Monday, June 10, 2013

Nagel and Materialism

Materialism is all the rage. The world is flooded with new takes on history and psychology interpreted through the materialistic filter. This does not come from philosophy, although it is doubtful that dialectic materialism vampire will ever die, it comes from science. It seeps in to all things academic. Art is chaos theory. Fiction, serious fiction, acts like it will never be the same. Jerry Coyne wrote, “The view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics must be true unless you’re religious.” (He is including here the so-called soft sciences of psychology and the like.)

Certainly science is presenting us with some serious problems. Time and space are tumbled and spilled like a broken kaleidoscope. In fiction this has created a world notable for its lack of depth, its arbitrariness and its juxtaposition. This often makes for difficult reading as the reader's life is not reflected in this view. The reader may be a random victim, may have life beyond his control but he is locked into certain structures and strictures. He does experience a timeline. He will be older tomorrow. He will have responsibilities, regardless of how Kafkaesque. And despite of the goofiness of life, he wants to live. The novelist's world may be an accurate reflection of current physics, it may not accurately reflect the life of the reader.

There are two curiosities here. The first is uncertainty: It cuts both ways so there should be some option for an alternative. The second is wonder. If string theory is an accurate description of the world, how can that ever be understood? When the astronomer says that the black hole NGC1365 has the mass of 2 million suns with the energy that is given off by a billion stars burning for a billion years, who would dare develop a concept to contain that?

Materialism has not become more clarifying and some are getting uncomfortable. Heisenberg-like, some uncertainty has appeared. Thomas Nagel, in his new book Mind and Cosmos writes, “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.” The Guardian awarded Mind and Cosmos its prize for the Most Despised Science Book of 2012. But Nagel is no fool. Nor is he a theist.

An interesting suggestion has emerged to reconcile all the problems that materialism has revealed in our age of the uncertainty principle: Faith.









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