Materialism is wrong but useful

I'm slowly trying to resume a long-delayed attempt to blog about Peter Godfrey-Smith's excellent Metazoa. This is an wonderful book which looks at the materialist perspective on animal minds. Regular readers will know that the notion that mind and matter are the same thing is not one I have any truck with, and it's just lucky for Godfrey-Smith that I like his writing so much. Otherwise I'd have to get jolly cross with him for being so silly.

I realised that in my early draft of the post I'd gone off on a long tangent, so I've decided to spin this off into its own post here. Since I think the whole concept is manifestly daft, it might surprise you to learn that I nevertheless have some strong materialist sympathies, and of course this warrants an explanation.

Specifically, Godfrey-Smith contends that at the very least, life, though not necessarily mind, can be explained through materialism. Here I tend to agree. I will even go much further. I will generalise and say that materialism is an outstanding and necessary premise for all science. For science, (note the strong emphasis there !) observable, physical components of reality are all there are, and there is no need to invoke anything extra in order to theorise accurate models with strong predictive powers.

Long-term readers will now be hanging their heads in despair. "Hang on a minute, Rhys", you might say. "You said you were an agnostic !* That post took me six days to read, you bastard ! And didn't you also say that you really like this gif as an analogy to science ?"

* I have great respect for my small but thoughtful readership, so much so that I assume they can actually convey hyperlinks though the spoken word.

Indeed so, attentive reader.  Let me address the second point first. 

(Incidentally, if you haven't read the giant post about atheism then don't bother yourself with that right now, but the link to Ian Wardell's piece about the gif is worth your time before proceeding here.)

I do think the analogy of unobservable mechanisms is extremely useful. But it is by no means complete. When early man looked at the horizon, he surely thought, "mmm, mammoth steaks tonight, me likey." Afterwards, he probably wondered, "me tired. me keep walking forever, or will me fall of edge of world ?". He would have had little way to know for sure. Slightly less early man would start to speculate that the Earth was round, and would have been able to keep walking to take a short cut home, but he too would have had little way to test this directly.

For those early thinkers, the shape of the Earth was like the triangles in the gif. It couldn't be observed directly, but the different ideas made different predictions. Initially, both round and flat models gave equally good results. As more and more observations were accumulated, divergences between the theories and observations became greater and greater. Eventually, long before even Magellan finally actually did it, the discrepancies became so great that one model was all but directly observable. The triangles had become visible.

So it is with most (though perhaps not all) science. We can make predictions for which testing requires instrumentation we may not access for many decades, centuries, even millennia. But eventually, good science brings the results into view, such as that the findings explain themselves. Once you see the triangles, it's game over.

There are major caveats though. If you see the triangles but not, say, the circles, that doesn't necessarily mean the circles don't exist as well or even that the triangles are definitely the cause of motion. But this can be established : atoms aren't illusions or convenient models any more than the shape of the Earth is.

That's the superficial interpretation, which holds up reasonably well in a limited way. But of course, the gif is better than that. It works as an analogy because it shows how a whole multitude of geometrical patterns work equally well as an explanation. The original artist may have used any one of them when creating the animation, or something else entirely. It was generated by some mechanism, but we can't know from the gif alone exactly how this was done. So even "seeing the triangles" is not necessarily enough, although the basic point I made still stands : it is theoretically possible to go to the artist and ask exactly how it was made. We can peep behind the curtain, if we have sufficient data. There is no need to keep digging to infinity.

It's not necessary to dive too deeply into the nature of reality or existence here, but we do need to at least go paddling. The "applicant conditions" are relevant. That is, within the everyday macroscopic realm, chairs definitely do exist - but at the subatomic level, there are no particles or property of chair-ness. Chairs do exist within a certain domain, but not within others. Likewise, perhaps at some deeper, underlying level of reality atoms don't exist either, but that doesn't make atomic physics somehow wrong, let alone lend any credence at all to a Flat Earth. Creationism remains monumentally stupid.

So I take materialism to be entirely correct, as a scientist. That doesn't mean there isn't something going on behind the scenes, it just means it's not important in understanding the observables. The universe, I quite happily take it on faith, can ultimately - or more probably only to a very large degree - become self-explaining with sufficient observations. If you want to believe in something else going on as well, or even instead of, then fine with me. It's only if you think you need a divine influence to explain observable phenomena, if you not merely ignore but actually reject the materialist explanation that we're going to have a problem... but more on this when I eventually tackle Berkeley. 

The point is that the scientific, materialist perspective says that you can explain the observables using themselves, and don't need to invoke anything else. And this is something you probably have to assume while you're doing science. You do not have to make this assumption - indeed, should not make it - while doing philosophy. This is why I earlier placed a strong emphasis on science and not on scientists.

What, though, of the notion that the data doesn't speak for itself ? This is important. Usually in research, data is scant. A host of theories are equally valid; which one you prefer and which data you select is indeed down to personal preference. But all the same, clearly the Earth is round. Clearly viruses do exist. Bricks are demonstrably painful if you drop one on your toe. You can't argue your way out of a punch to the gut.

As I mentioned already, sometimes fact and theory are interchangeable. The observation of a round Earth inevitably constrains predictions for navigation - there is no way a model which uses a flat Earth can be made to work, the data does have direct implications for itself.  But how do we reconcile this with the notion that interpretation is invariably a subjective mental process ? Is it just because there are limitations specific to certain cases, or is something more fundamental at work ?

A possible solution to this apparent paradox may lie again with the applicant conditions. Within our perceptive domain, within the self-consistent nature of the data, with all the senses and natural interpretations available to us (I mean the most fundamental ones of all, like space and time, concepts which we appear to be hard-wired to believe in), a round Earth is a direct result of the data. You can't arrange things in a circle and say there isn't a circle. But to an entity which perceived even these apparently most basic aspects differently, perhaps even "roundness" wouldn't make sense of a concept. They would have to employ some other, utterly different model.

A rough analogy might be how if you assume a theory is true, then anything that contradicts it must be taken to be false. If and when you're working within the paradigm of, say, the planets moving on solid crystal spheres, then anyone saying that comets are icy bodies that cross the orbits of the planets must be mad - great lumps of ice ought to shatter the spheres, but clearly this doesn't happen.

This doesn't mean your paradigm can't change, of course. But while you accept it, just as while you accept the notions of space, time, matter, solidity, etc., then you can't possibly accept certain statements as anything other than insane. So the data can speak for itself, albeit in a limited and provisional fashion. And, importantly, the fact that what you understand by space, time, solidity and all the rest might not be the Absolute Truth of Reality, does not mean that your observations are meaningless. Contrary to a recent argument, when I say I'm "certain", I don't mean it as a mere approximation, but that I am literally certain - within my own paradigms, at least. More on this when I get around to Hume, I suppose.

In short, I am quite prepared to accept that the true, deepest nature of reality is inaccessible, and might even feature something one could legitimately call divine. When I consider philosophy, I reject materialism as absurd. But when I practise science, I embrace it as necessary. I have little truck with the notion that we actually need this deeper aspect of reality to explain anything observable, saving, importantly, our own inner awareness. The intersection, where conscious beings make choices based on purely subjective qualia, is absolutely fascinating, but fortunately it does not appear to have any bearing on galaxy evolution or gas dynamics. If it did, I'd be in a right pickle.