Recommended Reading Part IV: Metaphysics

The Literary Journey that Led Me to Post-Physicalism

Welcome to the four installment of our “post-physicalist physiocratic curriculum.” In the three prior installments, we have discussed moral philosophy, anthrophysiocracy, and economics. Today we turn our attention to metaphysics, specifically to a set of competing schools we will call physicalism and post-physicalism.

Physicalism is a mainstream philosophical position arguing that everything about the universe, including all aspects of the human mind and consciousness, can be explained by physical processes and phenomena. Physicalism used to be (and sometimes still is) called "materialist monism," but since “materialism” has nowadays taken on connotations of consumerist greed, physicalism is nowadays my preferred term. It was the prevailing worldview of the West in the 20th century and has continued to dominate the 21st century. It might be summarized as the belief that “this world is all there is.”

Post-physicalism is a dissident position arguing that physicalism cannot explain all aspects of existence, such as consciousness, qualia, free will, and other mental phenomena. Post-physicalism is a broad school that includes a range of metaphysical positions, including metaphysical dualism, hylomorphism, monistic idealism, neutral monism, panpsychism, and other even more obscure doctrines. The common thread among post-physicalist theories is the belief that while physical explanations of the universe are critically important, they do not capture the full spectrum of what exists. It might be summarized as the belief that “there is something more.”

So which position is correct? This is no trivial question. Everything from the existence of God, the reality of evolution, the meaning of life, and the capabilities of the human made are at stake. As I wrote in Why Has Our World Gone So Crazy?, the stakes of this debate are profound:

[If physicalism is true], then nature is purely physical, and that pure physicality extends to human consciousness. Neither cosmos or humanity has any teleology. Free will is an illusion and consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain-matter. Human thought is merely computation, and will be replaced by machine thought as AI improves.

[If post-physicalism is true] then materialist-monism has deeply misled us about the nature of our universe and ourselves. Nature is not purely material: something else, perhaps a Platonic realm, exists. Humans do something more than mere computation when they think, and do something more than obey cause and effect when they make choices.

Let’s get to it.

Old Atheism, New Atheism, and Counter-Atheism

I first began to think seriously about religion when I was in high school. Like most American young men in the late 1980s I was a “default Christian,” vaguely believing in the existence of God but without any particular theological insight. By the time I graduated law school in 2000, I was a committed atheist. My atheism begin with the premature death of my father to cancer, which left me questioning my faith and demanding God explain Himself.¹ Since He didn’t, I turned to books to justify my lack of faith. It is with these books that our curriculum begins.

Ayn Rand, of course, provided many such arguments; since I’ve already recommended a number of her philosophical work, I won’t add any more to the list. Instead I will recommend Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian. While I don’t endorse Bertrand Russell’s thought in general, this book itself is a highly accessible “Old Atheist” critique of Christianity from the point of view of an early 20th century materialist.

By the early 2000s, the New Atheists had risen to the fore. Of their voluminous online and published writings, the two I recommend are Richard Dawkin’s 2006 book The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 book God Is Not Great. Dawkin’s evolutionary work was very influential on me during law school (which is evident in my philosophy of reproductive perfectionism) and he provides a modern critique of Christianity from the point of a committed Darwinian materialist. Hitchens’ work is less rigorous and less scientific, but - like all of his work - exceptionally well written and delightfully polemic. It’s a fun read.

Having now examined Old and New Atheism, our curricular focus turns to Counter-Atheism, specifically Vox Day’s 2008 manifesto Irrational Atheist. When I read Irrational Atheist I had been a long-time reader of Vox’s blog, and before that, his articles on WorldNetDaily. I read his book to understand, in part, why such a smart fellow was a believer.

