Are you completely materialistic in your mindset?

We now turn our attention to the sixth question in Michael Brown’s 7 honest questions for atheists, which is aimed at getting the atheist to identify his worldview in positive terms more than the previous questions.

My answers to Brown’s previous questions can be accessed here:

1. Why are you an atheist? 

2. Can an atheist have purpose? 

3. Are you sure there’s no god? 

4. Can science answer the remaining mysteries of the universe? 

5. Have you ever questioned your atheism?

Brown’s sixth “honest question” for atheists is as follows:

Are you completely materialistic in your mindset, meaning, human beings are entirely physical, human consciousness is an illusion, and there is no spiritual realm of any kind? Or are you superstitious, reading horoscopes or engaging in new age practices or the like?

I can address the final part of this question right off: I am not superstitious and I do not put any stock in horoscopes, astrological signs, numerology, or other forms of mystical ritualism. I don’t plan around Friday the 13th or turn around if a black cat crosses my path. I don’t say grace at supper time, or pray to Mary, or fondle Rosary beads. I don’t bow to Mecca nor do I meditate on the Buddha’s wise sayings or put effort into driving off “karmic accumulations.” I don’t think I could even name one “New Age” practice let alone indulge in any. I have so many far better things to do with my time. I hope this is clear. 

As for Brown’s question on having a “materialistic… mindset,” we need to have a solid understanding of what’s being asked. Since, as Andrew Bernstein once said in one of his lectures, “definitions are our friends,” we need to understand what is meant by “materialistic” as it is being used here. Fortunately, Brown gives three indications of what he’s asking, albeit by means of a package deal. 

Let’s look at the elements he lists in turn:

- “human beings are entirely physical” – Physical as opposed to what? Human beings are biological organisms. Like many other species in the animal kingdom, human beings have bones, muscles, organs, nerves, metabolic needs, etc. There’s no question in my mind that human beings are physical just as dogs, cats, dolphins, lizards and goldfish are physical. The qualifier ‘entirely’ here is supposed to have relevance. Presumably Michael Brown himself would concede that human beings are physical inasmuch as he would (one would hope) acknowledge that human beings are biological organisms. More on this below. 

- “human consciousness is an illusion” – While the view expressed here is closer to what I understand ‘materialism’ to entail, the notion that “consciousness is an illusion” – an affirmation which some individuals have taken seriously – is as overt an example of the fallacy of the stolen concept as one could propose. The concept ‘illusion’ presupposes the reality of consciousness, so any statement or question which makes use of the concept ‘illusion’ affirms the validity of its cognitive roots, among which of course is the reality of consciousness. For any concept to have legitimate meaning – including the concept ‘illusion’ – consciousness would have to be real for concepts are a means of expanding awareness beyond the confines of sense perception. Thus to say “consciousness is an illusion” would be to contradict oneself performatively by making use of a concept while denying its conceptual roots. It should be pointed out that recognizing the fact that human beings are physical in no way commits one to the view that consciousness is therefore an illusion. 

- “there is no spiritual realm of any kind”: What exactly is a “spiritual realm” and how many are there? Is it a place? Typically the concept ‘place’ denotes a position or spot on a surface or within something, and therefore implies something physical. But presumably a “spiritual realm” would not be a physical place and the assertion that there is a spiritual realm invites a series of epistemological questions: Is this something one can have direct awareness of? If so, by what means? Can a “spiritual realm” be perceived? If not, then how – if at all – can one have direct awareness of it? If we cannot have direct awareness of it, is its existence something that we can infer from things that we do have direct awareness of? If so, what is involved in this? Can one have objective awareness of a “spiritual realm”? This would need to be explained. Proponents of the view that a “spiritual realm” is real would need to explain how we can reliably distinguish between what they call a “spiritual realm” from something that we may merely be imagining. If I imagine something, what I imagine certainly does not exist in reality – but does it exist in a “spiritual realm” beyond the reach of our senses and rational faculties? How is a “spiritual realm” different from dreams, hallucinations, psychotic states? If by “spiritual realm” one really means something that is really only imaginary, then it couldn’t possibly be real, and recognizing that it does not actually exist would only be rational. 

