The Materialist Superstition
by
George Gilder
George Gilder is a Senior Fellow of the Seattle-based
Discovery Institute, where he chairs the program on
high technology and the future of public policy
The continued prevalence of the materialist superstition was manifest in a recent issue of
Time magazine titled "In Search of the Mind."(1) The cover story for the issue
authoritatively declaimed that "consciousness may be nothing more than an evanescent
by-product of more mundane, wholly physical processes." According to one medical
school neuroscientist cited in the article, "being awake or being conscious is nothing but a
dreamlike state" that has "no objective reality" because we can "never actually touch or
measure it."
Here we have a good example of what C.S. Lewis called "nothing buttery," the modern
practice of dismissing non-material qualities as "nothing but…" some lower physical
property.(2) Time's story reflects the stranglehold on the modern mind of induction - the
belief that the only foundation for knowledge is our direct sensory experience.
The Time article contains strong assertions of the materialistic superstition in medical
science. But of course the materialist superstition also prevails on college campuses in the
many varieties of Marxism and behavioral psychology and logical positivism that flourish
there. We likewise find the materialist superstition in psychology with the vision that the
pleasure principle - based essentially on physiological gratification - is a prime motive of
human behavior. And we find it in economics through the notion that human beings are
dominantly self-interested actors optimizing for pleasure, and that you can thus create a
kind of economic calculus governed by the desire for pleasure.
The materialist superstition has long roots in Western culture. Indeed, for three hundred
years most intellectuals have been dedicated to its agenda of self-destruction by seeking to
overthrow and suppression of mind. Today, however, we have the chance to overcome
this superstition and to restore the culture of our time. But to do so we must battle the most
deeply entrenched beliefs of the secular intelligentsia that have come to dominate the
media, the culture, and the universities.
The effort to overthrow mind and replace it with inert, blind, and meaningless matter
originated in the triumph of Newtonian physics in the seventeenth century. Isaac Newton
was himself a deist, but he had a vision of the world that was profoundly materialistic and
determinist. He believed that at the basis of the universe were solid, immutable,
impenetrable, inert, mindless, blind bits of matter. Furthermore, he maintained that the
universe was built up from these bits of matter in a great determinist machine, like the
workings of a clock. Although he acknowledged the need for a watchmaker - God, this
need was readily rejected by followers who exulted in the enormous power over nature
that Newtonian machines give them in an immediate way. The Newtonian world was one in
which choice played no role. Pierre Laplace followed Newtonian physics to its logical
conclusion with his famous assertion that if he knew at one instant the positions and
motions of every particle in the universe, he could calculate the entire past and future of the
human race.
Since Man subsists not on his practical possibilities but on his ultimate philosophies,
materialist determinism soon became the implicit religion of science and the most profound
enemy of all other religion and morality. What mattered was not the practicality but the
teleology and eschatology of determinist science: the goal of a thinking machine, the
reduction of the brain to a material paradigm, the apparently continuing march of
knowledge toward a fully mechanistic determinism. Even as the scientist promised to
prolong life and enrich its pleasures, he seemed resolved to destroy its meaning.
The computer initially contributed to this vision of materialist determinism, because even
human intelligence, the unique special claim of the species on its road to ruin, was now seen
as likely to succumb to a mechanistic rival. In gaining dominion over the world, we worried
about losing control of our own machines.
When transistor switching speeds plummeted into the picosecond range (trillionths of a
second), it seemed plausible to many analysts that for all its user friendliness and endearing
idiosyncrasies - such as "common sense" - the brain was no longer "merely a computer,"
but was in fact far inferior to computers in speed and computing power. Theorists
estimated that the human brain contains some ten billion neurons (a number of switching
devices within the reach of the supercomputing technology of the next decade) and each
neuron switches at only one millionth of the speed of an advanced transistor.
The computer thus lent enormous new authority to the determinist vision. Not only could it
be used to achieve enormous new advances across the range of the scientific enterprise,
but the computer itself constituted a paradigm for comprehending the very fabric of thought
in materialist terms. The computer seemed to subordinate thoughts themselves to things,
mind to matter, soul to solid state physics. It seemed to unmask the mind and demystify it,
and thus to banish sacred and spiritual powers from the world.
Deeply believing - whether at some subconscious level or in a conscious paradigm of
research - that human mystery of nature would end by destroying the mystery of human
nature, the Western intelligentsia gullibly adopted a medley of materialist determinisms.
From Marxism to behavioralism, from routine evolutionism to logical positivism, from
deconstructionism to reflex psychology, scientists and scholars produced an unending
stream of theories that reduced man to a mechanism.
