Physicalism and Metaphysicalism

Man is not a deterministic puppet dangling on the strings of the butterfly effect.

Yesterday I wrote that physicalism is the doctrine “calling into question the notion that we need appeal to anything beyond or above the brain and body – an immaterial soul, for instance – to explain behavior and experience, whether normal or abnormal.”

It is not my authorship that gives physicalism its definition. It came from the newsletter of the Center for Naturalism, which has physicalism as its metaphysical basis.

Physicalism differs with naturalistic metaphysicalism in at least one specific concept. Physicalism holds that nothing is greater than the sum of its parts. When it comes to humans, physicalism, (also called scientific naturalism, or SN), the Center specifically states: “Naturalism holds that everything we are and do is connected to the rest of the world...”

This is the butterfly effect. There is no reason to discount or deny this butterfly effect. While a butterfly that flaps its wings in China may actually cause a tornado in Kansas is beside the point. The point is that whatever the truth of anything is, for example whether or not the bufferly effect is real or not, that truth is the proof of existence.

SN holds that because we are connected to the rest of the world through existence, we are “fully caused creatures.” For the adherents of SN, this means every minute detail of existence is part of us and, therefore, we cannot claim to be “self-made” creatures.

Such SN believes the idea of being “self-made” is pretty egotistical.

“Our bodies and minds are shaped in their entirety by conditions that precede us and surround us,” states the Center's website. [emphasis added]

Physicalism discounts and denies any metaphysical significance to the idea that men's minds are capable of creating themselves from these preceding conditions. In other words, unlike our ability to make bricks from clay, then mortaring them together into a desired shape such a house, our brains are incapable of taking these preceding conditions and making bricks if that if what we desire to make, rather than accepting whatever it is that the preceding conditions have determined our minds will make of those conditions.

That is one reason that physicalism and scientific naturalism define themselves as deterministic. [Wikipedia]

Determinism is “The doctrine that every fact in the universe is guided entirely by law [ ] and thus allow[s] only for mechanical causation,” i.e., the butterfly effect. [Dictionary of Philosophy; Runes; 1942]

The one law of the universe that determinism, physicalism, SN, and other doctrines fail to take into account is the law that man's mind is free to think or not. This is a position of egoism, not of egotism, and is part of the law of man's mind.

If man's mind is free to think when it wants to think, then the act of thinking denotes something willful. Willful thinking determines which “preceding conditions of the butterfly effect” that have been placed squarely in our paths by mechanical causation will be acted upon.

SN would have us believe that even though we are free to pick and choose, in most instances, which preceding effects we will think about, nevertheless we did not create those butterflys, and therefore we cannot call ourselves “self-made,” but must apply the metaphysical conclusion that we are, instead, “fully caused creatures” of deterministic nature.

The truth is, if men are free to pick and choose which facts of existence they act on, they are free not to act on the most important conditions that will determine their life-and-death situations.

Determinism and physicalism cannot accertain why one person chooses to remain in the path of a hurricane while everyone else leaves. Perhaps that person knowingly stays for all the reasons which even to him or herself are the wrong ones. Does a meteorolical storm chaser chase tornadoes only for the science? Can it not be that some choose to overcome the fear of tornadoes by chasing them, as one might hope to overcome the fear of spiders by holding a tarantula? Could it be that some storm chasers have a death wish? Could it be that some are facinated by the very fact of existence itself and wish to understand the mechanical laws of nature?

It is the law of the nature of Man himself that he needs to “appeal” to something beyond physicalism. It is this law of the nature of man that give proof to the fact of existence that Man is not deterministic and is not a puppet on the strings of butterflys.

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The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
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The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
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Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

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The Brain, the Mind, and Metaphysics

To suggest that somehow the mind is independent of the organ that gives it its existence is nonsense.

In the January-February newsletter from the Center for Naturalism, the case is made for the rise of physicalism, the doctrine"calling into question the notion that we need appeal to anything beyond or above the brain and body – an immaterial soul, for instance – to explain behavior and experience, whether normal or abnormal. [ ]

"This isn’t to say that physicalist explanations are anywhere near complete," the newsletter goes on, "nor does it conclusively disprove the existence of the soul or some other immaterial aspect of ourselves – nothing could do that. But it is to say that as physicalism makes headway, the dualist hypothesis that the mind is categorically independent of the brain in some respect has less and less going for it."

Inherent in scientific naturalism, that form of naturalism that seems to be prevalent in today's moral marketplace, is the idea that others somehow believe the mind is independent of the brain.

I wish to set something straight here and now: the mind is a process of the brain, just as digestion is a process of the bowels. Without the bowels there would be no ability to digest. Without the brain there would be no ability to have a mind.

No one disputes the scientific idea that neurons firing in the brain, that chemicals and electricity must be active in the brain, that synapses must be created, and that other processes must be in effect for the mind to work properly, or to work at all.

To suggest that somehow the mind is independent of the organ that gives it its existence is nonsense. But when scientism suggests that the organ and its functions were "once considered categorically immaterial mental phenomena [but] are now shown to have a material basis in the nervous system," a straw man is being set up.

Scientific naturalism loves that straw man. They use it against the immaterialism of the soul.

The sum of the parts is greater than the parts alone. Ink, paper, and glue alone do not make a postage stamp. But the idea that when properly put together those things are not an immaterial metaphysical phenomena is wrong.

A postage stamp, or anything else that is metaphysical and therefore greater than the sum of its parts, is definitively immaterial. The material is the ink, paper, and glue. The immaterial is the "idea" that when properly put together those things can create a postage stamp. Ideas are immaterial.

Yet no one disputes that a postage stamp is made of material. Objectively, however, a "stamp" is immaterial when it is considered to be the idea of an object made legal only by the production and acceptance of its existence by the proper authority.

No such stamp ever has to be produced. A stamp not produced yet definable is metaphysical, not physical. What is metaphysical is immaterial.

The mind is the metaphysical description of the events of the brain which, when analyzed, are greater than the sum of the physical parts that make it.

The "idea" of a light bulb, for instance, or of that postage stamp, is greater than the forces which create the synapse. It takes the metaphysical mind to put concepts together in the proper order in order to make sense of existence, to create stamps and light bulbs and space shuttles. It isn't the physical workings of the brain that do that. It is the mental workings of the mind, which of course do not and cannot exist without the brain, any more than sight can exist without the eyes.

But the recognition that what the eyes see is a tree or a bird or a newborn human being is greater than the sight unrecognized.

The "notion that we need appeal to anything beyond or above the brain and body" is not the straw man scientific naturalism makes it out to be.

Instead, it is a notion that metaphysical naturalism takes for granted, because metaphysical existence is properly a matter of the mind, not of the brain.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/