A simple bit of amateur philosophising got me this far in my examination of my beliefs. When I say “materialist” I’m not referring to someone who lives their life around the pursuit of material goods (though I’m not one of those either), but one who believes that the material world is all that exists. There is nothing more, the materialist claims, than matter and energy and the hard laws of science, nothing other than what can be examined and known by the measurements of science. I disagree. Why’s that? The simple fact of the experience of consciousness is enough to convince me that the mere movement of atoms and the play of natural forces are not enough to explain the universe.
That there is a me-ness, a consciousness with a subjective experience of the world, that bit of me that looks out through my body, is a fascinating and telling piece of evidence. This isn’t an appeal to scientific evidence. From observing the outward, physical evidence, we humans could just be complex collections of atoms that behave as if we are conscious, when in fact we have no more real awareness than the solar system. However, I know from my own subjective experience that I do have the experience of being alive, the sensation of feeling things, of thinking, and of reacting to an external world. I can only make this argument to others on the basis of the assumption that if I have this subjective experience, then other people do so too. It’s based on the evidence of our experience, of the very fact that we are able to experience things, that I believe there has to be “something more”.
I’ve heard it argued we simply evolved this experience of consciousness at some point in the past once our brains developed sufficient complexity. I simply don’t see how dumb atoms could produce this experience. This isn’t just a lack of imagination on my part – I believe that it is a logical impossibility that the physical could produce something non-physical like consciousness. Some people have suggested that consciousness is an illusion, but I find this argument incoherent. How can it be an illusion unless there is something conscious to be fooled by the illusion? It’s like arguing that you are mistaken in thinking that you are thinking – sheer self-defeating nonsense. This is only a small first step in my investigations, and I’ve only got so far as concluding that there must be “something more” than the plain movement of matter. The second piece of evidence I’ll be considering is the common human belief that certain things are “right” and certain things are “wrong”. Does this indicate some real moral standard, or is morality just a shared delusion or invention? Those are the questions I’m thinking about at the moment.