Artists always tend to follow the prevailing science, often with a lag as long as a century.
Converging on the culture from every hall of academe, scientific determinism prompted a
bizarre stream of doomladen or absurdist works of art and literature. The most prestigious
novelists - from William Faulkner and George Orwell to John O'Hara and Robert Stone -
left man in the twentieth century as arrant a victim of inexorable fate as he was in the great
god-ruled tragedies of the ancient Greeks.
The counterpart of determinism was existentialism. With history a saga of blind fate,
heroism emerged chiefly as anarchic revolt by defiant individuals, supermen who leaped
onto the stage abandoned by the gods and hurled thunderbolts of rebellion at the
clockwork world. But by their very desperation and frenzy - and ultimate futility - the
existentialist rebels seemed to vindicate the determinist philosophers.
With science believed to be abandoning man, and the dignity of the soul, men rose up to
claim the dignity of science for squalid temporal schemes of the state and to ascribe soul to
the new machines. After contributing indispensably to the rise of science, religions began
renouncing the great human enterprise of understanding and mastering nature, and thus
failed to comprehend the real message of the scientific revelation of God.
Laboring desperately to reassemble the smithereens of shattered grail of faith, the public
clutched at a new pagan polytheism. Materialist intellectuals widely worshipped the god of
the machine, artists reveled in the god of the senses, and churches retreated to a
pre-industrial vision of an ecological Eden. Even the most sophisticated apologists of
religions expressed a nostalgia for Newton's cosmos as a causal clockwork and God as a
watchmaker.
People came to believe in a religion that resembles very closely that of the pygmies in the
jungle; in other words, they believe only in things that they can see, and touch, and
measure. The pygmies worship the sun, the trees, and the world; the modern intellectuals
worship the measurable, palpable, visible, mechanical kinds of phenomena that their senses
can present to them, and deny as a matter of principle all dimensions beyond these
domains. The people in the jungle, however, have at least this advantage: they believe that
the trees are fundamentally alive.
The underlying vision emerging from the triumph of materialism was one of death.
Modernscience granted us incomparable riches, but only as part of a Faustian pact: a deal
with the devil whereby we gained wondrous machines in exchange for our very souls.
Plunging into the world of modern science, from this point of view, we lost first our human
dignity and then our free will. The physical world was ultimately a tomb: the death site of
both God and man. God died with the eclipse of the Creator and the end of meaning. With
the death of human dignity and uniqueness, man degenerated into a mere intelligent machine
that differed from a computer chiefly by thinking more slowly and by more quickly and
irremediably wearing out. Ironically, as the capstone of the nihilist enterprise, science as a
creation of free human minds also perished.
Yet all this anguish and ardor - all the fatalist philosophies of nihilism and existentialism -
were mere delusions arising from the great modern superstition of materialism, a
superstition that has now been refuted by an entire century of modern science and by the
findings of computer theory itself. For the central fact of the twentieth century is not the
overthrow of mind, but the overthrow of matter.
The overthrow of matter reached its climax in the physical sciences when quantum theory
capsized the rules that once governed and identified all solid objects. Scientists no longer
see the foundation of all matter as inert, blind, impenetrable, blank particles. Rather,
physicists now agree that matter derives from waves, fields, and probabilities. To
comprehend nature, we have to stop thinking of the world as basically material and begin
imagining it as a manifestation of consciousness, suffused with sparks of informative energy.
The fundamental entities in quantum theory are wave-particles, a profound paradox that
was first launched in 1887 when Albert Michelson and E.W. Morley did their famous
experiments that showed that there is no ether in the universe. Until the experiments of
Michelson and Morley, the fundamental belief was that the universe is filled with solid
matter, which would be needed as the medium through which light waves could propagate.
Earlier experiments had demonstrated conclusively that light is a wave; it was assumed,
therefore, that there must be a material medium through which the waves of light could
travel. By dispelling the notion of ether as the luminiferous medium bearing light, Michelson
and Morley effectively banished most of the matter from the universe.
Light thus emerged as an esoteric paradox of waves without substance traveling at a fixed
speed in relation to a medium without substance. In 1905, in a Nobel Prize-winning paper,
Albert Einstein declared that if there was no ether, light could not be a wave. It had nothing
to wave through. Extending the insight of another earlier researcher, Max Planck, Einstein
said that light consisted of quanta - packets of energy - that he called photons. Although
said to be "particles," photons observed the equations of wave motion developed by James
Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s. They seemed to be a cross between a wave and a particle.
In terms both of classical physics and of human observation, this wave-particle cross was
an impossible contradiction. Waves ripple infinitely forth through a material medium;
particles are single points of matter. At once definite and infinite, a particle that is also a
wave defies our sensory experience. Newton's universe, built of solid, hard, impenetrable,
movable particles was foundering.