Suppose I make the statement, “There is no dreamworld.” Is that a true statement? It depends on what the statement is specifically affirming. I expect that I am no different from anyone reading this in that I often dream when I sleep. It is a fact that human beings dream. Is a “dreamworld” an actual place one visits during sleep, leaving his body and traveling to some other realm? A vivid dream can induce such an impression on the dreamer, but in fact he has not traveled anywhere – he’s still lying in his bed and when he wakes up he will still be who he is. If “dreamworld” is a metaphor for the cycle of sleep in which one dreams, then the answer is yes – a “dreamworld” exists in this sense. I see nothing wrong with urging my wife after a long day at work to ready herself for dreamworld. But is it an actual physical locale independent of stages of sleep, then I would say no.

Materialism is not merely the recognition or acknowledgement that matter exists, for if that were the case, every thinker who acknowledges the existence of matter would be a materialist. To the extent that materialism entails either implicitly or overtly a denial of the reality or efficacy of consciousness, it is a performatively self-contradictory position, for denying is a function of conscious activity. It would be as self-contradictory as thought I stated out loud, “I am not speaking” – for I would have spoken while denying my own speaking. Again, we have an instance of a stolen concept. So as such, materialism is not a defensible position and is to be rejected in toto. 

Materialism and religionism go hand in hand in that they are two sides of the same coin. Both implicitly treat consciousness as belonging to the domain of mysticism. If one rejects theism, many theists apparently assume, leaves materialism as the only alternative, and by this it is understood to constitute a rejection of the reality of consciousness. If you’re not a theist, you must believe human beings to be nothing more than the stark, inhabited circuitry of a robot (or what Steve Hays would call a "meat machine" - see here). And many materialists seem to accept this, discounting consciousness as something real or at any rate causally relevant in an individual’s life (cf. Karl Marx: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” - A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). 

The Objectivist position does not fall prey to these criticisms because Objectivism begins from the very outset with the three axioms – the axiom of existence, the axiom of identity and the axiom of consciousness. Since consciousness is axiomatic, there’s no getting around its fundamental centrality to all cognitive actions, whether it is identifying, integrating, differentiating, inferring, deducing inducing, forgetting, denying, rejecting, wishing, hoping, etc. The reality of consciousness is explicitly affirmed at the most fundamental point in the entire philosophical structure. 

Additionally, I would argue that consciousness as such is biological in nature. Consciousness is not an entity distinct from the biological organism which is capable of consciousness. Rather, consciousness is a category of activity, activity which is performed by a biological organism, and common concepts which we use every day underscore this. Whether it’s seeing, hearing, thinking, remembering, deciding, inferring, guessing, fantasizing, etc., all these activities denoted here are activities of consciousness. The entity which performs these activities is the individual who does the perceiving, thinking, deciding, etc., in question. 

Pace Brown, why not simply ask: What is your fundamental view of man? What is your understanding of consciousness? If someone asks to opine on the question, “Is consciousness real?” is he not expecting me to engage my own consciousness in relation to the question? The question assumes consciousness is real – consciousness would have to be real in order for any question to be possible. And just to consider the question, one would need to be conscious, for considering anything is a category of conscious activity, and understanding a question would be a precondition to providing any feedback on the question – and both of these – understanding and providing feedback – are themselves categories of conscious activity.

As indicated above, many thinkers, both religious as well as atheists, operate on the assumption of a dichotomous framework: either an individual is religious, or he’s materialistic. These two categories – religion and materialism – are treated as jointly exhaustive: no other alternative is to be seriously entertained, and any proposed alternative is to be construed as a variant of one or the other horn of the prevailing dichotomy. These positions, put forward as opposites, are in fact two sides of the same coin – both split man into two opposed halves.

In her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand summarized this frequently encountered dichotomy in a passage from John Galt’s Speech:

They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave. 

They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists. 

Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations—he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

The answer to the soul-body dichotomy which religion and materialism both assume and espouse, is the doctrine of mind-body integration:

The New Intellectual . . . will discard . . . the soul-body dichotomy. He will discard its irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action, reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. He will be an integrated man, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and that action divorced from ideas is suicidal. He will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology—the volitional level of reason and thought—is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue. He will know that men need philosophy for the purpose of living on earth. (Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual)

Because historically human thinkers have been baffled by the reality of consciousness, they have consigned its significance to mystical speculations and have thus assumed that consciousness can only be explained by appealing to supernaturalism. But supernaturalism misconstrues consciousness as much as materialism does. Both religion and materialism are in effect a denial of the axiom of consciousness. There is no rational justification for deferring consciousness to supernaturalism.

If Brown should ask me, “Are you a materialist?” I will answer: I am an Objectivist. And from there I would look forward to a lively discussion. 

by Dawson Bethrick