On the Fractal Error of Materialism

 
Let us start from a position of ontological agnosticism and absolute skepticism. In this spirit, we are not going to make the assumption that the defining ontological assumptions of the two metaphysical systems that we are going to examine -- objective idealism and materialism -- are internally coherent enough in their implications to be consistent with the existence of any possible world.

We will endeavor to regard our preferred ontology not as the fleshed-out world-picture that we have come to attach to the set of ontological commitments that constitute its minimal definition, but purely as a list of ontological commitments that we will logically examine in a first-principles manner with the goal of determining whether or not it allows for the properties that our fleshed-out world-picture must have.

As a part of this skeptical exercise, I ask the reader to temporarily suspend their belief that their preferred set of ontological commitments is identical to - or even logically compatible with - a particular world picture.

It may turn out that reality has an ontology other than what we believe, and that we are unconsciously smuggling the properties of this real ontology into our preferred set of ontological commitments when they simply are not logically compatible with it.

Minimal Definitions:


Instead of relying on terms that have been historically subject to deep confusion and varying definitions, we will attempt to use terms that are more descriptive and less likely to trigger potentially distorting cached thoughts and attitudes.


Minimal Objective Idealism: 

(1) The substrate of reality is autonoetic (intrinsically self-knowing):


Objective idealism maintains that the substrate of reality is such we can know its various states simply and directly in virtue of being them (or containing them within our being). The first thing to stress is that knowing by being is distinct from knowing by conceptualization.


Knowing by being is direct, pre-inferential, pre-conceptual, and allows for no epistemic gap -- in which uncertainty can reside -- between being a thing (or containing it within your being) and directly knowing it. Its domain is the qualities, and quality-disclosed patterns, changes, forms, and interactions that one contains within one's being. It is a non-goal-oriented "directly representational" form of knowledge that provides goal-oriented cognition with the intrinsically knowable content that informs the actions that it undertakes to form conceptual models and in which it observes the quality-disclosed patterns, similarities, and differences that it describes, analyzes, and records in easily retrievable conceptual format.  

Knowing by conceptualization is indirect, inferential, and thus potentially mistaken. Its domain is goal-oriented simplifications, generalizations, mappings, predictions, and causal intervention strategies, none of which exist in our being prior to cognition instantiating them. Knowing by being is what allows us to know that these various forms of goal-oriented conceptualization exist, however it does not guarantee that they will succeed in their aims, for simply knowing them indubitably does not guarantee that the inferences that they make about things external to our being will apply.

Major problems that the substrate of reality being autonoetic resolves:

(1.A) The infinite-regress problem of knowledge in non-autonoetic ontologies:


Even if we make the assumption -- purely for the sake of this argument -- that non-autonoetic states (or states not contained within an autonoetic field) can be coherently said to exist (something that we will dispute on logical grounds later on) we still face the problem of a vicious form of infinite regress that renders knowledge logically impossible: 

Imagine a chain in which non-autonoetic process A is said to be known in virtue of its causal impact on non-autonoetic process B, which in virtue of not being autonoetic, cannot directly and intrinsically know its own contents -- which are claimed to contain information* about process A -- and thus B must attempt to rely on its causal impact on process C in order for its contents -- which are claimed to contain information about A -- to be known, but C, also being non-autonoetic, suffers the exact same inability to directly and intrinsically know its own contents as B, and must attempt to rely on its causal impact on non-autonoetic process D in order to be known... ad infinitum.

There is no autonoetic element in this chain that is capable of knowing A, and so we just wind up with a pointless infinite regress in which information from A is infinitely passed down a chain in which no element is capable of serving as the autonoetic bottom in which the information from A can ever finally be known.

And so A is never known.

It doesn't matter how complex these chains are, for complexity can't in principle change the fundamental fact that as long as no element in the chain is autonoetic, knowledge of A can simply never arise anywhere within it.

* The term information is often used by non-autonoetic ontologies to smuggle in properties of reality's actual autonoetic ontology into a set of ontological assumptions that are not logically compatible with its existence. We will address this later on.

(1.B) The minimal logical criterion for existence of anything is that it is capable of distinguishing itself -- in virtue of existing -- from what it is not, for that which cannot distinguish itself from the total set of things that it is not is a self-contradiction and can have no particular properties.


How this "self-distinguishing" works in an autonoetic ontology like Objective Idealism is very concrete and straightforward. If the substrate of reality is autonoetic (intrinsically self-knowing) being and knowing by being cannot be separated: to exist as a particular state in the autonoetic substrate is to be known by it as self-evidently distinct from what the particular state is not. This takes the form of self-evidencing particulars: e.g. black, white, pain, pleasure, and quality-disclosed forms, processes, similarities, differences, and interactions, which furnish us with a world that is known prior to conceptualization for conceptualization to describe and for cognition to be informed by.