The overthrow of matter afflicted the theory of physics with contradiction and paradox. In
successive steps, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, and others showed
that not only light, but also electrons, protons, neutrons, and other atomic "particles"
likewise exhibited wave action. Eventually, the paradoxical duality of wave-particles would
come to exclude all materialist logic; in the usual way, quantum physics does not make
materialist sense.
Quantum physics can make sense, however, if it is treated in part as a domain of ideas,
governed less by the laws of matter than by the laws of mind. The paradoxical stuff of the
quantum domain, atomic phenomena seem to represent the still mysterious domain
between matter and mind, where matter evanesces into probability fields of information and
mind assumes the physical forms of waves and particles. Even paradox, a perplexity for
things, is a relatively routine property of thoughts. Conceiving of the quantum world as a
domain of ideas, we make it accessible to our minds. The quantum atom is largely an atom
of information, a rich domain of information at the foundation of matter.
Thus, the fundamental entity in quantum theory is a cross, a cross between a wave, which
is infinite in extent, propagating infinitely through its surrounding medium, and a particle, a
point of no extent. All the universe is based on these crosses of waves and particles which
are utterly paradoxical, but which accord very deeply with the fundamental paradoxes of
the Christian religion: the Word made flesh, the God-Man, the eternal and the temporal,
the infinite and the particular. In place of what had been an inert, blind bit of matter at the
foundation of the universe, we find a cross.
If the discovery of the wave-particle was the first great breakthrough in the battle against
materialism, the second breakthrough came in 1975, when neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield
of Princeton reported findings that the historic saga of the downfall of materialism may rival
even the experiments of Michelson and Morley. While Michelson and Morley combed the
cosmos seeking signs of material ether, Penfield pored through the material brain looking
for signs of mind.
Penfield's researches were altogether as unique and unprecedented as the ether tests. He
performed surgery on 1,132 epileptics over a thirty-year period. After removing a part of
the skull of the patient under anesthesia, he would bring him back to full consciousness.
Then Penfield would explore the brain widely with an electronic probe. Since the brain
lacks sensitivity, the patient, though fully alert, could feel no physical pain.
With the patient guiding the surgeon's explorations and reporting the results of stimuli at
different cerebral sites, the doctor would often find and remove the cause of the epilepsy.
In the process of pursuing this procedure with more than a thousand patients, Penfield
gained a unique and voluminous body of data on the responses of different parts of the
brain to an electrical stimulus. Combining these experimental findings with extensive studies
of epileptic effects - also consisting of localized electrical bombardment of regions of the
brain - Penfield made many original contributions to the mapping of brain functions. But as
in the case of Michelson and Morley's ether tests, more important than all his findings was
a momentous absence. Nowhere in the brain did he discover any evidence of mind : the
consciously deciding, willing, imagining, and creative force in human thought.
Penfield summed up his conclusion:
The electrode can present to the patient various crude sensations. It can cause him
to turn head and eyes, or to move the limbs, or to vocalize and swallow. It may recall
vivid re-experience of the past or present to him an illusion that present experience
is familiar, or that the things he sees are growing large and coming near. But he
remains aloof. He passes judgment on it all. He says," things are growing larger"
but he does not move for fear of being run over. If the electrode moves his right
hand, he does not say " I wanted to move it." He may, however, reach over with the
left hand and oppose his action.
Penfield found that the content of consciousness could be selectively altered by outside
manipulation. But however much he probed, he could not enter consciousness itself. He
could not find the mind or invade its autonomy. Penfield concludes: "The patient's mind,
which is considering the situation in such an aloof and critical manner, can only be
something quite apart from neuronal reflex action …. Although the content of
consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not."
Like Michelson and Morley before him, Penfield began his investigations with the goal of
proving the materialist superstition. Like them, he failed utterly. "I like other scientists have
struggled to prove that the brain accounts for the mind." Instead, he showed that the critical
elements of mind - consciousness, will, commitment, decision, and reason - are not locally
manifest in the brain.
The intruding scientist could affect contents but not consciousness. The brain's activity
always occurred within the dominating and enveloping radiance of an autonomous mind.
Some epileptic seizures would break the brain's connection with the mind. As a result, the
person would become an automaton. Like a programmed computer, he could proceed
with his existing activities - walk down a street or even drive a car. But he could not
change his course or adapt to unexpected developments.
While Penfield's electrodes could cause specific events, he could not usurp awareness of
them; the patient could always distinguish between authentic mental processes he had
willed and processes evoked by the probe. Stampedes of electrons could not cause a
conscious whim in the mind, but a whim of the consciousness could cause stampedes of
organized electrical and chemical activity in the brain.
