That is, a reductively materialistic view of human nature excludes the sort of openness to the meaning of the universe that is associated with spirituality. Or it replaces true spirituality with a debased, consumerist version thereof: I will create a meaning of my life for myself while you create a meaning for yourself. The latter involves no communion with something greater than ourselves. No reverence. Only self-worship. To seek a meaning that others can also discover, a meaning that is not your own private little creation, is to rely on something godlike in yourself that is capable of reaching beyond the here and now: it is to reject the more reductive of materialism.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
Comments