?

Right. There is a theory which has been gaining ground among scientists and philosophers in the last couple of decades called panpsychism, which asserts that particles don’t give rise to consciousness because they are already conscious. What if, they ask, we don’t have to account for the creation of consciousness from dead matter because consciousness itself is an irreducible, fundamental property of matter itself? Mass, location, charge, consciousness.

C’mon, they are saying a proton is conscious? Like, they have a mind?

No, no, not that they have a mind. To have a mind, you need to have a brain, a nervous system. What they are saying is that particles are conscious in a very simple way which we might imagine as monotonal. Only when particles combine into a complex nervous system do they achieve complex self-awareness, or what we would call a mind. Basically they are saying that since we are all conscious, and consciousness can not be broken down into parts of explained as arising from anything, we should just accept that it doesn’t have parts and doesn’t arise from something unconscious. Its simpler to admit that consciousness is fundamental to reality, that its a fundamental quality, or aspect, of matter. In science this is called the principle of “parsimony,” as some have pointed out. Basically, it means our theories shouldn’t make things more complicated than they need to be.

I see. Fascinating. That’s actually a really interesting theory.

Yes, but it has a small problem.

What is that now?

Well, it assumes particles exist like little building blocks of more complex things, like little conscious marbles¹. Except Quantum physics tells us particles don’t actually exist that way. What you may not realize is that according to Quantum Electrodynamics, those particles don’t exist as discrete objects. They are excitations of the unified field of space-time. So if they are excitations of the field, and we are saying they are fundamentally conscious, then we are saying that particles are actually excitations, or waves, of a a unified field of conscious energy. In other words, energy is just changes in consciousness. To put it another way, matter is not conscious, it is consciousness.

But “consciousness” refers to being conscious of something. How can what we are conscious of itself be conscious?

Easily, actually. When we introspect, we know that our “inside”, or what it feels like to be us, is to be conscious. We are just assuming, quite logically, that this is true of everything else as well.

A unified conscious field sounds like a….

Mind?

Right. Like a cosmic mind. Which sounds more like what mystics have been saying for three thousand years than what “scientific materialists” still like to shout from the rooftops without thoroughly interrogating what they themselves believe.

Ok….. but is this mind self-aware?

Well, Spinoza, for one, argued that the totality of things must possess an idea of itself. Of course it wouldn’t have any feelings or be a person, unless you count us as the neurons in its nervous system. Since we have feelings, then in that sense God would.

Holy shit.

Yes, holy.

(Laughing) Ok, so possibly the totality of all beings are firing neurons in a giant self-conscious mind?

Yes, which, incidentally, was argued more or less in a 16th century South Indian Tamil work of philosophy called Kaivala Navaneeta, among other places.

Ok. So then when things are going bad on earth here that’s like a bad mood in the mind of God?

Yah, mor or less. And it also suggests that the reason prayer might work is because we’re sending signals within the mind of God. This makes sense of why Jesus, for example, said that if when you pray you don’t get an answer, keep praying. Wear down God’s door². Why, though? If God is a person who can hear you, why wouldn’t He just answer? If a prayer is like a neuron firing in a giant brain, though, then the more times it repeats, or more intensely it fires— say, for example, a whole Church gets together to pray— the more likely it is to trigger action.

Whoah. I feel like we should be smoking something right now.

Funny, but why be silly? Are you trying to brush off what we’re saying here? Don’t you think it might be worth some serious thought if this is the case?

Yah. I mean, it gives life a whole new depth, generates a lot of questions.

It does. And since I, as a character, am just a thought in the mind of my creator, Matthew, whether we continue this conversation or not will depend on whether I can occur to him enough times to trigger action.

Cheesy ending.

I’m cheesy that way.

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Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/plasma-ball-illustration-414860/

1. I am indebted to Bernard Kastrup for this argument from conscious particles to a unified field of consciousness. See his “Analytical Idealism In A Nutshell.”

2. To be more precise, this makes sense of the phenomenon Jesus described. It is exceedingly unlikely that Jesus believed all of reality was conscious and we are all neurons in the mind of consciousness-at-large.