In Our Time - Materialism

Episode Date: April 24, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Materialism in Philosophy – the idea that matter and the interactions between matter account for all that exists and all that happens. We trace the descent of materialism from the ancient Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus, to its powerful and controversial flowering in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as an attack on religion. It’s provocative stuff even today and certainly was in 1770 when Baron D’Holbach published his book The System of Nature. He wrote: "If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them."Materialism was considered so dangerous that every copy of the Baron’s book was condemned to be burnt. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, materialism dominates much of our understanding of the world today. Associated with science and atheism, Materialism has influenced many forms of contemporary human thought from the process of history to the diagnosis of disease and boasts a cast list of devotees including Pierre Gassandi, Thomas Hobbes, the Marquis de Sade and Karl Marx. But what does materialism really mean, how has it developed over time and can we still have free will if we are living in a materialist world? With Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Caroline Warman, Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford; Anthony O’Hear, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, this is a quotation from the 18th century. If we go back to the beginning, we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods, that fancy, enthusiasm or deceit adorned or disfigured them, that weakness worships them, that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them. It's provocative even today, and it was inflammatory in the 1770s in France, when published by Baron Holbach in his book, The System of Nature. The Baron's bold attack on God was underpinned by materialism,

a philosophical idea so dangerous that every copy of the book was condemned to be burnt. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, materialism dominates much of our understanding of the world today. With me to discuss materialism from the ancient Greeks to modern physics, Anthony Grayling, professor of philosophy at Burke Becking, University of London, Caroline Warman, fellow of Jesus College Oxford, and Anthony O'Hare, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham. Anthony Grayling, can you give us a definition of what materialism means in philosophical terms?

Materialism is the view that the only thing that exists in the universe is matter, and the forces that act on matter, and the processes that those forces bring about in matter. So by entailment it means that there's nothing immaterial, that is nothing which is not part of the physical universe. for example, independently existing minds or deities or angels or supernatural things of any kind. It just is matter. And matter is ideas as well.

Yes, so a certain kind of matter, the stuff that forms our brains and central nervous system, would in its operations give rise to mental phenomena like thoughts and memories and desires and so on. When did materialism first emerge as what could be called a philosophical idea in the West? Well, it's very strongly present to my mind. the pre-Socratic philosophers of classical antiquity. Thales, who's conventionally regarded as the first of them,

held that the basis of all existence is a material substance. Water, which is capable of taking solid form when it freezes into ice and becomes a gas when it boils away into steam. And so it can change its nature and become all the different kinds of physical thing that there is in the world. And his successes in the pre-Socratic tradition more or less held the same kind of view, for example, one of them, and Eximinis thought that air,

which is one of the elements, earth, air, fire and water, is the fundamental element. An exagoras thought that matter is the basic substance of the universe. So it was a very widespread view among the early philosophers of Greece that the universe is fundamentally

material in nature. Did they take that through to human beings? Did they, not just looking outside themselves, as it were, at the world, the hills, the trees, but inside themselves. It said that we are part of the same. substance, we are water, or we are air. Did they take that through? They did indeed, they recognised indeed that human beings are part of the natural world. They thought that what

distinguished humans from the rest of nature is the possession of reason, possession of mind, but they were perfectly prepared to accept some of them that the mental phenomena that distinguish us arise from the functioning of the matter of which we are made. And so that idea planted den is, we're going to leave to the end of the program now, which we're going to get to, I hope, according to that idea is one which is being developed in materialism ever since. Yes, I mean, fundamentally what's happened is that more and more sophisticated ideas about the nature of matter, its structure and its properties, have emerged, especially in the early modern period and thereafter. So, for example, the 16th and 17th centuries, when, um,

the materialist hypothesis was revived by someone we'll talk about later, Pia Gassendi, the atomism of the ancients was revived as a model for explaining how physical objects interact with one another according to the principles of mechanics. And that idea, which is a very important component of early modern science, has remained, but with increasing sophistication as our understanding of it has improved. Back to the Greek, Caroline Warman. Another philosopher Epicurus is known to us as the philosopher of pleasure, but can you give us a sense in how he took up materialist ideas?

