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Sam Razali |
I remember my undergraduate days at 'The University of Speaker's Corner' in London (arguably the best university in the whole universe!). After having listened to different speakers and having had discussions and at times heated debates on Sunday afternoons in Speaker's Corner we would go to one of the coffee bars, or occasionally to a pub in Marble Arch area for some more discussions. The centre of our 'Circle' was our much loved and much missed friend Alfred - a man of great knowledge, high intellect and good capacity for thinking. The number of the individuals of the 'Sunday Circle' would vary anything from seven to ten. We had different views and beliefs on philosophical, political, religious and social matters. Roger was both a militant atheist and a staunch materialist - they are usually, but not necessarily, interrelated anyway. Although somewhat arrogant, Roger was reasonably well read, and I must say, also not a bad debater.
On one Sunday while having a debate with one of our friends, Barry (who was sitting next to me), Roger began angrily banging his fist on the table and rattling our tea cups and saying to Barry, 'This is what I believe in [pointing to the table], it exists, it is real, and it is the only reality [referring to the 'reality of the matter'], why can't you understand it?' Barry turned to me and said, 'What do you say to that Sam?'
There are different types of materialism, which I am not going to deal with individually, as this short article is not for that purpose. What I am going to do, however, is to divide 'materialism' as a philosophical belief, into two broad categories: 'Hard Materialism' and 'Soft Materialism', and I am going to talk about them briefly.
Soft materialism is the belief that says all that exists is matter, and if anything else exists it is the product of and dependent on matter. A soft materialist says that it is the matter, material substance, that exists in this world, and in the universe, and if any thing else such as consciousness, soul, mind, spirit (or anything like that) exists, it has emerged from the brain, and on its own cannot have independent existence nor can it have a causal efficacy on the brain.
A hard materialist says that existence is physical and everything that in this universe exists is of material substance; in short, he says that 'existence' (anything that exists) is physical, i.e. of material substance. To a hard materialist 'spirit' or 'soul' means nothing and he or she does not have much time for 'consciousness'; to them 'mind' is the brain or is nothing more than the 'working of the brain'.
A reductionist materialist is necessarily a hard materialist. A reductionist, reductive materialist, says that any complex thing can be understood only by 'reducing' it to simpler parts or to its basic constituents. The 'Reductionist Concept' is the opposite of the 'Holistic Concept'. They are opposites in the sense that reductionism as a concept holds the view that in order to understand the intrecacies and make sense of the complexities of things and uncover their realitieswe must 'reduce' them (hence, he term 'reductionism') to thier simplest elements, basic constituents. Holism (holistic concept) says the reality of anything is in its 'Wholeness' - being 'Whole'. To a reductionist the 'Whole' is the sum of its parts. Holistic concept says, 'The Whole is greater than the sum of its parts'. The operative word in the last statement is the word 'greater', which refers to the interrelations, interconnections, and interactions of the parts that all together result in greater significance, greater importance, greater meaningfulness, hence greater reality and even 'the only reality' of the thing in question. We can, therefore, see why Holism maintains that the reality of a complex structure cannot be fully understood in terms of its disassembled components.
The reductionist materialists are not bothered with this kind of Holistic 'greater-ness' which to them is nothing more than a 'namby-pamby concept'. They have shielded themselves in their 'Newtonian mechanistic paradigm'. And as far as they are concerned the whole working of the world is mechanical (physical) and everything is functioning mechanically (physically), even the Love of a mother to her child, and the compassion of a person to his or her fellow human beings are all physical; they can be traced, they say, back to the brain - to the electrical charges and discharges in certain parts of the brain and to particular neuronal events in the brain. Yes indeed, the materialist concept of the reductionists, reductive materialism, does not end in taking apart a type-writer, or in dismantling a computer or in disassembling a car; they convincedly say that it can also be applied to human being. After all to these people, as has been said, mind is brain or is nothing more than the activities of the brain. Futthermore, they say that our decision-makings, plannings, creativities and even all our emotional feelings are all physical (in the brain) and can be explained in physical terms; and this can be done by examining and analysing some of the neuronal activities in certain parts of our brains. As far as they are concerned it is all brain; there is no Self, Soul, or 'I'------it is all brain. For example, Mary and John who love each other, it is their brains which love each other, and their Love can be traced somewhere in their brains. As for me, henceforth, when my brother, who is in Australia, asks me why I am not getting in touch with him, I know what to tell him: 'My brother don't blame me please, blame my brain; it is my brain (or perhaps my 'genetic makeup') which doesn't miss you or probably it cannot remember you as often as it used to do!!' This is a bankrupt and bizarre concept. It is a philosophical delusion and neuroscientific illusion.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to rejoice. During the past few decades we have been witnessing the decline of Newtonian 'mechanical empire', which lasted for about 300 years. The 'decline' started with the most famous scientific equation of the 20th century put forward by the great man himself, Einstein: E=mc2. He explained that matter is another form of energy; moreover, mass and energy not only are two sides of the same coin but also they are convertible. It was he who shook the foundations of Newton's mechanistic model of reality. Thus, the 'scaffolding' that had been so firmly protecting the mechanistic structure ('the building') for so long began 'to shake'. Then along came the new physics, Quantum mechanics, central to which is 'Wave-Particle duality'. The idea of wave-particle duality is fascinating: it tells us that at the sub-atomic level the particles, Quantum entities, are nothing more than waves; at times these waves appear as particles and then particles become waves and so on. The Quantum world is lively and dynamic, and not a lifeless and mechanistic world.
The materialists, who had been boasting with their claim that matter was the only reality, are beginning to see that their material world is crumbling'. Now they are looking for a 'solid place' to stand on, so that they can mourn the demise of reductionist materialism, or simply reductionism. . But why mourn? Being freed from the shackles of mechanistic world needs rejoicing.
I can still hear Roger banging his fist on the table and saying to Barry, 'This is what I believe in; it is real and it is the only reality'. I wonder where he is now? I shouldn't be surprised if I hear now he is a lecturer in metaphysics in one of London Colleges. And he is! Someone told me! Indeed, Roger, too, like so many materialists, came to realization (and then most probably became convinced) that above the thing called 'matter' and beyond all that there is, there is the 'Ultimate Reality', or as dear Alfred would often refer to It ---'The Final Truth'.