I completely disagree with your post, but I really appreciate it. Perhaps as an artful and accurate node of what people who are satisfied or not satisfied with materialism disagree about.
The materialist in me figures from first principles, that it would seem that life has no meaning, morality has no basis, love is an illusion, everything is futile, etc. This is an intellectual and emotional response dove-tailed together. I would say that the intellectual response is first, and the emotional response comes second, because the melancholy is only there if I dwell on it.
As far as I can tell, the only argument that materialism-satisfied materialists have against the intellectual response that generates my negative emotional response is that they lack a negative emotional response. So I see it quite the other way: satisfied materialists lack the emotional response—in a nod to the normative tone of your post—that they should have.
Materialism is very compelling, but it has this flaw in its current (hopefully incomplete) formulation. That’s the pill to swallow. I would like to see this problem tackled head on and resolved. (I’ll add that admitting that some subset of people are not designed to be happy with materialism would be one resolution.)
The materialist in me figures from first principles, that it would seem that life has no meaning, morality has no basis, love is an illusion, everything is futile, etc.
Perhaps part of the difference between those who are satisfied/not satisfied with materialism is in what role something other than materialism could play here. I just don’t get how any of the non-materialist ‘answers’ are more satisfying than the materialist ones. If it bothers you that morality is ‘arbitrary’, why is it more satisfying if it is the arbitrary preferences of god rather than the arbitrary preferences of humans? Just as I don’t get how the answer ‘because of god’ to the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ is more satisfying for some people than the alternative materialist answer of ‘it just is’.
Ok, so I am not a student of literature or religion, but I believe there are fundamental human aesthetic principles that non-materialist religious and wholistic ideas satisfy in our psychology. They try to explain things in large concepts that humans have evolved to easily grasp rather than the minutiae and logical puzzles of reality. If materialists want these memes to be given up, they will need to create equally compelling human metaphor, which is a tall order if we want everything to convey reality correctly. Compelling metaphor is frequently incorrect. My atheist-jewish husband loves to talk about the beauty of scripture and parables in the Christian bible and stands firm against my insistence that any number of novels are both better written and provide better moral guidance. I personally have a disgust reaction whenever he points out a flowery passage about morality and humanity that doesn’t make any actual sense. HOW CAN YOU BE TAKEN IN BY THAT? But unlike practicing religious people, he doesn’t ‘believe’ any of it, he’s just attracted to it aesthetically, as an idea, as a beautiful outgrowth of the human spirit. Basically, it presses all the right psychological buttons. This is not to say that materialists cannot produce equally compelling metaphors, but it may be a very difficult task, and the spiritualists have a good, I don’t know, 10,000 years on us in honing in on what appeals to our primitive psychology.
Why produce new metaphors when we can subvert ones we already know are compelling?
For it is written: The Word of God is not a voice from on High but the whispers of our hopes and desires. God’s existence is but His soul, which does not have material substance but resides in our hearts and the Human spirit. Yet this is not God’s eternal condition. We are commanded: for the God without a home, make the universe His home. For the God without a body, make Him a body with your own hands. For the God without a mind, make Him a mind like your mind, but worthy of a god. And instill in this mind, in this body, in this universe the soul of God copied from your own heart and the hearts of your brothers and sisters. The Ancients dreamed that God had created the world only because they could not conceive that the world would create God. For God is not the cause of our humility but the unfulfilled aim of our ambition. So learn about the universe so that you may build God a home, learn about your mind so you may build a better one for God, learn about your hopes and desires so that you may give birth to your own savior. With God incarnate will come the Kingdom of God and eternal life.
Ok, so I am not a student of literature or religion, but I believe there are fundamental human aesthetic principles that non-materialist religious and wholistic ideas satisfy in our psychology.
I’m wondering whether your statement is true only when you substitute ‘some people’s’ for ‘our’ in ‘our psychology’. I don’t feel a god-shaped emotional hole in my psyche. I’m inclined to believe byrenma’s self report that she does. I’ve talked about this with my lapsed-catholic mother and she feels similarly but I just don’t experience the ‘loss’ she appears to.
Whether this is because I never really experienced much of a religious upbringing (I was reading The Selfish Gene at 8, I’ve still never read the Bible) or whether it is something about our personality types or our knowledge of science I don’t know but there appears to be an experience of ‘something missing’ in a materialist world view amongst some people that others just don’t seem to have.