He was so important in taking this initial model that Anthony Grayling has just given us of the world and the universe made up of the forces of matter and divisible according to matter and refining it a bit. So he said that matter and atoms doesn't just sort of move about, move about the cosmos. it tends downwards, which we can understand as an early idea, perhaps, of gravity, a very early idea. So matter goes down.

A beautiful way of understanding that is one that Lucretius, who we'll hear about later, tells us about it's matter and atoms full like raindrops. And he added a further thing, which is the idea that atoms swerve. So the term for this is klinamen. They swerve around. and later on. With pleasure, this interacts very interestingly because you get the idea of a deviation in French and Icarre swerves,

so not just being a movement sideways, but something that could be moving off the straight and narrow. So you see how all the sort of the metaphorical thing starts growing. So this is the, this is how Epicurus then gave a slightly modified model of the interaction of matter, which allows us to introduce pleasure. So he says that humans, so bringing back how humans work with all of this, they should follow pleasure.

But if we call it inclination, we see how that's absolutely consonant with what he said about matter moving downwards. Inclination is moving down. And it's also doing what you want, and it's moving according to the forces of attraction, which you call it gravity in French is attraction. And so the whole sort of system, which is about material interaction,

which sort of seeps into interaction according to pleasure is set up. And so he uses both, though. He's talking about the pleasure that human being. Sometimes it's better defined as tranquility or serenity rather than pleasure, that rather than hedonism. There's an argument as what he meant by pleasure. There's also a big argument as what we mean by matter, but it seems to be bringing a science into human behaviour there.

I mean, the minute you say there is only one substance, in the universe and its matter, then humans are part of that, and it's a specific denial of the separation of spirit and matter, so inevitably that is the case. Can you tell us what opposition or disagreement there was to this view at the time, around the time?

Well, he did various very polemical things, which was allowing women into his, to be disciples of his. and because they lived in communities of men and women and very shockingly they were allowed to marry and have children and because they were rather retired

they closed their doors there were accusations of immediately of debauchery and all the rest of it but what ideas were around you've described Antonin set us up on one line Antonin Grayling to Antonin's today it's going to be a bit difficult.

Andy Grayling set us up on one line. And Epicurus has taken this idea of materialism up and applied it to human behaviour. Were there anybody... Did Aristotle, for instance, at the time, have the same ideas? Was he going with that idea? Or was he putting an opposing notion?

Yeah, I mean, Aristotle is slightly earlier. So, I mean, Epicurus was... He was born just before the death of Alexander. Yeah, but Aristotle's ideas ran, didn't they? Oh, they're still running. and centrist. So where is ideas around? Let's just get this out of the way. Where is ideas around and were they opposed to Epicurus?

Yes, because Aristotle believes in permanent substances and essences and Epicurus doesn't. Right, Anthony Hayne, nevertheless, the Roman poet Lucretius, he teams have taken up Epicurious idea and he wrote this great poem,

Dererum Natchel The Nature of Things. What conclusions did Lucretius draw about the nature of things, especially in regard to religion? Yes, well, Lucretius was basing most of what he said on what had already been said by Epicurus and Greek atomists. All these people believed that the world consisted basically of atoms. So that's where the idea atom comes from.

And atom actually means indivisible. These indivisible particles were the basic stuff out of which everything else was constituted. And Lucretius draws this idea into a whole picture of the universe and indeed of humanity. He thinks these atoms are eternal, they're moving around all the time, they're of different sorts, but they combine and uncombine and recombine

to produce the things which we see and the world which we experience, and indeed many worlds. He seemed to believe that there are many worlds. That part of Lucretius wasn't particularly original, and I think it has to be said that Lucretius was a poet and a speculator. certainly wasn't a scientist and some would doubt that he was really a philosopher.