Knowledge is not possible without distinguishability, for without distinguishability from what a state of knowledge is not, there is nothing in particular to know. And distinguishability is not possible without knowledge, for without knowledge there is nothing in particular to be distinguished from anything else. So knowledge and distinguishability are mutually necessary for the existence of one another, inseparable in principle, and are thus two conceptual angles on one self-same thing.

The inseparability of existence and knowledge by being -- and thus the fact that existence is necessarily autonoetic -- directly follows from the fact that nothing can be coherently asserted to exist if it cannot distinguish itself from what it is not in virtue of existing:

•  Nothing can be coherently asserted to exist that does not distinguish itself from what it is not in virtue of existing.
• Knowledge and distinguishability are one self-same thing seen from two distinct conceptual angles that each emphasize one aspect of knowledge/distinguishability while implicitly assuming the other. 
• Existence is necessarily self-knowing in virtue of being necessarily self-distinguishing from all that it is not. 
• Existence is necessarily autonoetic.
  
  

 
Consciousness realism rests on the claim that knowing by being occurs, and that there are thus properties of reality about which we cannot in principle be mistaken in virtue of the fact there is no epistemic gap between existence and knowing by being.


The divide between 1st person and 3rd person ontologies can be summarized as follows:


3rd person ontologies explicitly deny that there is a private-to-being (i.e subjective) intrinsically self-knowing aspect to existence, and assert that knowledge -- far from being necessary for existence -- somehow results from the interaction of chains of non-autonoetic processes with purely external publicly accessible properties (which are claimed to somehow exist without being contained by anything autonoetic).

1st person ontologies assert that there is a private-to-being (i.e subjective) intrinsically self-knowing aspect to existence that discloses the intrinsic qualitative nature of reality in a way about which we cannot in principle be mistaken because there is no epistemic gap between being and knowing by being. 

Minimal Materialism:


(1) The substrate of reality is not autonoetic/private-to-being (i.e. subjective) and reality can be exhaustively described by a 3rd person ontology composed exclusively of publicly accessible particular properties.


Materialism: A Blind Smuggler's Tale

Given that knowledge is not possible without an autonoetic bottom to end infinite regress, and that existence itself is necessarily autonoetic, we can conclude that quite literally everything that materialism asserts to exist has been blindly and fallaciously smuggled into the ontology from the quality-disclosed world-picture furnished by 1st person experience.

• It assumes that existence and consciousness (autonoetic being) are existentially separable in virtue of the fact that they are conceptually separable. Given that two distinct concepts can emphasize different aspects of a single self-same thing while implicitly assuming its other aspects, conceptual separability does not imply existential separability. As a result, materialists have formed a logically incoherent concept of what existence is, which is only knowable to them because it occurs within the autonoetic substrate of their own being.
  
• It assumes that quality and form are existentially separable in virtue of the fact that they are conceptually separable, even though it is only by imagining (or experiencing) a qualitative contrast between a form and its background -- which individuates form -- that materialists have any notion of form whatsoever. 
  
• It assumes that a 3rd person state of affairs can be coherently asserted to exist without reliance on the 1st person autonoetic perceptual states by which they actually know it, again purely because the 1st person and the 3rd person are conceptually separable and are assumed to thus be existentially separable.
• It assumes that multiplicities can exist without an autonoetic field that provides multiplicities with an existential medium in which their elements can collectively co-exist in the state of being known to co-exist.
  
  Materialism is a bottom-up ontology, composed exclusively of particulars, that asserts the reality of multiplicities while simultaneously denying that there is anything in reality that is not a material particular, and it thus deprives multiplicity of an existential medium, for no material particular can in principle serve as this existential medium. Its concept of multiplicity is thus ontologically ungrounded. 
  
  Objective idealism is a top-down ontology in which particulars are not separate from the unitary autonoetic substrate in which their quality-disclosed being, relational properties, and co-existence are contained by a single unitary field of being/knowing. Co-existence, relative location, and relational properties like similarity and difference must be ontologically grounded in something, and non-holistic bottom-up ontologies like materialism deprive us of anything that could fill this role. Objective idealism ontologically grounds all of these properties by making them the properties of a single holistic autonoetic field.
  
  And because all rule-bound spatial and temporal distinctions logically require an existential medium that is more general than these rule-bound particular distinctions to instantiate and maintain them -- for this cannot be accomplished by nothing -- it follows that the autonoetic substrate is more general than space and time: it contains them in autonoetic awareness, but autonoetic awareness is not itself stratified by the awareness-internal spatial and temporal distinctions that it instantiates within itself and serves to contain. So autonoetic awareness is absolutely ontologically unitary.
  
  This only scratches the surface of the fractal wrongness of materialism, but I'm not trying to write a book here. My aim is just to guide a few materialists out of the philosophical fly-bottle in which their minds have become trapped, and I think that this should suffice as a first effort in that direction.