This is a thought-chain on philosophical materialism, and not the kind of materialism where someone prefers physical possessions over other values. In philosophy, a materialist is someone that believes that only physical matter exists, and everything can be explained by physical interactions.
I find myself in this camp, even though I know we don’t currently have good explanations for many phenomena in our world (consciousness, qualia, abiogenesis, pre-big bang cosmology etc.). I think that most people are not materialists, and have intuitions about souls and the afterlife that have been passed down through culture, tradition and religion. The notion of materialism finds resistance in a mind that has these intuitions; the stronger the intuition, the stronger the resistance. Materialism doesn’t have a strict opposite, but since most people believe in something other than the material, I’ll generalise them as Supernaturalists: those who believe there is something beyond the natural world.
Supernaturalists struggle with the idea of materialism because of the nature of our subjectiveness. We experience things and we don’t know why. We have no inkling, no idea how we have attained qualia or consciousness. And yet we have it. The Materialist does not deny that we have these things. The Materialist appreciates that Nature, in all her glory and complexity, can arrive at such marvels through the vast combinatorial space of atoms, compounds, and fundamental forces. The Supernaturalist looks at Nature and thinks she is inert and incapable; only random, only foolish, only destructive.
An irony is that the Supernaturalist often accuses the Materialist of being reductionist by themselves being reductionist. They think that life cannot be material because the material world is incapable of producing life! And yet, when we look around material life is precisely what we see, and how much more clearly in our modern world? Material machinery abounds!
Another irony is that historically the Supernaturalist’s intuitions about non-human life have not granted our animal cousins an immaterial soul. The pig, chicken, sheep and cow are slaughtered by the billions for our consumption - to where do they depart? Our intuitions say nowhere, and rightfully so. But then you have granted material machinery that is incredibly complex, conscious, capable of qualia and experience. And the more you learn about animal intelligence the more you realize how much they are like us. So even the Supernaturalist has premise for complex material machinery that needs no immaterial component to function!
It is difficult to extend that premise to ourselves. I do not think this is the fault of materialism, but of our deeply ingrained supernaturalistic intuitions. Many Supernaturalists shudder at encroaching nihilism or the destruction of values and principles, should they accept materialism. But that need not be the fear. If all is material, then the material encompasses both meaning and values. Our material minds are capable of deriving and generating these necessities.
What we know is that Life, The Universe, and Everything is at least material. Our biological chemistry is deeply (if not entirely) responsible for the phenomena that are our thoughts, experiences and emotions. We know that we can alter these things with substances. We know that if the machinery stops, so do those phenomena. There seems to me precious little left for the soul to even do. If heaven is not real and you are not animated by an immortal soul, then coming to terms with this means you are losing something you never had.
So nothing matters? No!
Everything is matter.
