Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (29 page)

The Mechanistic World of Materialism

The first virtual world we will explore, the world of materialism, is tough and bleak. It is a world in which all of our experiences—our emotions, our perceptions, and our thoughts—are ultimately explainable by, and reducible to, underlying physical processes. This virtual world was developed in the seventeenth century, owes many of its features to Descartes (not himself a materialist), and has proven to be enormously useful for the discoveries of modern science. Its structure underpins current science, and is widely accepted by contemporary philosophers. In this world, only the physical is real—or, we might say, only the physical is
really
real. Your perception that you are reading this essay right now, the tart sweetness of the orange you had for breakfast, the pain you felt when you peeled it and the skin squirted acidic liquid into your eye, the smell of orange zest on your hands—all of these things are the result of meaningless physical processes, sensations that arise from the action of purposeless particles in motion. Indeed, in this world, the oranges, the bodies that consume them, and the book that you are reading, are essentially the same things, composed out of the same particles, which are governed by the same scientific laws, and ultimately explainable through them. Our belief that our perceptions are much more than this—that oranges are real, and fundamentally different from books, that feelings are meaningful, that we are more than physical entities and that our lives might have an ultimate purpose—are illusions, a kind of conjuring act performed by our brains which allows us function. They can never give us clear and unfettered access to reality itself.

Notice how different this world is from the world Suzanne shows; it has none of the colors, textures, tastes, and smells—let alone the emotional connections—that permeate the space we share with her. Indeed, in the material world, it is
not only perceptions that exist only in our minds, but also the meanings we place on our encounters with one another, and the intentions we place on our own activities. The transcendent image of Jesus as a kind of celestial lifeguard as he stands atop his tower, his loneliness, the audible and visual flow of the river, the color of the sunlight, the beauty of the human body, our concept of perfection, and the trust between us, are all nothing more than perceptions in the mind, things which exist only in our consciousness as representations of reality, but which are never themselves objectively real. What is
really
real are the physical processes which give rise to them, the movements of purposeless particles that can be described in mathematical and mechanical terms. In this world, in short, we are merely physical organisms, and, since our mental lives—our perceptions, emotions, beliefs, experiences—arise from our physical existence, we can ultimately give a physical explanation of these mental events.

Notice, too, that while this is an ordered world, it isn’t one that has meanings and purposes built into it. This isn’t a world where Jesus can save anyone from drowning. We may believe that our perceptions respond to real things that exist outside of us, that our relationships are meaningful, that there is a reason for our existence, but all we’re doing when we make these assumptions is projecting what is going on in our brains onto the natural world, not reflecting in our minds things which really exist out there. In short, in a materialist world, taste, smell, color, meaning, and purpose aren’t real—which means, of course, that our thoughts, our subjective experiences, and perhaps even our minds themselves—are ultimately not real either. In this world, while bodies can touch bodies, minds never can.

The Extraordinary World of Teleology

But there is another possibility we can consider, another virtual world that we can enter. This world provides a teleological explanation of reality, rather than a materialist one. This virtual world of teleology is one that was largely constructed
by Aristotle (with help from other ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato), and it has recently been refurbished and updated by Thomas Nagel.

In Aristotle’s teleological world, we begin our explorations of reality through the information provided to us by our senses. When we look around us, we see a world composed of many different sorts of things: houses, cars, moose, people, dogs and cats, smells, sounds, textures, grass, rocks, rivers, the taste of oranges, and the heat of a freshly made cup of tea. Moreover, common sense reveals a world filled with meaning and purpose, not only specifically human purposes but also more generally natural ones. We build cars for transportation and houses for shelter, we domesticated dogs and cats for different purposes; ears and eyes and taste buds perform different functions; different creatures, from mammals to fish to viruses and bacteria, occupy different niches in the ecosystem; and all living creatures need water to live, which demonstrates the existence of an underlying natural order.

In his controversial book
Mind and Cosmos
, Thomas Nagel defends a naturalistic teleological conception of reality, and challenges those who believe that the virtual reality world constructed by the materialists is not itself a representation of reality (as all virtual worlds are) but a true account of reality itself. As he observes, the architects of the materialist virtual world limited its features right from the start by subtracting (from the things they thought it possible to study) anything mental, including intentions, purposes, meanings, subjective experiences, and consciousness itself. They subtracted, in short, everything that makes us human, different sorts of animals from dogs, cats, and moose, different from other kinds of things like rocks, trees, and lakes, leaving us as little more than physical objects—different in appearance, perhaps, from dogs, cats, trees, and stones, but, underneath it all, subject to and defined by the same physical processes they are, and explainable in the same mathematically-based scientific terms.

Nagel believes that this was a fundamental mistake, and argues that it has resulted in a picture of reality that is not
only a
false
description of the way things
really
are, but an inadequate account of features of our lives that we already know, namely, the reality of our experiences. While our emotions, perceptions, and experiences are perhaps
explainable
in terms of physical processes, they are not
reducible
to them: the subjective experience of what an orange tastes like, the warmth of hot tea as it moves down your throat, the way the invitation to go home with Suzanne makes you feel, are themselves
real
. Even if it were possible to map out, in some precise way, what’s going on in your brain as you sip the tea and chew the oranges, to explain what processes are taking place in your body as you ingest them, and how those processes relate to physical features of the oranges and tea, the subjective experience—the way these things feel to you—is also real, over and above those brain patterns and physical processes. Nagel holds that, “Conscious subjects and their mental lives are inescapable components of reality not describable by the physical sciences,” and human beings are nothing less than “large-scale, complex instances of something both objectively physical from outside and subjectively mental from inside” (pp. 41–42).

