/lit/ - Literature

>>19378724

I used to be a materialist and even got my degree in Biology. It was extremely exciting to learn the principles of the natural world systematically, as any of you must know who have seriously undertaken any subject like that. I can tell you how all about the parts of cells, and how they interact, and especially about the immune system because that's what I did my senior thesis on... And I subscribed to Nature and watched documentaries on PBS and whatever else.

I figured consciousness was a sort of "epiphenomenon" of the material world. I figured it could be reduced to some sort of physical system just like any of the other exceedingly complex natural systems I studied, though it was presumably something that would not be figured out in my lifetime. I did not think this was a question with much ethical relevance - plenty of materialists are, after all, far better people than people who believe in souls.

But some life disappointments shook up my mind on this and I spent a lot of time walking in the woods thinking about reality. When I describe something naturalistically I'm never describing why it happens, but only what is happening. If I say that an animal is moving because its muscles are contracting, this doesn't account for why it's moving, but it describes the process of moving. If I say 1 and 1 make 2, I have not explained how this can be. Why shouldn't both remain 1? Where does 2 enter the picture? To say "1+1=2 because of addition", or "the animal moves because of its muscles", is as absurd as to say that I'm writing this post because my fingers are moving. There must be some principle by which something is something else, or becomes something else, whether the thing in question is a person or viron, and cutting up a subject into its constituent parts doesn’t ultimately explain anything.

Natural scientists would say the "why" is impossible to know and not worth asking about. But there’s no need to start making wild assumptions or fly into mysticism…