He was a rhetorician and in some ways he was a very modern man because he tries to draw from this picture of atomism conclusions about religion and about human life. He thinks that religion was started by people who didn't understand the true causes of things and were frightened. And so religion is mostly about fear and it oppresses people because they frighten themselves with huge goblins and things that don't really exist, which they see as underlying the natural phenomena. If they realize they were all atoms, they wouldn't worry about gods. He does think there are some gods, but they're very remote and don't have anything to do with us. So as far as we are concerned, in effect,

there are no gods. We ourselves are constituted of atoms, atoms of many sorts, but two sorts in particular, the more material sort and atoms which apparently can when they're brought into a certain combination with other atoms produce thought and ideas. This is, I don't think, very adequately explained, and I'm sure we'll come back to the idea which Anthony Grayling has already mentioned, that materialists rather help themselves to the idea that matter can produce consciousness. But we'll leave that to one side for a moment. Now Lucretius is most famous for saying that death is nothing to be scared of because we only have experiences

when the atoms which constitute us are all bound up together in one substance. But once we die, they all fly off in different directions. There's nothing to experience. So after death, there is nothing to experience. So, according to Lucretius, there is nothing to be afraid of. I will just point out that Philip Larkin,

who was as atheistical, I think, as Lucretius, perfectly well understood this, but he called this specious stuff, the thought that rational people couldn't be afraid of what they couldn't feel. For Larkin, that was exactly what you had to be afraid of, nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with, the anaesthetic from which none comes around. In O'Bard, yes.

So in O'Bard. So a lot of people present Lucretius as solving the problems of life, I think it's a matter of temperament, and Philip Larkin, and many other people are of a different temperament. We're coming towards an era on this ride through into the Christian era, which is very long, which Greek ideas about matter seeped into the Christian hegemony of thought. Yes. One thing which the materialists are very, I was going to say, very weak on,

actually they're very hostile to, are the idea, is the idea of final causes. Now, you mentioned Aristotle. One of Aristotle's key ideas, which actually he shared with Socrates and Plato, was that what existed in a certain dispensation and for various purposes. So according to Aristotle, nature was an interlocking system

in which each thing and each part of each thing had its own purpose within the whole, and this may have been designed by, an intelligent designer. Socrates certainly thought that, and Socrates, in fact, condemned the Greek materialists for not believing this. Now, the idea of purposes and intelligence underlying the universe was, of course, very congenial to Christianity. So I think during the Christian era, science and thought generally was dominated by Aristotelian

ideas of purposes, intelligence, and final causes. This, of course, was quite antithetical to the atomist idea that all we had were atoms bombinating about randomly for no purpose whatever. Would it be cause,

Anthony Grayling, would it be crude, to say that when the Christian hegem came in, let's say the 4th century, and for the next 1,200 years or so, that really blocked out most other thought and certainly, as Anthony Harris said, as repressed or put down materialism.

Well, there was certainly very little speculation until the later medieval period about matters metaphysical, which we've just been discussing, and a certain consensus arose among Christian thinkers about the nature of the world. It wasn't so much Aristotle, although, of course, he was a very important figure throughout the period and certainly for the thinkers of the later medieval period. but it was a view taken by Plato to the effect that there is certainly matter, but then there is also mind. There is the immortal soul which informs and occupies certain kinds of matter,

that is human bodies. And whereas mind, soul, spirit is good because it's capable of aspiring to knowledge of the very highest truths, the eternal truths, constituting the world of being, matter is bad. and it's, you know, if you think about mud and hair and ghastly things like that. The world of flesh and the devil. Yes, exactly. It's horrid. And that sentiment is something that infuses Christianity, of course,

because the great battle between the spirit and the body and the need to suppress the appetites of the body, all are developments, consequences of taking this kind of view about the nature of matter. So in Christian doctrine, there certainly is matter. It's fundamentally a dualist view. There is both spirit and matter. And then there is an ethical view about the nature of these two things. things which says matter bad, spirit, good.

And that was the dominating view all the way through until the early modern period when a separation between ways of thinking about the realm of matter and the realm of spirit was introduced. One of the important figures there, of course, is Descartes. So we have a situation where, inserted into this notion of materialism

which has been jogging along, we have a hegemony of thought, which can be represented, I think, by the persecution, the Aryan persecution, in the fourth century where the Aryans were wiped out because they said Christ was just a man and they were very strong Christians. He wasn't as God as well as a man.