While not everyone experiences the ‘god-shaped hole,’ it would be dense of us not to acknowledge the ubiquity of spirituality across cultures just because we feel no need for it ourselves (feel free to replace ‘us’ and ‘we’ with ‘many of the readers of this blog’). Spirituality seems to be an aesthetic imperative for much of humanity, and it will probably take a lot teasing apart to determine what aspects of it are essential to human happiness, and what parts are culturally inculcated.
Well, coming back to the original comment I was responding to:
The materialist in me figures from first principles, that it would seem that life has no meaning, morality has no basis, love is an illusion, everything is futile, etc.
I don’t feel that way, despite being a thoroughgoing materialist for as long as I can remember being aware of the concept. I also don’t really see how believing in the ‘spiritual’ or non-material could change how I feel about these concepts. It does seem to be somewhat common for people to feel that only spirituality can ‘save’ us from feeling this way but I don’t really get why.
I acknowledge that some people do see ‘spirituality’ (a word that I admittedly have a tenuous grasp on the supposed meaning of) as important to these things which is why I’m postulating that there is some difference in the way of thinking or perhaps personality type of people who don’t see a dilemma here and those for whom it is a source of tremendous existential angst.
People are capable of feeling oneness, being loved (without a material source) and various other strong positive emotions, but are apt to lose track of how to access them.
Dysfunctional behavior frequently is the result of people jumping to the conclusion that if only some external condition can be met, they’ll feel one of those strong positive emotions.
Since the external condition (money, respect, obeying rules) isn’t actually a pre-condition for the emotion but the belief about the purpose of the dysfunctional behavior isn’t conscious, the person keeps seeking joy or peace or whatever in the wrong place.
Core transformation is based on the premise that it’s possible to track the motives for dysfunctional behavior back to the desired emotion, and give them access to the emotion—the dysfunctional behavior evaporates, and the person may find other parts of their life getting better.
I’ve done a little with this system—enough to think there’s at least something to it.
Do you take awe in the whole of humanity, Earth, or the universe as something greater than yourself? Does it please you to think that even if you die, the universe, life, or maybe even the human race will go on existing long afterward?
Maybe you don’t feel the hole because you’ve already filled it :)
I’ve experienced an emotion I think is awe but generally only in response to the physical presence of something in the natural world rather than to sitting and thinking. Being on top of a mountain at sunrise, staring at the sky on a clear night, being up close to a large and potentially dangerous animal and other such experiences have produced the emotion but it is only evoked weakly if at all by sitting and contemplating the universe.
I don’t think I have a very firm grip on the varieties of ‘religious’ experience. I am not really clear on the distinction between awe and wonder for example though I believe they are considered separate emotions.
I can’t speak for mattnewport, but I don’t take awe, as a rule—I just haven’t developed a taste for it. I am occasionally awed, I admit—by acts of cleverness, bravery, or superlative skill, most frequently—but I am rarely rocked back on my heels by “goodness, isn’t this universe huge!” and other such observations.
Perhaps part of the difference between those who are satisfied/not satisfied with materialism is in what role something other than materialism could play here. I just don’t get how any of the non-materialist ‘answers’ are more satisfying than the materialist ones.
The answers are satisfying because they’re not really answers. They’re part of a completely different value and belief system—a large, complex structure that has evolved because it is good at generating certain feelings in those who hold it; feelings which hijack those people’s emotional systems to motivate them to spread it. Very much like the fly bacteria (or was it a virus?) that reprograms its victims’ brains to climb upwards before they die so that their bodies will spread its spores more effectively.
I think that the standard example of that is a fungus that infects ants. And the bad pun is “Is it just a fluke?” that the ant climbs to the top of a straw, and that it’s behind gets red and swollen like a berry, so that the birds are sure to eat it.
If it bothers you that morality is ‘arbitrary’, why is it more satisfying if it is the arbitrary preferences of god rather than the arbitrary preferences of humans?
I believe I can answer this question. The question is a misunderstanding of what “God” was supposed to be. (I think theists often have this misunderstanding as well.)
We live in a certain world, and it natural for some people (perhaps only certain personality types) to feel nihilistic about that world. There are many, many paths to this feeling—the problem of evil, the problem of free will, the problem of objective value, the problem of death, etc. There doesn’t seem to be any resolution within the material world so when we turn away from nihilism, as we must, we hope that there’s some kind of solution outside the material. This trust, an innate hope, calls on something transcendental to provide meaning.
