The primacy of the physical

As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.

--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)


You don't need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.

--Robert Anton Wilson


In philosophy, the central conflict is between the concept of the primacy of matter and the concept of the primacy of mind, or at least ideas (''idealism''). Philosophical materialism says that all of existence is matter and the interactions of matter. In this worldview, even minds, ideas, emotions, and meaning are manifestations of interactions of appropriately organised matter. Philosophical idealism, on the other hand, posits that there are ''non-physical'' entities that precede and are more ''fundamental'' than matter; minds and ideas can have their own independent existence. One often hears about mathematicians who regard numbers as ''real things'', or of New Age authors who dress their claims in the language of quantum mechanics to claim that ''we change the world just by thinking about it'', or that ''the moon doesn't exist until we think about it''.

I've written a bit about minds, levels of abstraction, and evolving physical systems. Now let me try to synthesise all this and say why the physical must necessarily precede ideas.

Like I've said before, minds are themselves high-level, abstract ways of viewing physical systems (with the system in this case being the brain and its associated sensory apparatus). There is no such thing as a non-physical, disembodied mind (and hence no such thing as a personal, ''immaterial'' God. Nor can there be).

Still, many would persist and claim that there is a case to be made for regarding a non-physical ''system'' or some other entity (or ''pure being'') as a means by which ideas can exist in some realm devoid of any physical processes. This is taken to be a more reasonable, watered-down position than that of positing an ''immaterial mind''. In reality, it is just about as untenable as the notion of a disembodied mind, and in a sense is even more so.

Firstly, we are left wondering how such ''non-physical'' ''things'' could ever interact with the world of matter and energy. Even if they could exist, the existence of these ''things'' would be completely superfluous. Secondly, to speak of ''non-physical systems'' is to invoke something while denying a necessary condition for its very existence. There is, in the idealist formulation, nothing to do the idea-ing. Once you conjure that ideas can exist outside of physical systems in some ''realm'' by themselves, then you are denying the very thing that gives them any coherence (indeed, existence) in the first place: for how does something even qualify as an idea if it isn't the product of a mind that formulates and conceives of it? Indeed, what in this scheme could serve as the linkage between non-physical ideas and material things if not volition? What about mind could you then not suppose is allowed to exist in this non-physical space if ideas can? Thus, a mind is brought inexorably back into the proceedings - but as I've mentioned, a mind cannot exist as a non-physical, disembodied entity either. There are other problems with ''free-floating ideas'': ideas require organisation in the form of an interrelation among their constituent components (sub-ideas, sub-sub-ideas, and so on) and between each other (ideas are meaningless - that is, they convey nothing - unless they exist against the backdrop of other ideas). So them, ideas are predicated upon structure. It is utterly nonsensical to talk about non-physical structure, if by that one means structure in the complete and utter absence of matter and energy, which is what philosophical idealism does posit.

Concepts exist as abstractions, as I have alluded to; to speak of a concept that does not ultimately exist as a pattern on some substrate is the sheerest of lunacy. Substrate-neutral concepts, on the other hand, make sense, because these only require the presence of appropriately organised matter and the attendant processes that make them meaningful by providing the required system of interrelations. The medium itself need not matter; it is the existence of a medium that is important.

One might still ask: isn't it true that artefacts can embody ideas, hence giving efficacy to the notion of ideas as something like Platonic essences that exist outside of matter? The answer is: No, absolutely not. The first part is correct: artefacts can indeed embody ideas. This is so whether the people who built the artefacts are alive or not, or whether the artefacts exist in a world completely devoid of people (say, after a mass extinction has wiped out every last human being on the planet Earth). They embody the ideas of people who necessarily once existed. There is nothing at all mysterious or mystical about that (and hence no need to weave stories that try to show that there is something qualitatively different at play here in the form of ''separately existing ideas''). But that they embody ideas is only because they are lumps of matter that exhibit patterns representing abstractions (''ideas'') that someone took to be meaningful and worth preserving (and meaning is itself, ultimately, an abstraction, for the same reason that ideas are: there must be some entity for which interacting with the world at the level of these ontological categories has efficacy, and for these entities to effect upon the world some means of reproducing the conditions that gave those categories significance. In other words, highly complex physical systems that go by the name of ''human beings''. Artefacts only exist because they are the end product of a long and arduous process of cumulative evolution.

