The Matter Delusion

October 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Dawkins, Richard, Evolution, God, Haldane, J.B.S., Sense, Substance |

In the talk that Richard Dawkins presented as part of the Tedtalks series in 2006 he referred to physical matter as a ‘convenient fiction’. Our experience of the apparently solid table in front of us and the apparently solid wall around us is, he claims, a product of our brains interpreting the relationship between our (middle sized) bodies and the (middle sized) objects of the world. Physics determines that the relationship between two medium sized objects is generally one of non-penetrability, we cannot routinely walk through walls or pass our hand through the surface of a table. If we wish to avoid repeatedly banging into walls and other matter then the survival imperative of an evolutionarily determined brain requires that interpretation of this relationship dramatises this non-penetrability. We see and feel walls and similar objects as ‘hard’. This general principle applies to all substances, resulting in the various grades of hardness and softness we encounter without a second thought to their provenance. All matter, in this understanding, is a story told to us by our brain so that we might better navigate the world of the medium-sized.

This seems straightforward enough; ‘the world is’, to paraphrase JBS Haldane, ‘queerer than we can suppose without making up imaginary entities like solid matter’. This raises the question of what the ontological difference might be between the convenient fiction of matter and the equally fictional (although possibly less convenient) god? Why is believing in god a delusion whereas believing in matter is simple common sense? A posting on the Richard Dawkins website forum noted that the distinction is not between god and matter, but between god and the experience of matter that we call ‘hardness’. Whilst this refinement does shift both entities more clearly into the realm of abstractions, it does not explain the very different attitude we have to these concepts. ‘Hardness’ is one of a range of human interpretations of the properties of the universe; it is qualia familiar as common sense to (apparently) everyone and hardwired from birth. God, on the other hand, whilst it is also a human interpretation of the workings of the universe, and whilst some variation of the god concept seems to be a human universal and therefore also approaches the status of common sense, possibly even hardwired, seems to be less resistant to disbelief. Although god, as a concept, in some cases ‘won’t go away’, the presence of atheists in the world (and even in foxholes) demonstrates that he, she, or it can indeed be banished by an act of educated will. As Dawkins goes on to mention in the same presentation, the most determined efforts my Major Albert N. Stubblebine of US Military Intelligence failed to dissolve the hardness of matter by a similar act of will. A failure of organised disbelief that caused him to repeated crash into the wall he was trying to walk through.

These two delusional entities, the hardness of matter and being of god, may mark two points on a continuum of embodied imagination in which the impact of the delusion is felt to greater or lesser extents. The hardness of matter is felt at the surface of the body, the being of god, if it is felt at all, is felt in the mind. Both feelings are, in a sense, interpretations. ‘Hardness’ is an interpretation by the sensorimotor system of certain enduring and consistent laws of physics related specifically to the properties of substances; god seems to be an interpretation of a supposed unification of the big questions of life, the universe, and everything.