The Incoherence of Metaphysical Materialism

For some time now I’ve been underlining in private communication with C. Derick Varn the incoherence of the doctrine of materialism on a metaphysical level. His most recent reading of Nicolas Villarreal’s “What is Materialism?” is a welcome occasion to explain my thoughts in a more organized and official form while also warning against the pseudoscience that has gripped many parts of the Left in an attempt to make this doctrine coherent.

I want to preface the following considerations with some remarks, first on their relation to Marxism’s theory of historical materialism, which I do not see as endangered by them at all. Though it seems clear to me that Marx made a grievous error in throwing out the best parts of Hegel, his work on societal reproduction is, on the whole, spot-on, and while many successive intellectuals, continuing to this day in the likes of Colin Drumm, were trying to undermine its achievement by fixating on slight simplifications and imprecisions, this misses completely the point of the work itself and is certainly not the intention behind this text. Yet, this would probably not excuse me from being charged by Villarreal, as Cutrone was as well, with being “petite bourgeois” and “reactionary”, the favorite insults of Marxist wannabe-radicals. However, the aim of this text, unlike Villarreal’s article, which could be greatly improved in legibility by cutting (along with its constant quote-mining) out its haphazard attacks on philosophical fashions not worth the attention (and instead focusing on those that do, mainly Hegel), is not the settling of scores, which will be refrained from outside this paragraph, but rather to attack metaphysical materialism itself, as suggested by the title. Villarreal’s article is only a welcome opportunity to do so, as it purports to explain to us what “materialism” actually is:

At its most basic level, we can take materialism to be the idea that some ideas refer to things that are more real than other ideas, and that this level of realness is determined by whether the idea represents specifically material phenomenon.

Here already we encounter a problem, which is that the only thing distinguishing materialism from anything but the most radical scepticism of the Greeks is the claim that the “reality” of an “idea” lies in whether it “represents” “material phenomena”, but this is only meaningful insofar as we have an understanding of what a “material phenomenon” is, a conjunction of two terms that are both undefined both by Villarreal and in current scientific discourse. An old point re-iterated often by Chomsky, but also in current-day physics books like “Moonshine beyond the Monster” is that our understanding of “matter” has become more and more immaterial as time went on, going from something everyone would think of, like a stone, to continue one of Villarreal’s examples, to, basically, the excitations of a fermion field, which most people would intuitively agree is an “immaterial” structure, so that the name of materialism is already ill-fitting for any theory purporting to be in agreement with current-day science. This might only be a misplaced choice of nomenclature for historic reasons, though the emptiness of the term has been filled with all kinds of interpretations of materialism, usually at odds with one another, but it forces those trying to keep “materialism” even remotely in line with what someone not drenched in Marxist vocabulary would understand it as to slyly replace it with physicalism, or at least embed it through recursion into physicalism, as done by Villarreal:

The categories of political economy, by referring to the way labor is organized, to physical activity in physical space, (even if abstracted to overriding patterns of such activity), were more real than the category of the essence of man. And this greater realness, it is claimed by materialism, means they will necessarily have greater determining power over our reality.

Thus, it is not really matter that is under consideration, but physics in general. This might seem like a fine point, as long as physicalism provides a solid foundation for what is here called materialism, but physicalism itself is undermined by the fact that it in turn requires regress to mathematical structures, which it has to grant reality.

Let us here take a slight digression to hammer this point home by providing a quick overview of what the physical universe actually is, according to the most “bleeding-edge” science: in M/F-Theory as Mf-Theory (Schreiber and Sati)(among other places), Hisham Sati and Urs Schreiber provide detailed arguments for Sati’s Hypothesis H, which basically states that the fundamental field of M-theory is, essentially and with some simplification, described through a map from the physical universe into the 4-dimensional sphere (see here for a slightly more readable overview). From this fundamental field, what is more commonly known as the four fundamental forces, gravity, the strong fundamental force, the weak fundamental force and electromagnetism, arise through (a generalization of) a mechanism called the Kaluza-Klein-mechanism, which might illustratively though perhaps not completely mathematically accurately be described as echoes as of reverberations of the field as it goes around the tiny loops that seven of the eleven dimensions of our physical universe are wound up in. Finally, it appears that what is known as the standard model of particle physics arises because six-dimensional hypersurfaces intersect where we are (Gemmill et al.). Of course, none of this is set in stone and several cuncurring theories at this point exist to understand various parts of this derivation, but it is the most “bleeding-edge” science we have and Hypothesis H in particular explains a lot of the remaining questions in M-theory, providing a very strong indication that something like it is true.

Readers are welcome trying to make sense of the idea that the fundamental force field of the universe is given by a map into the four-dimensional sphere without assuming the existence of the four-dimensional sphere or that the standard-model arises as the intersection of six-dimensional hypersurfaces without assuming the existence of such, but really either of these is only a sharpened version of something that was known for a long time, which is that mathematics is necessary for physics and therefore it is necessary to assume the existence of mathematical structures for the assumption of physical ones to make any sense. This is known as the “Quine-Putnam indispensability argument”, of which I provide a sharpened version in Why the Physical Universe is a Mathematical Structure where I argue that, even if somehow a philosophical formulation could be found that could make sense of the need for mathematical objects in physical theories without assuming their existence, if in fact physics were to be unified into a monism this could only be done on the basis of mathematics because otherwise physical laws expressing the logico-mathematical coherence of other laws would remain separated from any physical law governing physical objects. But the basic argument was already known to Hegel in the introduction to the Science of Logic:

Aber insofern gesagt wird, daß Verstand, daß Vernunft in der gegenständlichen Welt ist, daß der Geist und die Natur allgemeine Gesetze habe, nach welchen ihr Leben und ihre Veränderungen sich machen, so wird zugegeben, daß die Denkbestimmungen ebensosehr objektiven Wert und Existenz haben.