However you articulate that hope, if you have it, I think that is theism. Humans try and describe what this solution would be explictly, but then our solution is always limited by our current worldview of what the solution could be (God is the spirit in all living things; God is love and redemption from sin; God is an angry father teaching and exacting justice ). In my opinion, religion hasn’t kept up with changes in our worldview and is ready for a complete remodeling.
Perhaps we are ready for a non-transcendent solution, as that would seem most appropriate given our worldview in non-religious areas, but I just don’t see any solutions yet.
I’ve been listening carefully, and people who are satisfied with materialism seem to still possess this innate hope and trust; but they are either unable to examine the source of it or they attribute it to something inadequate. For example, someone once told me that for them, meaning came from the freedom to choose their own values instead of having them handed down by God.
But materialism tells us we don’t get to choose. We need to learn to be satisfied with being a river, always choosing the path determined by our landscape. The ability to choose would indeed be transcendental. So I think some number of people realized that without something exceptional, we don’t have freedom. In religions, this is codified as God is necessary for the possibility of free will.
So if I say ‘there is no God’, I’m not denying the existence of a supreme being that could possibly take offense. I’m giving up on freedom, value and purpose. I would like to see, in my lifetime, that those things are already embedded in the material world. Then I would still believe in God—even more so—but my belief would be intellectually justified and consistent within my current (scientific) world view.
But if the truth is that they’re not there, anywhere, I do wonder what it would take to make me stop believing in them.
Without relaunching the whole discussion, there’s one thing I’d like to know: Do you acknowledge that the concepts you’re “giving up on” (‘transcendental’ freedom, value, and purpose, as you define them) are not merely things that don’t exist, but things that can’t exist, like square circles?
I only know that I believe they should exist. I gave up on figuring out if they could exist. Specifically, what I’ve “given up on” is a reconciliation of epistemic and instrumental rationality in this matter.
If God doesn’t exist, creating him as the purpose of my existence is something I could get behind.
And then I would want the God of the future to be omnipotent enough to modify the universe so that he existed retroactively, so that the little animals dying in the forest hadn’t been alone, after all. (On the day I intensely tried to stop valuing objective purpose, I realized that this image was one of my strongest and earliest attachments to a framework of objective value.)
God wouldn’t have to modify the universe in any causal way, he would just need to send information back in time (objective-value-information). Curiosity about the possibility of a retroactive God motivated this thread. If it is possible for a God created in the future to propagate backwards in time, then I would rate the probability of God existing currently as quite nearly 1.
I completely disagree with your post, but I really appreciate it. Perhaps as an artful and accurate node of what people who are satisfied or not satisfied with materialism disagree about.
The materialist in me figures from first principles, that it would seem that life has no meaning, morality has no basis, love is an illusion, everything is futile, etc. This is an intellectual and emotional response dove-tailed together. I would say that the intellectual response is first, and the emotional response comes second, because the melancholy is only there if I dwell on it.
As far as I can tell, the only argument that materialism-satisfied materialists have against the intellectual response that generates my negative emotional response is that they lack a negative emotional response. So I see it quite the other way: satisfied materialists lack the emotional response—in a nod to the normative tone of your post—that they should have.
Materialism is very compelling, but it has this flaw in its current (hopefully incomplete) formulation. That’s the pill to swallow. I would like to see this problem tackled head on and resolved. (I’ll add that admitting that some subset of people are not designed to be happy with materialism would be one resolution.)
Perhaps part of the difference between those who are satisfied/not satisfied with materialism is in what role something other than materialism could play here. I just don’t get how any of the non-materialist ‘answers’ are more satisfying than the materialist ones. If it bothers you that morality is ‘arbitrary’, why is it more satisfying if it is the arbitrary preferences of god rather than the arbitrary preferences of humans? Just as I don’t get how the answer ‘because of god’ to the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ is more satisfying for some people than the alternative materialist answer of ‘it just is’.