Day’s explicit goal in publishing this book was to demolish the arguments of the New Atheists and he did so in a very compelling fashion. Day happens to be (among other things) a professional game designer like me. His argument for “God as a game designer” was the first theistic apologia I ever read that shook my confidence in atheism. When it pointed out that the materialist doctrine that “we might be living in a simulation!” (which I accepted) was an open door to theism, that was a eureka moment for me:

[W]hen we were developing TacAI’s in the mid-’90s, we made use of an evolutionary approach in developing our algorithms. Instead of providing the AI with a detailed script, we gave it a few simple rules designed to encourage it to preserve itself while trying to destroy its enemies and then released it in the little virtual war lab. The AIs that acquitted themselves well were saved, those that didn’t were junked. Over time, this unnatural selection led to increasingly effective algorithms that we then incorporated into the game, which allowed the AI-controlled characters to behave in the desired manner, seeking shelter, laying down covering fire for friendly characters, and even anticipating enemy movements.

This AI development process is remarkably similar to the biblical description of the harvest of souls, of the separating of the wheat from the chaff… While the “God as game designer” hypothesis might reasonably be described as literally making God in one’s own image, especially when it comes from a game designer, it does offer the potential of explaining the importance of obedience to God’s will as well as the seemingly arbitrary nature of what is in line with that will and what is not. If we are AIs in God’s laboratory, then we cannot expect to have any more understanding of His ultimate purpose for us than the AIs…

The same year I read Irrational Atheist, I got married. My wife is not an atheist - in fact she is a profoundly spiritual woman who has undergone several out-of-body or near-death experiences in which she felt the direct presence of God. Conversation with her influenced my beliefs.

Unfortunately, a spiritually aware wife is not available on Kindle. Fortunately I have more books to recommend!

Day’s book shoved me from atheism to agnosticism, but it did not immediately cause me to break with physicalism nor did it make me embrace theism. At the time, I considered myself a Neo-Aristotelian in the Objectivist tradition, and Objectivism was decidedly physicalist. But not every Neo-Aristotelian tradition was physicalist. The Thomists, for instance, were Aristotelian theists.

I decided to seek out a Thomistic discussion of atheism and theism. That search leads to our next book: The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, written by Edward Feser in 2008.

Like Day’s Irrational Atheist, Feser’s Last Superstition was written in reaction to the rise of the New Atheists. Feser argues that there are two metaphysical systems at war in the West: the first is the teleological system of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas; the second is the mechanical system of Descartes, Locke, and Hume.

The New Atheists, he explains, depend on a false assertion that the mechanical system (what I call physicalism) is science when in fact it is merely an interpretation of science. Moreover, he says, the modern rejection of the teleological system was never based on sound philosophical arguments but was motivated by a pre-existing commitment to secular and atheistic outcomes.

The next book in our reading list is Mind and Cosmos, by philosopher Thomas Nagel. Nagel is one of the most renowned philosophers in the world, and Mind and Cosmos caused a furor when it was released. Why? Because in it Nagel refutes the Neo-Darwinian materialism of the modern worldview as “almost certainly false.” Like Feser, he calls us on to return to teleology.

“There [may be] natural teleological laws governing the development of organization over time. This is a throwback to the Aristotelian conception of nature… The possibility of principles of change over time tending toward certain types of outcomes is coherent, in a world in which the nonteleological laws are not fully deterministic.”

Since I had already embraced Aristotelian ethics and epistemology, it was not very difficult for me to embrace Aristotelian teleology as well. But it left me feeling unmoored scientifically, wondering if what I thought I knew to be “scientific fact” was actually just physicalist interpretation of scientific facts.

Mechanical Science and Quantum Science

Both Feser and Nagel had argued that the Achilles’ Heel of physicalism was in its theory of mind. Rather than explain consciousness, physicalism just explained it away — “swept the mind under the rug,” as Feser puts its.

Thus, as I finished reading the New Atheists and the Counter-Atheists, I began reading about another topic: the quantum enigma of whether consciousness was somehow related to, causal of, or caused by, quantum action.

Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner wrote what I consider to be the definite layman’s introduction to this topic in their eponymous Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness. This excellent book succinctly presents the measurement problem and demonstrates (in my opinion and in the opinion of many of the earliest quantum scientists, including von Neumann) that physics cannot escape an encounter with consciousness.

The book does not offer an answer to the quantum enigma, but instead explores several different interpretations of quantum mechanics that each attempt to make sense of it. Among the interpretations presented in the Quantum Enigma which I found most illuminating were those of uber-mathematician Roger Penrose and eminent physicist Henry P. Stapp.

Penrose himself makes two contributions to our curriculum: The 1989 bestseller The Emperor’s New Mind and its 1994 sequel Shadow of the Mind. Though 30 years old, they are not out of date. These books, which should be read in sequence, tie together Alan Turing’s work on artificial intelligence, Kurt Gödel's theorems on the incompleteness of mathematical logic, and Stuart Hameroff’s microtubule theory of consciousness. When we complete the journey on which Penrose leads us, we discover that the great mathematician is a profoundly Platonic thinker who asserts the unique power of human cognition over the immaterial nature of abstract forms:

The human faculty of being able to understand is something that must be achieved by some non-computational activity of the brain or mind. We…find ourselves driven towards a Platonic viewpoint of things. Our minds…have some access to this Platonic realm through an ‘awareness’ of the mathematical forms and our ability to reason about them. It is this potential for the awareness of mathematical concepts… that gives the mind a power beyond what can ever be achieved by a device dependent solely upon computation for its action.

Stapp also makes two contributions to our post-physicalist curriculum. The first is his 2007 book Mindful Universe. Stapp argues that quantum mechanics has irrevocably shattered our ability to accept the materialistic and deterministic Newtonian world; physics must accept that mind matters. Unlike many writers on “quantum woo,” Stapp is an eminent physicist with impeccable credentials, and his Realistic Interpretation of Orthodox Quantum Mechanics is built directly on the work of John von Neumann.

Stapp’s 2017 follow-up, Quantum Physics and Free Will, explores the philosophical implications of his Realist Interpretation. Stapp ends the book with a glorious counter-attack against those nihilistic materialists who assert that our consciousness is an epiphenomenon, our free will an illusion, and our perceptions a delusion:

Our minds become endowed, by means of the quantum mechanical dynamical rules, with the power to influence the macroscopic properties of matter, without themselves being totally predetermined by material properties alone… The empowering message of quantum mechanics is that the empirical data of everyday life, and also our intuitions, are generally veridical, not delusional; and hence that our mental resolves can often help bring causally to pass the bodily actions we mentally intend. The role of our minds is to help us, not to deceive us, as the materialist philosophy must effectively maintain.

Following up on the bibliography and footnotes of Stapp’s work led me to our next book, the 2009 bestseller Irreducible Mind by psychologists Edward F. Kelly and Emily W. Kelly. Irreducible Mind is a very, very long book and necessarily so — because Kelly and Kelly don’t just provide arguments for a post-physicalist view of mind, they also provide — in exhaustive detail — the scientific evidence to support their view:

Mainstream conclusions, deeply at odds with the must fundamental deliverances of every day experience, result from correctly perceiving what are in fact necessary consequences of the classical materialist-monist premises from which practically all of contemporary psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy derive. [But] [m]ultiple lines of empirical evidence, drawn from a wide variety of sources, converge to produce a resolution of the mind-body problem along lines sharply divergent from the current mainstream view… We find this evidence cumulative overwhelming.

Among the evidence that Kelly and Kelly catalog is evidence for what one might call parapsychological, paranormal, or supernatural phenomenon such as remote viewing and reincarnation. In fact, Kelly and Kelly actively collaborated with Stapp in some work in the field of parapsychology, which Stapp felt could be explained by his physics.

