The Immaterial World
The Immaterial World
Why materialism is an incomplete picture of reality
"By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you shall return." - Genesis 3:19
I'd like to disagree. We are not dust, though dust we may become.
Throughout my education, I was told that the natural world is a collection of atoms mediated by physical forces. Adherents to this “materialist” view may acknowledge that some dimensions of reality remain hidden, but the governing idea is that we are things. This was certainly the teaching emphasis in medical school, and is also one common perspective in contemporary philosophy, under which notions about the "soul" or the "spirit" tend to be deprecated.
We will pass over the objection that materialism leans heavily on the laws of physics even though those laws are themselves not physical. How to account for the existence of the laws is left out of the picture. The fact that our inner lives also remain unaccounted for under this scheme is an even bigger objection, but doesn't seem to bother its supporters much (see Daniel Dennett's attempt to argue consciousness away as a sort of epiphenomenon).
Before considering living beings, we can ask: Are physical objects really just a collection of molecules and the forces that bind them? Let us look at just a single dimension of this question: physical shape, or more broadly, the position of physical components in space.
First consider a subset of all things: objects comprised of a single substance without any moving parts. We'll restrict ourselves to macroscopic objects to begin with; examples would be a sculpture or a rock, say a lump of marble. Obviously these objects are vastly simpler than a living being, but can still offer some insights.
It is obvious that the sculpture possesses something that the rock does not. It is in the shape of, say, a mother holding her child. Yet as you look at it, you are seeing only marble, or more precisely the light reflecting off of assemblies of molecules in the marble. There is clearly no "soul" there, no life. No one would deny that it is an inert physical object. But nonetheless this statue conveys something to you that the rock does not.
Another example would be a lump of glass, as compared to a glass lens. Both are simply and entirely comprised of silicon and oxygen plus a few minor components. Once again, it is evident that the lens possesses properties that the lump does not. The lens can magnify the image of the sun, and can concentrate its rays to help start a fire. Assemblies of lenses can reveal the satellites of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. The lump completely lacks these properties. Yet the only difference is one of shape, and shape is neither a molecule nor a force.
A wing can lift a balsa airplane into the sky while a block of balsa wood cannot even begin to.
Strokes of ink can convey the history of the world.
We are surrounded by such examples; in some cases, the shapes interact with a mind instead of with other physical objects or fields. We'll consider what they have in common in a moment but first let's look at a microscopic example.
DNA is comprised of four different types of nucleotides assembled into a double helix. This requires that the nucleotides possess the shapes they do so that they fit together like a puzzle. All DNA is a double string of this kind, but some DNA can result in the synthesis of useful proteins while other DNA seems to be useless. The two such strings differ only in the sequence of nucleotides, that is, their position in space. Only these positions hold the difference between meaning and non-meaning.
Rather than further amplify our examples, let's move on. What is the essential distinction between these objects?
The difference is clearly somehow connected to making order out of disorder, what I will call the introduction of information. Someone or something interacted with these physical objects in their initial form (a rock, a lump of glass, a pile of nucleic acids) such that the shape was imparted in a very particular pattern (a sculpture, a lens, DNA). But whatever that intervening influence was, it is no longer itself present in these objects. It came and went. The sculptor may be long dead, but the stone’s new shape remains.
Shape is not the only means by which information can be imparted to an object. Various forces and fields recognized by physics can also do this, as when information is encoded onto the hard drive of your computer by a collection of memory states on a silicon chip.
While the sculptor or inventor in our examples may be dead, they clearly did exist at some point, but I puzzle over the case of DNA, and by extension, life. Without an "author" one must consider the possibility that information can coalesce and form out of chaos, that is, that the natural world has an inherit tendency towards forming habits, and that these regularities can slowly amplify themselves in such a way that useful configurations persist and useless ones perish, and eventually information arises and propagates itself. (Note that if nature indeed does have this power of self-organization, there is no reason to suppose that creation has yet ceased.)
These examples show how information is encoded in physical objects, but barely begin to describe how something like it factors into thought, emotions, what is right and what is wrong, what is beautiful and what is ugly. These mental states represent the arrangement of concepts rather than physical objects in some immensely subtle way. They influence action, and therefore influence the physical world. Yet none of these mental states are themselves physical, though embodied by the brain. These concepts are immaterial, while the brain is material. They are the story, not the paper and ink. While the laws of physics constrain the behavior of physical objects, it is unclear why they would constrain the flow of information or meaning. Whether we choose to visualize a falling apple instead of a falling pear would hardly seem to depend on Newton's laws.
Much of our world is of this nature. The material world exists, but there is an equally vast immaterial world.
The good news is that in this sense the soul (or if you prefer, the spirit) exists, but the bad news may be that it is dependent on a physical body for its existence. Consider the music on your computer. I have Bach's Goldberg Variations on mine. Bach's music is sitting there ready to be released by me at will. The dead silicon is not the music. But the music can exist there only because the silicon does. Of course the same music can be found in many physical embodiments across the world – on paper scores, recordings, and other computers – but if somehow every such embodiment were to be destroyed, Bach's genius would be lost to us.
As another example, love may be dependent for its existence on some underlying physical arrangements in the living brain. But it also has a larger existence, because it can be "copied", or transmitted, into other minds, and affect the outside world in tangible ways. Even if this transmission is impossible, love persists, as for our loved ones who have died. And does not their love still live in our minds? Not until all such memories depart is the love gone. So it is for other thoughts and ideas.
The biblical passage may be correct that to dust we shall return, but it is incorrect that we "are dust". It overlooks the most important way we differ from the ground from which we spring.
We are not things, or more precisely, we are not only things.
These intertwined material and immaterial worlds are, I think, a manifestation of a single larger reality, difficult for us to perceive as such. Whether anything, or anyone, exists outside this natural world as I have described it is not a point on which I take a stand. There is no need to invoke a separate supernatural world for my purposes here. Mysteries abide, but I anticipate humankind's understanding of them to eventually resolve into a unified whole.
But I do expect surprises along the way.