The established church would not have that. They wanted the two. They wanted to be God and man. The mystery of things, the spirit of things, the soul of things came forward and it was accepted very widely by a great number of people of something they were interested in, which was anti-matter philosophically

and ideology in every possible way. So what did Descartes bring to close to close this period down. He started another run. Can you briskly tell us that? Yes, he's representative. He's not, of course, solely responsible for this, but he's certainly representative of a view that became significant in the late 16th century and certainly in the first half of the 17th century, and Descartes himself was active to this effect,

that it was possible to think about the material realm, the realm of physical objects and processes, separately from the spiritual realm. So the church could tell us about the great, truths of the spirit. But science could investigate the material universe, treat it as if it were a kind of clockwork, therefore understand the principles, the mechanisms, the laws, the governed activity in the material realm, and do it without impugning any of the truths of religion. That, at any rate, was the aspiration of Descartes and some others.

He wanted to try to separate these two debates, because prior to his time, the church was made very anxious by advances in natural philosophy in science, which seemed to them to threaten the eternal truths of which the church was the preserver. Anthony O'Hare, to what extent was Descartes building on the work that had been done scientific work for people like Galileo? Well, there's nobody like Galileo, but like Galileo. I think that you could see Descartes as trying to give a philosophical defense of the modern physics, because what Galileo said was that science should. be concentrate purely on measurable qualities, such as space, position, quantity of motion and size.

And you should get to the essence of things by simply examining those properties and ignoring or explaining simply as artifacts of the more basic properties. our experiential world that consists of things that are coloured, they have a certain field, have a certain taste and these things. So Galileo was proposing an analysis of the world which took us a long way from common sensory experience. And what Descartes tried to do was to give a philosophical justification of why this was the right way to proceed.

and what he argued particularly was that science should be based on mathematics. And this, of course, was quite puzzling. Why should mathematics fit the empirical world? You know, we just take it for granted now, but in the early 17th century, this wasn't an obvious idea. And I think actually a lot of science was done in the Middle Ages, despite what Anthony Grayling said. they weren't so keen on measurement and quantities and number.

And it was that which Galileo brought to the fore, and indeed we still think of science in those terms. And what Descartes, who I think was somewhat confused in his own scientific ideas, but that was what Descartes was trying to rationalise in his philosophy. There's a feeling of the materialism striking back, as it were, these hundreds and hundreds of years on, and Anton Greil has already mentioned, Pier, Pierre Gassendi, who revived Epicurious ideas, Caroline Woolman.

Can you tell us about what he was reviving and how influential he was? Gassendi's immensely, absolutely immensely important. And he's a scientist himself, he's an astronomer and a cosmologist. And often these materialists are, because they're thinking about space and about the universe. Gassendi and Descartes are in many ways there are ways in which you can say that they're similar so the empirical approach to understanding the world so understanding it through the senses

and verifying it in evidence is similar but then of course the problem the problem that Gassendi sees with Descartes' view is that that the spirit is still there and that you can't logically actually argue that it's still there so for example

Descartes will say to Gassendi but what do you do what do you do with thought you know you can only see surfaces you can only measure surfaces and Gassendi will reply there are only services and so and so Descartes will say but that's all subjective and Gassendi will say exactly that is the point

and so he makes it dynamic again and all about measuring services and moves away from the idea of soul. And as you said, tries to re-inject epicurus into the scientific debate. And how successful do you think it was, Anthony Greling?