With Stapp’s Realist Interpretation of Quantum Physics firmly rooted in my mind, I began to explore whether the “something more” of post-physicalism might encompass the paranormal. That leads to the next book in our curriculum: The 2018 book Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science by Dean Radin.

Radin’s book is perhaps the most frank and honest treatise ever written by a parapsychologist. Dispensing with the tiresome disclaimers found in most other works of parapsychology, Radin says:

I’ve been studying magic from a scientific perspective for about forty years. For the first thirty-nine of those years I would have vigorously denied that statement…

After decades of conducting psi experiments, publishing many journal articles describing the results, and reviewing thousands of other experiments in my popular books, I’ve come to accept that psi is a real phenomenon…

And here’s the rub. psi is magic…

I liked Radin’s book so much that I devoted an entire article on the Tree of Woe to it: When Magic was Real. If you don’t have time to read Radin, you can get the gist of his findings from my essay.

Post-Physicalism Integrated

In order to unite the philosophical and scientific positions elaborated above into a holistic post-physicalism, we need to combine the Aristotelian metaphysics of Feser and Nagel with the quantum physics of Stapp and the irreducible mind of Kelly and Kelly.

For that, we turn to mathematician and philosopher Wolfgang Smith. Smith has written 14 books that explore quantum mechanics, free will, the irreducible non-material nature of mind, paranormal phenomenon, plus many of the topics I highlighted in my essays on Traditionalism, including initiation, counter-initiation, and more.

I was, until June of last year, ignorant of Wolfgang Smith’s existence; indeed, I only found out about him in comments from fellow bloggers JD Sauvage and William Briggs. Smith provides us with three books for our curriculum: The Quantum Enigma, Physics and Vertical Causation and The Vertical Ascent. All three books are short reads, and if you’ve made your way through the rest of the curriculum, they’re easy too. If you don’t have time to read them, you can check out my essay about Smith’s thought, which I will quote here: :

Smith believes that the solution to the quantum enigma can be found by abandoning the false metaphysics of Cartesian bifurcation and returning to the “sapiential” metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas. In Thomistic terms, the quantum world does not fully exist in actuality. It partly exists in potentiality. It is not quite prima materia, which is pure potentia without any actuality, but it is not substance either. It becomes substance only when a substantial form is imposed upon it by an observer who is something more than purely corporeal. Smith labels this process, of consciousness collapsing the wave function, as an example of vertical causation. He contrasts this vertical causation, which is non-local, with the horizontal causation of ordinary physics, which is bound by space or locality.

Wolfgang Smith’s Thomistic or “vertical” interpretation of orthodox quantum mechanics [is] extremely similar to Henry Stapp’s “realist” interpretation of orthodox quantum mechanics… Both Smith and Stapp affirm that the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation was fundamentally correct…. [But both also] believe that the collapse of the state vector is ontological, not epistemological.

Smith cite Stapp directly:

As Henry Stapp has expressed it, 'Everything we know about Nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of Nature lies outside spacetime ... but generates events that can be located in space-time.'4

Never have I been so happy to be wrong; here then is that very Thomistic explanation of Stapp’s quantum mechanics that I had insisted did not exist!

Had Sauvage and Briggs not recommended Wolfgang Smith to me, today’s metaphysical curriculum would have ended in the same unhappy place as my economics curriculum — a devastating critiques of the contemporary consensus, but without a unified theory to take their place. Fortunately, it does not end up there. Smith, by bringing Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics into alignment with quantum physics, provides that missing unification.

Thus we terminate this series of Tree of Woe articles with a happy ending. I apologize for the error and will make up for this momentary lapse into joy with extra woe in future articles.

1. As Vox Day puts it in Irrational Atheist, “Doubts about the existence of God, particularly the existence of a good and loving God, often stem from great emotional pain. While doubts are naturally bound to occur to any rational individual in moments of somber reflection, it is particularly hard to imagine that a loving God who loves us would choose to intentionally inflict pain upon us, especially if He is all-powerful…”.