Is Consciousness Entirely Physical? | Charles Tart

Charlie, the most important question we probably can ask about reality today is, does the traditional scientific approach of materialism, that only the physical is real, there's nothing else but the physical, is that true? The question is, can consciousness, the thing that we all seem to know but so hard to understand, can that defeat materialism? Well, let me point out why this is such an important question. Are you anything more than a meaningless hunk of meat? Maybe not. See, this is the thing. Materialism is not just an abstract scientific or philosophical position. It has consequences for the way we live our life. The mainstream scientific view, which is not essential science in my view, incidentally. Essential science has opened everything. But it's been so successful on material things, physical things, that it's become the dominant view. That mainstream view says there's no purpose in the universe. There's no goal. Things just happen. Take a bunch of atoms and subatomic particles, jiggle them together for a few zillion years, and you get us. And it doesn't mean a thing. We are nothing but the electrochemical actions of our brain. But that may be true. I may not like it, but that may be true. Just because I don't like it doesn't make it not true. That's right. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it true. But suppose it's not true. And what are the consequences of believing that? For instance, if I really believe that particular position, my personal reaction would be to invest in anything that extends my physical life, since that's all I've got, and try to get whatever I can to gratify me, because I happen to like that, even if it doesn't really ultimately mean anything. And to hell with you. You know, you're just a chemical accident. Why bother? So there are consequences of it. So I really have to insist, as a psychologist, it's not a neutral question. And so we may bring a lot of biases to bear on it. Now, I think spiritual experiences and the data of parapsychology are really important here in indicating that there's more to a human life, to being a human being, than simply the material aspects of it. So as you look at consciousness as imparting to the question, is only the material real? You would take two elements of consciousness, something about spirituality and parapsychology as two pieces that can very much address the question of materialism. Is there only the physical world, or is there something more? Yes. And it addresses the question in two ways. Direct spiritual experiences produce enormous changes in the way people view reality, irregardless of what science or religion or anything says about it. Direct spiritual experience is more real than real in a lot of cases. Parapsychology, on the other hand, as I talk about it as a specialized branch of science, says within the scientific framework, within this methodology of get your data, look at it carefully, work up theories, test them, and so forth, that kind of scientific parapsychology says, yes, the human mind does things which we can't reduce to any obvious material thing, and therefore, let's take a serious look at the stuff that's been called spiritual. There may be a reality to it. And even if the vast majority of the spiritual experiences are just wishful thinking, and even if parapsychological phenomena are rare and difficult to discern, certainly very controversial, if anything in one of those categories turns out to be impossible to explain within our normal physical world, that gives the physicalist explanation difficulty. It gives the physicalist explanation considerable difficulty, right? So that's why the parapsychological data and the spiritual experience data is usually ignored. We all fall in love with our theories and our conceptual systems. We like to think, I understand reality, it makes me secure, and so don't bother me with stuff that doesn't fit. It's a very human reaction. I can understand it, but it's lousy science. Science requires you to always put data first, to always look at things that seem to happen, whether you like them, whether they make sense to you or not. Well, the argument is, is that in both of those categories, there are reasons that it just doesn't fit. Some would say that the data itself is either spurious, illusory, or misinterpreted. Or that, some argue for the other direction, that it is impossible, if something is impossible to work in the physical world, therefore it is impossible. Yes, that sure arrogantly assumes that we really understand everything important, doesn't it? Scientists are very funny in that they don't learn from our own history of the number of times science had everything sewed up and there was nothing more fundamental to look at and then everything got overturned. Graduate students being told, don't bother to go into physics, there's nothing new to discover and whatnot. The French Academy saying meteorites are nonsense because stones can't fall from the sky. We have example after example of how scientists who are human beings get all attached to and enamored with their theories and make themselves blind to data that doesn't conflict, but that data opens up new vistas. The analogy works to a point, but in every case that you've mentioned, the thing that was disturbing was clearly within the physical world and was amenable to physical explanations within an enlarged physical system, but within a physics that is still the same kind of world. What you're talking about with spirituality or parapsychology or defeating the whole system requires there to be something not physical, which is a totally different category. But do you realize what a limitation you're putting on yourself, Robert? You're saying that science can only deal with physical matter, okay? So if you come to me and say, I've fallen in love, I have to ignore you because that's not physical and it's not important. I might measure your hormone levels or something like that, but the love itself I have to pay no attention to. That's kind of weird when we throw out some of the most important things to humans simply because they're not obviously physical. I would say that any characteristic like that, that we express love, can be explained ultimately in some ultimate physics or neuroscience in terms of some physiology. I respect your faith. That's what it is. And you'd have to add some sort of an analysis of an emergent quality that comes up that has to be explained at a different level that can't be reduced down to just electron spin or whatever, but you have to explain it at an emergent level. But neither explanation requires something outside of the physical world. To say that we're defeating materialism ultimately says that we are showing that something other than the physical world exists. To say we're defeating, okay, materialism is simply defined in terms of current knowledge at this point, and current knowledge can change. When I say that the data of parapsychology show the human mind can do things that can't be accounted for in material terms, I'm saying given current knowledge and reasonable extensions of it, they don't fit, and that means study them on their own terms. Now, you can never say what this might go into. The physics of a hundred years from now might look like spirituality to us. Who knows what it's like? Meanwhile, we have to look at what actually happens. Okay, if we analyze the data of parapsychology and assume that it is correct, I think that this is the claim, that because we can show independence of space and time in the data, even if some people would say it's controversial, that claim to be independent of space and time puts it outside the realm that anything we know about the material world can be explained. And that, by the way, is the reason why some scientists say it's absolutely impossible to begin with, because it's impossible to be outside the realm of space and time. I mean, I'm sorry to laugh, but in some sense, your faith is very touching. Because if I listen to what you're saying, what you're really saying is that my knowledge, my scientific knowledge is so fundamental that it's now imperative that I must explain everything in terms of that. Well, okay, people like to feel secure in that we know a lot. I'd much rather say, here are things that don't seem to fit that challenge us to have a wider view. I think that's wonderful that things happen to human beings that don't make sense this way. We're going to grow from it. That's the fun part.