As Eliezer says in Joy in the Merely Real:
Ok, so I am not a student of literature or religion, but I believe there are fundamental human aesthetic principles that non-materialist religious and wholistic ideas satisfy in our psychology. They try to explain things in large concepts that humans have evolved to easily grasp rather than the minutiae and logical puzzles of reality. If materialists want these memes to be given up, they will need to create equally compelling human metaphor, which is a tall order if we want everything to convey reality correctly. Compelling metaphor is frequently incorrect. My atheist-jewish husband loves to talk about the beauty of scripture and parables in the Christian bible and stands firm against my insistence that any number of novels are both better written and provide better moral guidance. I personally have a disgust reaction whenever he points out a flowery passage about morality and humanity that doesn’t make any actual sense. HOW CAN YOU BE TAKEN IN BY THAT? But unlike practicing religious people, he doesn’t ‘believe’ any of it, he’s just attracted to it aesthetically, as an idea, as a beautiful outgrowth of the human spirit. Basically, it presses all the right psychological buttons. This is not to say that materialists cannot produce equally compelling metaphors, but it may be a very difficult task, and the spiritualists have a good, I don’t know, 10,000 years on us in honing in on what appeals to our primitive psychology.
Why produce new metaphors when we can subvert ones we already know are compelling?
For it is written: The Word of God is not a voice from on High but the whispers of our hopes and desires. God’s existence is but His soul, which does not have material substance but resides in our hearts and the Human spirit. Yet this is not God’s eternal condition. We are commanded: for the God without a home, make the universe His home. For the God without a body, make Him a body with your own hands. For the God without a mind, make Him a mind like your mind, but worthy of a god. And instill in this mind, in this body, in this universe the soul of God copied from your own heart and the hearts of your brothers and sisters. The Ancients dreamed that God had created the world only because they could not conceive that the world would create God. For God is not the cause of our humility but the unfulfilled aim of our ambition. So learn about the universe so that you may build God a home, learn about your mind so you may build a better one for God, learn about your hopes and desires so that you may give birth to your own savior. With God incarnate will come the Kingdom of God and eternal life.
This is reminding me of Stross’s ReMastered’s “unborn god”...
I’m wondering whether your statement is true only when you substitute ‘some people’s’ for ‘our’ in ‘our psychology’. I don’t feel a god-shaped emotional hole in my psyche. I’m inclined to believe byrenma’s self report that she does. I’ve talked about this with my lapsed-catholic mother and she feels similarly but I just don’t experience the ‘loss’ she appears to.
Whether this is because I never really experienced much of a religious upbringing (I was reading The Selfish Gene at 8, I’ve still never read the Bible) or whether it is something about our personality types or our knowledge of science I don’t know but there appears to be an experience of ‘something missing’ in a materialist world view amongst some people that others just don’t seem to have.
While not everyone experiences the ‘god-shaped hole,’ it would be dense of us not to acknowledge the ubiquity of spirituality across cultures just because we feel no need for it ourselves (feel free to replace ‘us’ and ‘we’ with ‘many of the readers of this blog’). Spirituality seems to be an aesthetic imperative for much of humanity, and it will probably take a lot teasing apart to determine what aspects of it are essential to human happiness, and what parts are culturally inculcated.
Well, coming back to the original comment I was responding to:
I don’t feel that way, despite being a thoroughgoing materialist for as long as I can remember being aware of the concept. I also don’t really see how believing in the ‘spiritual’ or non-material could change how I feel about these concepts. It does seem to be somewhat common for people to feel that only spirituality can ‘save’ us from feeling this way but I don’t really get why.
I acknowledge that some people do see ‘spirituality’ (a word that I admittedly have a tenuous grasp on the supposed meaning of) as important to these things which is why I’m postulating that there is some difference in the way of thinking or perhaps personality type of people who don’t see a dilemma here and those for whom it is a source of tremendous existential angst.
I think Core transformation offers a plausible theory.
People are capable of feeling oneness, being loved (without a material source) and various other strong positive emotions, but are apt to lose track of how to access them.
Dysfunctional behavior frequently is the result of people jumping to the conclusion that if only some external condition can be met, they’ll feel one of those strong positive emotions.
Since the external condition (money, respect, obeying rules) isn’t actually a pre-condition for the emotion but the belief about the purpose of the dysfunctional behavior isn’t conscious, the person keeps seeking joy or peace or whatever in the wrong place.
Core transformation is based on the premise that it’s possible to track the motives for dysfunctional behavior back to the desired emotion, and give them access to the emotion—the dysfunctional behavior evaporates, and the person may find other parts of their life getting better.
I’ve done a little with this system—enough to think there’s at least something to it.
Do you take awe in the whole of humanity, Earth, or the universe as something greater than yourself? Does it please you to think that even if you die, the universe, life, or maybe even the human race will go on existing long afterward?