Penfield's book is entitled The Mysteries of the Mind(3), but he did not purport to have
resolved them before he died. However, his conclusion accords with the reports of
anguished armies of other investigators throughout the domain of cognitive science,
neurophysiology, and artificial intelligence.
Computer pioneer Norbert Wiener made the essential point as early as 1948: "The
mechanical brain does not secrete thought 'as the liver does bile,' as the earlier materialists
claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy as the muscle puts out its activity.
Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism that does not admit this
can survive at the present day."
The brain is a kind of computer. But it differs sharply from existing electronic computers.
The kind of electrical probe used by Penfield would utterly scramble a microprocessor.
Unlike a computer, the brain claimed a level of consciousness transcending local neuronal
activity.
If the brain cannot function without a human mind, it should not be surprising that a
computer cannot function without a human mind either. The idea of the computer as a mind
is an idol of the materialist superstition. The human brain serves the mind. The artificial
intelligence vanguard wanted to show that the mind was merely a brain in order to support
the feasibility of building computer minds. But the industry will now have to give up its goal
of usurping mind and focus more effectively on serving it, ass the brain does.
In his book, Penfield gave a clearer view of the relationship between mind, brain, and
computer: "Because it seems to me certain that it will always be quite impossible to explain
the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain … and because a computer
(which the brain is) must be programmed and operated by an agency capable of
independent understanding, I am forced to choose the proposition that our being is to be
explained on the basis of two fundamental elements." He concluded: "The mind seems to
act independently of the brain in the same sense that a programmer acts independently of
this computer, how ever much he may depend upon the action of that computer for certain
purposes." Penfield's researches were compelling and unprecedented. But it is impossible
to prove a negative. That his elaborate probes and epileptic bombardments failed to find
the mind in neuronal activity does not establish that the mind is not matter.
In the long run, the quantum revolution described earlier provides a more powerful reason
for moving beyond the materialist superstition. As we have seen, in the atomic domain we
do not find Newton's lifeless, opaque, inert, and impenetrable bits of matter. We find a high
drama of richly intelligible activity, shaped by mathematical possibilities and probabilities,
where electrons combine and disappear without occupying conventional time or space, and
things obey the laws of mind rather than the laws of matter. Things combine and collapse,
emerge and vanish, like tokens of thought more than like particles of mass. In other words,
both at the highest levels of nature where meanings, purposes, structures, functions, and
other conceptual entities prevail, so at the fundamental level of physical reality, thought
dominates things.
The reverberations of this change sweep through social science as well as natural science.
Gone is the view of a thermodynamic world economy, dominated by "natural resources"
being turned to entropy and waste by human extraction and use. Once seen as a physical
system tending toward exhaustion and decline, the world economy has clearly emerged as
an intellectual system driven by knowledge. The key fact of knowledge is that it is
anti-entropic: it accumulates and compounds as it is used. Technological and scientific
enterprise, so it turns out in the age of the quantum, generates gains in new learning and
ideas that dwarf the loss of resources and dissipation of energy. The efforts that ended in
writing "E=mc^2" or in contriving the formula for a new photovoltaic cell or in inventing a
design for a silicon compiler - or in spreading the message of a moral God - are not
usefully analyzed in the images of entropy. To see the world primarily in terms of its waste
products is possibly the most perverse vision in the history of science. The history of ideas
cannot be comprehended as an entropic cycle of the production and disposal of paper
products.
The materialist superstition succumbs to an increasing recognition that the means of
production in capitalism are not chiefly land, labor, and machines, present in all systems,
but emancipated human intelligence. Capitalism - supremely the mind-centered system -
finds the driving force of its growth is innovation and discovery. In the age of the
microcosm, value added shifts rapidly from the extraction, movement, manipulation, and
exhaustion of mass to the creative accumulation of information and ideas.
At the heart of this progress is a bold human sacrifice. After centuries of struggle against
the elements - human masses pushing and pulling on massive objects at the behest of
armed rulers - man stopped hoarding gold and jewels, land and labor. He stopped trusting
only the things he could touch and feel. He stopped believing only his eyes and ears. At last
relinquishing the sensory world, he gained access to a higher power and truth. And all
those things are being added unto him.
Overthrowing the superstitions of materialism - of anthropomorphic physics, of triumphant
entropy, of class conflict and exploitation, of national and tribal bigotry - modern man is
injecting the universe with the germ of his intelligence, the spoor of his mind. Sloughing off
every layer of macrocosmic apparatus, the computer will ultimately collapse to a pinhead
that can respond to the human voice. In this form, human intelligence can be transmitted to
any tool or appliance, to any part of our environment. Thus the triumph of the computer
does not dehumanize the world; it makes our environment more human. We can overcome
our alienation from things. We can escape our absorption in the trivialities of subsistence.