But inasmuch as it is said that understanding, that reason exists in the objective world, that spirit and nature have universal laws according to which their life and their changes are made, it is admitted that the determinations of thought have just as much objective value and existence.

So for “materialism” to make any sense whatsoever, it would at least have to take recourse to mathematicism, the idea that the most basic substance is mathematical. However, this is no save refuge either, as mathematical objects themselves can be derived from each other, so that more complex ones can be generated from simpler ones, so that we are once again left to ask with Hegel:

Mit was muss der Beginn der Wissenschaft gemacht werden?

With what does science have to begin?

This should be humbling to us, and indeed Hegel was right certainly with most of his metaphysics, but this deserves its own post. For our purposes what is important is that the abstract ideas necessary to make sense of the physical universe cannot be grounded in the experience of physical objects, or even in their common abstraction. Nor can the “bleeding edge” of current-day physics now or for the foreseeable future be grounded in experimentation, as Villarreal is insisting on:

At the bleeding edge of our understanding of causality, where there can be nothing to subordinate theory except observation, there exists no other recourse than this test of theory via observation.

This is indeed the opposite of what is happening, as the most advanced theory explaining physics, in particular M-theory, operates on an energy level so far beyond the current capacities of humanity that it is doubtful it can ever be verified by smashing particles together. This is not to say that such theories are meaningless or unverifiable, as some positivists insist in the embarrassment of finding science to be far different from their idealized conceptions, rather the truth criterion of such theories has moved from being one of agreement with experimentation to one of coherence both internally and in relation to other mathematical objects (which was something Hegel could have predicted). Yet, while, as we see, actual science is moving in the opposite direction to that outlined by Villarreal, he is using the veneer of science to justify his claims:

[Experiments with LLMs] are strong evidence that thoughts and ideas are signs that stand in for a more fundamental phenomenal experience or patterns of phenomenal experience, and, crucially, that these signs within the mind are reflections of the signs in material culture in terms of how they are organized.

Leaving aside the fact that “material culture” is nowhere defined, the crudeness of using experiments in which LLMs can roughly draw some very basic objects like a church tower from brain activity as evidence that ideas are always a stand-in for real “phenomena” should be a tell-tale sign that the underlying position is inherently doomed. Indeed, LLMs have no grasp even of basic logic, which might appear astonishing given that their underlying computers are literally built on Boolean logic and they have most of the knowledge of humanity at their disposal, but it is only an expression of the fact that the stringing-together of data based on real-valued measures of their similarity only somewhat mimics one part of the human thought process, not, to the contrary, a sign that it mirrors the human thought process, and the impression of the contrary can only be given through using the most pictoresque objects, it falls immediately apart once any abstraction is introduced. However, this is not to give the impression that Villarreal is outside the Marxist tradition in such crudeness. That is the problem. As Engels said in Anti-Dühring:

Even the apparent derivation of mathematical magnitudes from each other does not prove their a priori origin, but only their rational connection. Before one came upon the idea of deducing the form of a cylinder from the rotation of a rectangle about one of its sides, a number of real rectangles and cylinders, however imperfect in form, must have been examined. Like all other sciences, mathematics arose out of the needs of men: from the measurement of land and the content of vessels, from the computation of time and from mechanics. But, as in every department of thought, at a certain stage of development the laws, which were abstracted from the real world, become divorced from the real world, and are set up against it as something independent, as laws coming from outside, to which the world has to conform. That is how things happened in society and in the state, and in this way, and not otherwise, pure mathematics was subsequently applied to the world, although it is borrowed from this same world and represents only one part of its forms of interconnection — and it is only just because of this that it can be applied at all.

It goes without saying that the idea of a cylinder was not arrived at by measuring lots of real cylinders, and while I will readily agree that at some point, a basic abstraction gave rise to mathematical ideas, the opposition of mathematical notions to reality that Engels posits is again exactly opposite of actual reality, wherein mathematical ideas are what even allows physical reality to exist. Engels, in what is sadly typical for a Marxist, is a bad student of Hegel, who had this figured out already in the introduction to the Science of Logic:

Die Platonische Idee ist nichts anderes als das Allgemeine oder bestimmter der Begriff des Gegenstandes; nur in seinem Begriffe hat etwas Wirklichkeit; insofern es von seinem Begriffe verschieden ist, hört es auf, wirklich zu sein, und ist ein Nichtiges; die Seite der Handgreiflichkeit und des sinnlichen Außersichseins gehört dieser nichtigen Seite an.

The Platonic idea is nothing else than the universal, or more definitely the concept of the object; only in its conception does something have reality; in so far as it is different from its concept, it ceases to be real and is something void; the side of tangibility and sensual being outside of oneself belongs to this trivial side.

If the successive development of science showed us anything, it is that he was right all along.

1. Conclusion

My very first post to this site very first post to this site was me protesting against pseudo-science published by Cosmonaut¹. Both pieces share a know-it-all attitude unwarranted by their haphazard treatment of science, but more significantly, both display a preference of the concrete over the abstract that runs deep within Marxism and that has become an increasing problem in its history, particularly once Marxists took over power, and only whose most obvious symptom was the exorcism of “bourgeois” abstract art from “the true art of the people” that became Soviet artistry. On a deeper level, all Marxist metaphysical theories share this crucial mistake of trying to advocate materialism when metaphysical materialism has been a doomed position from the beginning, of trying to ground the abstract in the concrete when the concrete has long ago shown itself to be grounded in the abstract. It is high time we dispense with the notion that “materialism” can be made coherent, to let go of our preference of the concrete and embrace the abstract.

Footnotes:

¹

One could say things have come full circle, but that would be implying a closure of trajectory that I do not assume.