Further, Nagel argues, in order for consciousness to have arisen at all, evolution itself cannot be a purely physical process, but must include the reality of mental phenomena. Moreover, he believes, our existence as beings capable of reflecting on the world around us, and on the workings of our own minds (among other things) is unlikely to have arisen entirely by chance, but must have been part of nature’s “intended” design. As he puts it, “to explain not merely the possibility but the actuality of rational beings, the world must have properties that make their appearance not a complete accident: in some way the likelihood must have been latent in the nature of things” (p. 86). In contrast to the materialist picture in which complex things can be broken down into underlying processes and explained in physical terms, in a teleological world, natural processes give rise to new and unexpected realities. “Teleology means that in addition to the physical laws of the familiar kind, there are other laws of nature
that are ‘biased towards the marvelous’” (p. 92). One of the marvelous features of a world understood in teleological terms is that thoughts are real, and so are the minds that house them; in such a world, it is entirely possible to touch someone’s body with your mind.

Which Virtual World Is Most Like Our Own?

This exploration of the materialist world and the teleological one allows us to finally answer the questions we began with: what kind of metaphysical picture underlies Suzanne’s world? Is her world like the one we live in, or radically different from it? And, finally, if you can touch someone’s body with your mind in Suzanne’s world, can we do this in ours? I want to suggest three things: first, that Suzanne’s world is teleological, and so incomprehensible from a purely materialist perspective. Second, although it is described in poetic terms that make its features appear mysterious and fantastical, Suzanne’s world is actually the one we live in. Indeed, the song can open our eyes to features of ordinary life that we often take for granted, but which are actually far more wonderful and extraordinary than we usually notice. And, finally, I will argue that we can touch one another’s bodies with our minds; in fact, we do this all the time, because our world is, indeed, “biased towards the marvelous.”

A defense of these claims will require us to compare what’s going on in the song to something that we’re more familiar with. Imagine that you and I are at the food court in the mall (I am a customer, perhaps, and you are an employee at one of the booths, Suzanne to my Cohen on a more mundane level). We are surrounded by other people, some pushing shopping carts loaded with bags, others drinking coffee or lining up to buy subs, pizza, and Chinese food. The servers at the various food outlets (including you, I notice as I place my salad order) look simultaneously bored and stressed out, torn between the necessity of working efficiently and the recognition that the jobs they are doing are repetitive and
dull. As we all move through the shared physical space of the food court, we maneuver around one another (shopping carts are seldom crashed into pedestrians, those waiting for seats at the tables move like speed racers when a spot opens up, in order to grab it before anyone else does, you and your fellow employees move around one another in a kind of choreographed dance), and we meet as minds as well: when I place my salad order, we make eye contact, you give me what I ask for, and when I hand you my money in exchange for the salad you just made, we have a shared understanding of what the transaction means.

The commonplace nature of these experiences disguises the fact that what we are engaged in, all of us who are present in the food court at this time, and in all of our encounters with one another as well, is something truly wondrous and philosophically interesting. We find ourselves, in these everyday activities, at the heart of the debate between the materialists and the teleologists about how we ought to understand the nature of reality and the place of human consciousness in a world that we can describe (if we wish) in purely physical terms. Consciousness—our awareness of our own minds, our recognition of the minds of others, and the way in which our experiences feel to us—is simultaneously mysterious and fantastic, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, and banal and ordinary, something we assume, take for granted, and utilize in everything we do.

One of the most striking features of human embodiment—we aren’t, after all,
dis
embodied minds either—is that we can never know what it would be like to experience the world as other people do, just as no one else can ever really know what it is like to be us. Nevertheless, each of us knows—and knows that others know—that other minds exist, and that, while particular subjective experiences (what it feels like to be
me
, as I order my salad, or
you
, as you prepare it, what it feels like to be Suzanne making tea and oranges, or Cohen as she serves him) are inaccessible to others, consciousness itself is a shared attribute of human beings. Moreover, one of the reasons why novels, poems, paintings,
and songs have the power to move us the way that they do results from their capacity to break down the barriers between us by allowing us, in a very real sense, to imagine what it might be like to be someone else, and to experience the world in the way that they do.

It is consciousness that allows us to function together in the food court (or down by the river at Suzanne’s, and elsewhere), because we encounter one another not merely as physical bodies maneuvering through shared physical space, but as
minds
meeting one another as well. We can relate our exchanges in the food court to our visit with Suzanne, to the shared meal of tea and oranges, and the pleasure we take in her company. In this encounter, we are much more than bodies sharing physical space; we are, in addition and most importantly, meeting one another as conscious beings who construct shared understandings together. We know that the oranges and tea come from China, we have all heard the story of Jesus walking on the water (and whether or not we believe it to be true, we recognize that it is a story of some significance), and we experience a shared desire for our interactions with one another to be meaningful.

But how do we do all these things, and how ought we to understand the mental events that make our exchanges with one another intelligible, and our interactions—potentially, at least—meaningful and significant? If we interpret what we experience through the parameters of a materialist conception of reality, it is not only the dimensions of Suzanne’s world that become unintelligible (or merely poetic) but also what happens to us when we listen to a song like “Suzanne,” and even our mundane interactions with others in places like the food court. Whatever we believe we are doing, whatever meaning we place on our encounters, the moral and social weight we give to them—all of these things are not
really
real for a strict materialist; they are, rather, a kind of coping mechanism which allows us to function in the world, but they are not truly reflective of what is going on beneath the surface. In truth, according to this account, there are no purposes or meanings in the natural world, and we, as physical
beings, are just as subject to the underlying physical processes that allow us to exist as are the tables, shopping carts, and foodstuffs that we see when we look around us.