Well, I think enormously successful because the dominating idea in early modern science is that we can describe physical activity in mechanical terms. I say the interactions between particles of matter, between bodies, whether large or small, according to the principles of mechanics. First Galilean mechanics and then later on, of course, in the Newtonian picture. So the idea of atoms, these indivisible particles out of which all things are made,

was brought back to serve, if you like, as little tiny billiard balls which are bouncing off one another and combining with one another, interacting according to these mechanical principles. And in the English language scientific tradition of the 17th century, instead of calling them atoms, they were called, little bodies. So the word that was coined for that was corpuscles. So the corpuscularian philosophies that came to be known was this mechanistic, particular view that all physical objects are made up of these tiny little, indivisible, interacting particles capable in their

combinations with one another of giving rise to all the physical phenomena that we see around us. We're talking about a huge tension, aren't we? The church has been dominating for so long, ideas of spirits, soul, mystery, the inexplicable, the to be revered, and believed in, are still very strongly there. And a lot of people want them to be there. And a lot of people have found great nourishment, including intellectual nourishment from that. But the materialist thing is saying it's there to be proved, examined.

And why did Thomas Hobbes fit into that, attenew here? Atenue here. 17th century, English philosopher, political philosopher most famously. But his view of materialism is germane at this point, I think. Yes. Hobbes espoused a pretty radical at a number, he thought the only things that existed were bodies. And even to the extent, again, we can ask about whether he believed in God or not.

He said he believed in God, but God was, for Hobbes, a spirit corporeal. So Hobbs actually took literally his own idea that everything was a body. Even God was a body, though not it has to be said a body that had much to do with us in Hobbs's account of things. and of course human beings as well were, according to Hobbs, simply consisted of bodily particles. And so what Hobbs is proposing is not just an account of the physical world. He's bringing human beings and everything we are right into this theory of nature that he has. And of course what he tries to do is to explain language and thought and ideas

in materialistic terms. Basically, what he's saying is that our experiences are caused by particles affecting our senses, and somehow or other this produces thought and ideas in our brains. And this is the standard materialistic account, thence forward. what I think none of them, at least of all Hobbs ever explained, was how it is that these particles or whatever it is that affects our sense organs, how it gets translated into experience and consciousness, let alone into thought.

Because this is not something which we find in any other area of the material world. the ability to be aware of what's happening and conscious of it this seems to take us to a different level of experience and existence. Let's just deal with you. I'd like to come take that on, Andrew Graham. I mean, just one thing before that I want to bring Baron Holbach in 1770 where he brought this particular argument, one particular argument to the boil, which is to do with Caroline, maybe you want to come in on this as well,

To which is to do with, if you're a materialist, does that mean you're an atheist? If you're an atheist, can you really exist in what is still a very heavily policed with thought, religious society? But Holbach comes out with it. He says you've got to be an atheist if you're a materialist. That's the way it is. At 1770. Yes, I mean, I suppose what characterises Olbach is not the originality of his thought, but the dogmatic, tyrannic way in which he expresses it.

He heavily criticises, he just pours scorn on authoritarian systems of government, which is, by extension, also to do with religion. And it's all about just repressing people and preventing their natural desires moving forward. So it's, for him, a materialist understanding of the universe from a scientific point of view, and the way in which we live within it, are all exactly part of the same thing. So yes, you have to be atheist. It's wonderfully intersocketed, isn't it? Because the Reformation has begun, let's say, 1517, and that's to do with religion,

but it's also do with free thinking. You can think against the establishment. The scientists have said, we can think about a universe in a different way. This goes around that, that doesn't go around that. So the whole thing is breaking through. It's as if the great dam, with one M, of Christianity, is being threatened by these torrents coming down. Do you see that?

Yes, well, you have a richly complex, set of events unfolding together here, you have the scientific revolution, you've got these materialist ideas from classical antiquity being reapplied very powerfully and very successfully in that scientific revolution,

and you've also got, as you've just said, the liberation of thought and inquiry after the Reformation, which began as a movement for liberty of conscience, but of course that immediately spilled over into this idea of liberty of thought more generally. And so somebody like Daubech is just exemplified

the application of the ability to think freely about these things and taking these ideas to their consequence. Now, if you think that all the evidence, that all empirical investigation, that the success of science jointly show that our best understanding of the world is as of a material realm and that there is very little only anecdotal and very partial evidence for anything non-material in the world,

