The Drug Age I: Romantic Materialism

[This is part 1 of a 6-8 part series. I’ll link the other parts here as they’re posted.]

We sit in oversized green chairs in the nook at the north end of the first floor of the philosophy building. I have math classes and girls on my mind, and as usual, the conversation hovers just above the upper border of my head. This is Philosophy Club, and J has just declared himself a miriological nihilist. Apparently that means that he thinks composites can only be referred to for convenience; they have no metaphysical status beyond the sum of their parts. Someone asks him what substances finally have their own existence at the bottom of this structure. “Fundamental particles.” Which fundamental particles? “I don’t know. That’s for the physicists to figure out.”

Do you realize how amazing it is that your mind is made up of nothing but neurons? Neurons, and electricity pulsing between them, gathering and scattering, lightning arcing every second to compose the illusion of sight. Hearing is neurons. Memory is neurons. That part of you that people used to call the soul is actually just an incredibly complicated pattern of neurons firing. Isn’t that amazing?

The biggest challenge I know to J’s particle-based metaphysics comes from quantum mechanics. Particles are not the only way to frame quantum mechanics; we also speak of waves, and fields, and energy, and potentials. All these perspectives are useful, and my impression is that the field doesn’t unambiguously support a philosophy that says the particles are real but waves and fields and energy and potentials are structures built out of particles. Even if we steelman the position to allow a category of “interactions between particles,” waves still present a problem. A photon is often the same thing as an electromagnetic wave, but there are situations where each paradigm explains experimental results better than the other, and I know of no reason to prefer one over the other as a metaphysical category.

But where is the materialist who says that waves are the fundamental substance, and everything else is built of waves?

I call the particle-based materialism emphasizing mind as neurons romantic materialism. I first saw it articulated in the excellent Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and as far as I can tell it’s the dominant position in our culture. The qualifier “romantic” is important because it captures their aesthetic sense. Whatever else they think is outdated, they care deeply about beauty, and they think it’s important that their metaphysics retain a sense of beauty and order and wonder.

I respect that.

I dabbled in both physics and philosophy in college. I hope I’m staying within the bounds of my knowledge, but it’s possible I’m getting it all wrong. I look forward to being corrected on either subject by someone wiser.

But until then, I have a hypothesis as to why I’ve encountered zero wave-based romantic materialists, compared to dozens of particle-based romantic materialists.

I don’t think romantic materialists are actually motivated by quantum mechanics at all. They don’t describe their romance in terms of quanta and waves. Rather, they’re always talking about the mind. The great romance is imagining your own sensations as elaborate patterns of electrical signals.

So I hypothesize that the foundational belief of most materialists isn’t that all of reality is made solely of fundamental particles. Rather, it’s about the mind. The foundational belief of most materialists is that the mind is made solely of neurons and chemicals.

Under this hypothesis, people realize that modern physics does not allow one to claim that atoms are the lowest level of reality, so they reach down and grab the first thing they can find from the shelf below. Particles!

In the rest of this series, I will continue to explore the neuron+chemical theory of the mind, and speculate on its origins and implications.