Eliminative Immaterialism

As an appendix to our crowd-pleasing refutation of (or at least polemic against) cognitive eliminative materialism, and in rank contradiction to our own earlier coffee-cup-related demonstration, we offer here, as an olive branch to the nihilists, this Bonus Gedankenexperiment:

Eliminative (Im)materialists

prove the non-existence of coffee-cups

Thm.  Certain credulous people (“Objectual Realists”) posit things they call “physical objects”:  most notoriously, coffee-cups, emblematic of their simple faith.  They fancy that these posits are perfectly solid, and retain their shape over time, and in sooth (but the image is fantastic) can actually confine a hot steaming swirling admittedly hydrodynamically chaotic fluid (the “coffee”)  lastingly within its walls.

They are deluded.

Pf.  [Subjoin all the perfectly valid truths of physics, whereby said “objects” actually resolve to an impossibly porous congeries of quarks, being otherwise mostly empty space.]

How could this ever lead to an objectual phenomenology such as these believers claim?  QED.

Of course, the mere descriptive apparatus of the Proof part  goes on for many pages, and requires several Ph.D.’s to understand;  so by the time we reach the scoffing at the notion that lasting solidity could possibly emerge out of such a mess, we are too brainfagged to object.  And indeed, the Fnorkoids, highly intelligent though disembodied beings from the fifty-ninth dimension, never having experienced anything remotely analogous to a physical “object”, will find the demonstration plausible, if not quite binding.

Nor do we, embodied though we be, stand in better case:  for indeed our physics -- with rare exceptions -- does not in fact derive the macroscopic properties (even physical properties, let alone cognitive or spiritual) of objects (oceans, animals, mugs) save in a very few favorable cases.   Scientists themselves maintain no otherwise:  as Martin Rees modestly concedes, “A star is simpler than an insect.” (Modest, since Rees is an astronomer  not an entomologist.)

Nor is the shortfall likely to be just an artefact of current computational limitations, since, provably, analytic solutions must already give up at the extremely simple level of a classical dynamical system of conservative central forces involving so few as three bodies.  (As the joke goes, quantum theory is already defeated by the zero-body problem -- the spontaneous Heisenberg-born infinities of the quantum foam.)  Why the coffee does not simply quantum-tunnel through the walls of the mug, or climb over its sides like liquid helium, or just fall straight through the bottom as the porosity picture would suggest, is a very hard problem. 

We do have certain knowledge of coffee-cups -- as certain as anything may be, at any rate (short of our Free Will, which is the most certain of all) -- but it is not of analytic or deductive origin.  It depends rather on the sort of… why, let us call it Revelation, that comes with Incarnation.   For it hath so pleased our Maker, not simply to think of us in posse, but actually to shape us concretely out of clay, with His manly hands;  and to place us in His garden,  for the greater glory of all that is, or was, or is to come.   -- Delightedly observing which, and experiencing which, at this very instant, we must note that,  should you desire a witness to His being and His goodness, you need look no further than the bracing mugful of java in your very hands.

Brains in a Vat

You probably know it from “The Matrix”;  the basic idea goes back to Plato at the very least.   Having often alluded to the philosophical issues involved, we won’t mention them here.  (Executive summary  for those pressed for time:  All the truth ye need   is in the Nicene Creed.)

Our quarry here  is,  rather,  literary.   In a philosophical context, “Brains in a Vat” refers to the very hypothetical situation in which we are now, and have always been,  and (crucially) unbeknownst to ourselves:  brains in vat.  All we see is an illusion;  cf. “The Truman Show.”  (Believers in the Creed need not fret about that scenario.)

Quite different is the situation presented in a classic episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, which I watched long ago, as an impressionable lad  in (possibly) ass-flap pyjamas.  (Do these even exist anymore? -- Not sure how long ago it was;  Google didn’t help;  reader clarifications  welcome.)  For better or worse, it has quite tenaciously  stayed with me.

Here, a man conventionally alive in our familiar reality, is facing death.  We get but a glimpse of him, short-tempered with his wife for her incessant smoking.  Rejecting our appointed time of circa threescore and ten, he arranges for his brain to be kept alive in a beaker:  thus seeking eternal life, not on God’s terms, but on Satan’s.  (These deals usually do not turn out well.)

His wish is granted -- as it was for that Cumaean Sibyl, who later was found hanging in a jar.   All we can see is a brain and a single eyeball;  and all that eyeball can see is a cylinder of optics above its liquid home.  Bubble bubble bubble go the oxygen blobs; a beeper monitors its brainwaves.   And now we see the venomously smiling figure of his wife, as she leans over into its field of view.  She promises to take ve-ry good care of him;  and slowly, voluptuously, voluminously -- as the beeper shrills furiously --  blows into that helpless lidless eyeball,  a curling plume of smoke.

~     ~     ~

Again, for the benefit of readers who may have just joined us, this reminder:  We are not, in fact (Donald Trump to the contrary), brains in a vat.  But increasingly, some Americans are acting as though they were, and by their distortion of the culture, drawing others in with them. 

Thus consider this Author’s Note prefacing The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (2005), a fine memoir --  umm, novel, by the exiled American Trevanian:

Although the characters and incidents of this novel are set in a closely observed and carefully described block of Albany, New York, during the Great Depression and the Second World War, a lively desire to thwart the litigious impulses for which Americans have become renowned  obliges me to declare that all the characters and names are products of my imagination and exist in no other reality than my own.

 

~     ~     ~

A contemporary update to the old brains-in-a-vat idea  is a particularly foul exudation of that already-malodorous  brain-fart of physics, is that our entire cosmos might be merely a simulation run by some supersmart aliens with these like, really big computers, in some parallel universe.  This fantasy  has stained the name, in particular, of Martin Rees.

Freeman Dyson points out, in his essay "Many Worlds" (2004; collected in The Scientist as Rebel (2006), that Rees was anticipated in this by the sci-fi writer Olaf Stapledon.  Stapledon enjoys a high reputation among those who don’t generally read schlock science-fiction;  personally  I found him unreadable.