Maybe you don’t feel the hole because you’ve already filled it :)
I’ve experienced an emotion I think is awe but generally only in response to the physical presence of something in the natural world rather than to sitting and thinking. Being on top of a mountain at sunrise, staring at the sky on a clear night, being up close to a large and potentially dangerous animal and other such experiences have produced the emotion but it is only evoked weakly if at all by sitting and contemplating the universe.
I don’t think I have a very firm grip on the varieties of ‘religious’ experience. I am not really clear on the distinction between awe and wonder for example though I believe they are considered separate emotions.
I can’t speak for mattnewport, but I don’t take awe, as a rule—I just haven’t developed a taste for it. I am occasionally awed, I admit—by acts of cleverness, bravery, or superlative skill, most frequently—but I am rarely rocked back on my heels by “goodness, isn’t this universe huge!” and other such observations.
The answers are satisfying because they’re not really answers. They’re part of a completely different value and belief system—a large, complex structure that has evolved because it is good at generating certain feelings in those who hold it; feelings which hijack those people’s emotional systems to motivate them to spread it. Very much like the fly bacteria (or was it a virus?) that reprograms its victims’ brains to climb upwards before they die so that their bodies will spread its spores more effectively.
I think that the standard example of that is a fungus that infects ants. And the bad pun is “Is it just a fluke?” that the ant climbs to the top of a straw, and that it’s behind gets red and swollen like a berry, so that the birds are sure to eat it.
Rabies is another example.
I believe I can answer this question. The question is a misunderstanding of what “God” was supposed to be. (I think theists often have this misunderstanding as well.)
We live in a certain world, and it natural for some people (perhaps only certain personality types) to feel nihilistic about that world. There are many, many paths to this feeling—the problem of evil, the problem of free will, the problem of objective value, the problem of death, etc. There doesn’t seem to be any resolution within the material world so when we turn away from nihilism, as we must, we hope that there’s some kind of solution outside the material. This trust, an innate hope, calls on something transcendental to provide meaning.
However you articulate that hope, if you have it, I think that is theism. Humans try and describe what this solution would be explictly, but then our solution is always limited by our current worldview of what the solution could be (God is the spirit in all living things; God is love and redemption from sin; God is an angry father teaching and exacting justice ). In my opinion, religion hasn’t kept up with changes in our worldview and is ready for a complete remodeling.
Perhaps we are ready for a non-transcendent solution, as that would seem most appropriate given our worldview in non-religious areas, but I just don’t see any solutions yet.
I’ve been listening carefully, and people who are satisfied with materialism seem to still possess this innate hope and trust; but they are either unable to examine the source of it or they attribute it to something inadequate. For example, someone once told me that for them, meaning came from the freedom to choose their own values instead of having them handed down by God.
But materialism tells us we don’t get to choose. We need to learn to be satisfied with being a river, always choosing the path determined by our landscape. The ability to choose would indeed be transcendental. So I think some number of people realized that without something exceptional, we don’t have freedom. In religions, this is codified as God is necessary for the possibility of free will.
So if I say ‘there is no God’, I’m not denying the existence of a supreme being that could possibly take offense. I’m giving up on freedom, value and purpose. I would like to see, in my lifetime, that those things are already embedded in the material world. Then I would still believe in God—even more so—but my belief would be intellectually justified and consistent within my current (scientific) world view.
But if the truth is that they’re not there, anywhere, I do wonder what it would take to make me stop believing in them.
Without relaunching the whole discussion, there’s one thing I’d like to know: Do you acknowledge that the concepts you’re “giving up on” (‘transcendental’ freedom, value, and purpose, as you define them) are not merely things that don’t exist, but things that can’t exist, like square circles?
I only know that I believe they should exist. I gave up on figuring out if they could exist. Specifically, what I’ve “given up on” is a reconciliation of epistemic and instrumental rationality in this matter.
How’d I do here?
If God doesn’t exist, creating him as the purpose of my existence is something I could get behind.
And then I would want the God of the future to be omnipotent enough to modify the universe so that he existed retroactively, so that the little animals dying in the forest hadn’t been alone, after all. (On the day I intensely tried to stop valuing objective purpose, I realized that this image was one of my strongest and earliest attachments to a framework of objective value.)
God wouldn’t have to modify the universe in any causal way, he would just need to send information back in time (objective-value-information). Curiosity about the possibility of a retroactive God motivated this thread. If it is possible for a God created in the future to propagate backwards in time, then I would rate the probability of God existing currently as quite nearly 1.