We can rise to the large challenges of life.
Giving up the superficial comforts of a human scale world, mankind moves to mindscale. In
the image of his creator, he exalts the truly human - and godlike - dimension of his greatest
gift from the creator: his creativity. Giving up the material idols and totems in his ken, he is
gaining at last his promised dominion over the world and its creatures.
The key lessons of the era spring from an understanding of hierarchy and freedom rather
than of topology and determinism. Just as the large integrated circuits at the heart of
computers cannot be designed from the bottom up, just as evolution could not have
occurred from the bottom up alone, the human mind cannot be understood without a clear
comprehension of the hierarchical structure of the universe.
The central error of materialism is to subordinate a higher level of creative activity to a
lower one: the dramas of humanity to the determinations of lifeless and unintelligible
monads of matter. Opening the atom to find a world of information, we discover that the
inverted hierarchies of materialism are as false empirically as the ancient philosophers found
them bankrupt logically. In the hierarchies of nature, the higher orders cannot be reduced
to the sum of their parts. Even the concept of wholes and parts is misleading; every part is
also a whole and every whole is also a part in a higher order of meaning.
The long dream of physicists that by studying the structure of atoms we could comprehend
the purpose of nature, or the dream of biologists that the study of evolution would reveal
the meaning of life, have both proved false. In the same way, neither the physics nor the
chemistry of DNA will explain the code of genetic information any more than the analysis
of spectrograms will reveal the meaning of a word or phrase.
Here we can see how the computer reinforces rather than replaces the human mind. Far
from a model of human intelligence that might excel its creator, the computer offers a very
limited perspective on mind. The usual materialist assumption is that the brain, the
hardware, comes first and mind somehow emerges from it. But the computer offers a
contrary example. The computer design itself is a software program and determines the
structure of the electronic circuitry that constitutes the computer. Similarly, the brain
consists of a rich panoply of neurophysiological processes that serve as analogs for
physical experience and perception. Yet neither system can function as an information tool
without a consciousness to interpret the information.
Knowing the location of every electronic charge and connection in either brain or computer
gives scarcely a clue of its purpose. It is the human mind that brings meaning or semantic
content to the syntax of the machine, whether hardware, software, or wetware. The higher
level languages of software lend significance to the dumb electrons circulating through the
system. But the language is still sterile until it is translated by the human consciousness.
Neither brain nor computer could think without an embracing presence of mind. The higher
level languages of software do not obviate the need for a controlling intelligence that
transcends them.
Any lower level of existence finds meaning only in higher orders outside itself. Physics finds
meaning largely in chemistry, chemistry in biology, biology in man, and man both in
knowledge and culture and in that higher level of meaning ordained by God. The study of
science is thrilling and rewarding on its own level and imparts new powers and technologies
for action on higher levels. But movement up a hierarchy leads to domains of increasing
freedom and dignity and spiritual fulfillment, not into a materialist or determinist trap.
The entire history of technology suggests a similar awakening to new powers and horizons,
new freedoms and opportunities. The new age of intelligent machines will enhance and
empower humanity, making possible new ventures into outer space and new insights into
atomic structure. It will relieve man of much of his most onerous and unsatisfying work. It
will extend his lifespan and enrich his perceptual reach. It will enlarge his freedom and his
global command. It will diminish despots and exploiters. It may even improve music and
philosophy.
By overthrowing matter, humanity will also be able to escape from the traps and
compulsions of pleasure into a higher morality of spirit. The pleasure principle is the
governing force of a physical determinism, whether in psychology, sociology, or
economics. Physiologically defined, pleasure makes the materialist world go round.
Optimizing for bodily pleasure, human beings can take their place in a determinist scheme.
Believing in determinism, they can escape the burdens of a higher morality. Pleasure
seeking is entropy in social life. It leads to the image of dissipation as the effect of
happiness. By contrast, the exaltation of mind and spirit leads to a higher order of
experience and a richer access of power than any of the forms of physical dominance and
exploitation that pervade the principles of material pleasure.
Matter is subordinate to mind and spirit and can only be comprehended by free men and
women. As computers master new levels of the hierarchy of knowledge, human beings can
also rise to new pinnacles of vision and power and discover new continents of higher truth.
The computer will give mankind new vessels to rule the waves of possibility. Its promise
can be betrayed only by the abandonment of the freedom and faith that made it possible.
