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7 Materialism: The Brain As Computer
First, it may be that sensory experience can be explained by physical law.
Alternatively, it may be the other way around—the nature of the physical world
might rest on principles rooted in a mental reality. It is plausible that nothing
exists unless it has been noticed, or grasped, by something like a mind. That
was the position of the 17th Century Irish philosopher George Berkeley, who
famously wrote:
All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth – in a word all those bodies
which compose the mighty frame of the world – have not any subsistence without
a mind.
Logically, there is a third alternative: It may turn out that there is a higher
science which is inclusive of both physical reality and cognitive phenomena.
No serious scientific work has yet been done on this third proposal. There is
no clear best choice among these alternatives, and all three can be defended.
However, for historical reasons the materialist, or physicalist approach has
prevailed. To understand how that happened, we must go back to the changes
that took place in European thinking after the close of the Middle Ages.
From the perspective of modern man, it is hard to fully take in how
sweeping—how all-encompassing—was the transformation of the European
spirit in the transition from medieval times to the Enlightenment. In the Middle Ages the church was the authority that controlled what people were allowed
to believe, and the temper of the age was one of obedience and piety. The church
taught (and most people believed) that there was a world of matter, which was
the inferior realm, and a world of spirit ruled by divine edict, which was the
superior realm.
By a bizarre logic which is hard to understand, the world of matter was
equated with pleasure, greed and self-indulgence, hence people were admonished to resist its pull. Instead, one should aspire to exist in the realm of spirit,
in which man reaches a higher level of existence by denying the yearnings of the
flesh. Matter and material things were seen as base: For that reason, thinking
people directed their interests to questions of the soul and neglected the study
of the physical world.
By the opening of the 17th Century all that had changed. Men and women
were exulting in a newfound freedom gained by a decisive rejection of the
church’s dominion over thought. After a thousand-year hiatus, interest was
turning once again to the material world and to the sciences. The work of
Galileo and of Isaac Newton showed that by applying reason and systematic thought, it was possible to fully account for the motions of the stars
and planets—and moreover that material objects on earth obeyed the same
laws as the heavenly bodies in their orbits. The Age of Enlightenment saw a
7 Materialism: The Brain As Computer
First, it may be that sensory experience can be explained by physical law.
Alternatively, it may be the other way around—the nature of the physical world
might rest on principles rooted in a mental reality. It is plausible that nothing
exists unless it has been noticed, or grasped, by something like a mind. That
was the position of the 17th Century Irish philosopher George Berkeley, who
famously wrote:
All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth – in a word all those bodies
which compose the mighty frame of the world – have not any subsistence without
a mind.
Logically, there is a third alternative: It may turn out that there is a higher
science which is inclusive of both physical reality and cognitive phenomena.
No serious scientific work has yet been done on this third proposal. There is
no clear best choice among these alternatives, and all three can be defended.
However, for historical reasons the materialist, or physicalist approach has
prevailed. To understand how that happened, we must go back to the changes
that took place in European thinking after the close of the Middle Ages.
From the perspective of modern man, it is hard to fully take in how
sweeping—how all-encompassing—was the transformation of the European
spirit in the transition from medieval times to the Enlightenment. In the Middle Ages the church was the authority that controlled what people were allowed
to believe, and the temper of the age was one of obedience and piety. The church
taught (and most people believed) that there was a world of matter, which was
the inferior realm, and a world of spirit ruled by divine edict, which was the
superior realm.
By a bizarre logic which is hard to understand, the world of matter was
equated with pleasure, greed and self-indulgence, hence people were admonished to resist its pull. Instead, one should aspire to exist in the realm of spirit,
in which man reaches a higher level of existence by denying the yearnings of the
flesh. Matter and material things were seen as base: For that reason, thinking
people directed their interests to questions of the soul and neglected the study
of the physical world.
By the opening of the 17th Century all that had changed. Men and women
were exulting in a newfound freedom gained by a decisive rejection of the
church’s dominion over thought. After a thousand-year hiatus, interest was
turning once again to the material world and to the sciences. The work of
Galileo and of Isaac Newton showed that by applying reason and systematic thought, it was possible to fully account for the motions of the stars
and planets—and moreover that material objects on earth obeyed the same
laws as the heavenly bodies in their orbits. The Age of Enlightenment saw a