(On a related side note, if an artefact embodies a wrong idea, does that mean that the idealist universe is therefore filled with endless permutations of wrong ideas? But then one needs to invoke a generating mechanism that produces the ideas and a sorting and selecting mechanism that chooses those ideas that are to be approximated in the physical universe. Is there really any need to pay these notions the slightest bit of heed?)

So are ideas, then, real? Yes, they exist (and are therefore real), but not in the Platonic sense that many people seem to think flows nonchalantly from something like the aforementioned considerations (by the way, there is a nauseating cliche that ''all philosophy is a footnote to Plato''. The more we come to see how the universe and the mind work, the greater should we appreciate that Plato's essentialist philosophy is most useful in the sense of showing us how not to think about these things). Ideas are indeed ''non-physical'' in one important sense - they are expressions of patterns that ''emerge'' in the universe as a result of interactions at different levels of physical organisation - but this gives not one iota of credence to the other (extremely different) sense of ''non-physical' - that they can exist ''by themselves'' devoid of some ultimate material basis.

The existence of emergent properties and entities in the world does nothing to bolster the case for Platonic essences. The latter are supposed to be ''basic'' things; that is, they already exist, and provide a blueprint, as it were, for physical instantiations of themselves. Their physical equivalents are taken to be imperfect approximations of the ''ideal''. Emergent properties are the result of lower-level interactions that give rise to something that can be treated as though it has a life of its own at the ontological category we are considering. It would make no sense, for example, to try to understand how a spider differs from a tortoise by going down to the level of the quarks composing the nuclei of the atoms in their cells. One needs to adopt a view that takes into account history and process, as well as extant higher level structure, to answer such questions (incorporating a sort of ''design stance'', as Daniel Dennett says, where we are concerned about phenomena at higher ontological categories than at the basest levels. Incidentally, this is also why exhortations to find a ''theory of everything'' are arrogant nonsense. We can immediately appreciate the absurdity of, for example, understanding a political system via recourse to quantum mechanics or string theory, or to understand how a fascist differs from a communist or how Kennedy differs from Bush by understanding the Big Bang). Specifically, the very process that gave rise to the types of things that people have wanted to lump into idealist categories - biological evolution - is deeply anathema to essences, namely for the following reasons: continuity, flux, and qualitative change. Essentialism in biology is actually a disguised way of invoking creationism. Creationists believe that the world is inhabited by representatives of God's idealist forms. Even those religious folks who accept evolution have, as Richard Dawkins has said, failed to have their consciousness raised; they will suppose that ''this is God's way of making us'', completely missing out on the central philosophical import of evolution through cumulative selection: that mindless entities interacting in mindless ways can bridge the gap between the world of dumb, unthinking, primeval matter and the world of purpose and meaning.

To use Daniel Dennett's terminology: Sky Hooks explain nothing. You need Cranes to do the actual work, and work is what you want to track when building a model of anything. Idealists are trying to lift something from the physical universe and then make it do work outside of its proper domain; they are assuming that this ''thing'' can have efficacy outside of the conditions that give it any semblance of coherence in the first place. But when they do this, they are forced to appeal to increasingly nebulous terms of discourse like ''pure being''. These terms eventually become so diluted of any structure or relation to observed phenomena that they end up explaining less and less the more and more they are invoked. Idealism is thoroughly unscientific, in spite of the fact that many clever theologians have invested a great deal of time and intellect trying to give their beliefs a ''rational'' basis. In fact, it could be said that these theologians have thought themselves out of a good argument.

Idealism might make nice poetry; it can act as a good approximation in day-to-day life. But its central tenets are complete bunk.


Next: God as a material force.