then you're going to be, if you're consistent, pretty soon at the conclusion that Dolbach reached, which is that the universe is a material arena, and nothing else exists in it, and therefore all the claims that are made about other realities or another dimension to reality or a spiritual immaterial reality, which makes some sort of claim on us, which tells us what kind of morality we should have,

what kind of political system we should have, divine right of kings and so on, all goes out of the window. And this is where the other sense, the connected sense of materialism, as atheism, comes into the picture. Anthony here, can I just end this particular paragraph with the benefit of hindsight? Is there a sense which Descartes, who was not a materialist himself,

created a space, tragically a space, in which materialism and even atheism could flourish? Well, Descartes, of course, said that all matter was extension, and it could all be explained on scientific mathematical principles, probably of a reductive sort that is breaking it down into small elements which then would be seen as causing the greater larger phenomena

and the problem that Descartes was left with was of course he said as Anting Grading as pointed out that there was the human soul or mind wasn't part of this picture so everything in the world

was extension and scientifically explicable, according to Descartes, except the human mind, not even the human body. The human body was part of the physical world. So there was just this little thing, or actually rather big thing, called the mind, which was outside it. So I think this is why it was quite natural

for people like Hobbes and Dolbach and La Maitrie to want to bring the human mind into the Cartesian picture. And it was thought to be. be rather implausible by these thinkers, that there should be something, just one thing, outside this naturalistic picture. I would, though, just to make a caveat about all this, that I don't think that we can simply say that this scientific materialism was the necessary or only consequence of free thinking, because people who weren't orthodox, Christians. I mean, I think the Christian church has been taking quite a heavy battering in this program.

People who weren't Orthodox Christians... I don't think it has, and we just... Anyway, people who weren't Orthodox Christians, I was going to say, found this picture repulsive, one of whom was, of course, William Blake, but many other people, because they thought that the idea that all that existed was atoms, which we got down to by, a detailed examination and dissection of the world left out a huge amount of, well, you can call it spirit, but a huge amount of experience and nature and beauty.

And that's what I want to talk about now, to move to free will and determinism much. I think we'll address for the last part of the programme. Let's say that materialism, as Andy here said, is good at explaining everything in the universe right down to the body, but there's still the mind there. It's been less successful in convincing people

how people work, how the mind work, and the problem of determinism has led to what is free will, how to account of consciousness, what about sin, and where are we there? Well, this is very interesting, because the 18th century saw the organized rise, if you like, of psychology as a pursuit, as a study. Most of the philosophers who are significant in the 18th century, pantheon, people like Hume and weed and others,

were very interested in this question about how the mind works. The assumption behind what they were doing was that matter in motion is competent to produce conscious phenomena, the phenomena of mind. But as with Descartes, a century and more before, it was a very great mystery how that happened. How is it that the excitations of gelatinous matter inside the cranium gives rise to the technical phenomena of consciousness, as people have said, colored pictures in the head? and that has remained a mystery to this day. I mean, we're still very puzzled and researching with great energy into this question of how consciousness arises, although we now know a tremendous amount about the correlation between brain structure and brain activity and mental life.

But in the 18th century, the focus of attention really was on how ideas combined with one another by the principle of association, how thought works, what place reason occupies alongside our emotions in giving rise to our overall conception of the world and how we act in it. And so psychology focused on those aspects every now and then looking with some trepidation and puzzlement at the relation between matter and mind. Now, as you say, this gave rise to a particularly difficult question,

the question of free will. Prior to this time, by the way, this question of whether we human beings are genuinely free agents, that is, capable of making choices, being fully responsible morally for what we do and fail to do. That had been cast in a slightly different way. Very much earlier on, people ask, if there is a God and God is omniscient, then he knows the future, but he's given us free will, so he knows what we're going to do in the future, so are we really free, and so on. And of course, there was a large variety of different theories that people put forward to take account of that. But with the great success of

of the scientific revolution, the problem was recast. If we are part of nature, we are part of the causal realm. So isn't it the case that everything we do is caused by antecedent states of affairs? Does that mean, therefore, that we don't have free will? And this was the way that the problem presented itself very vividly in the 18th century. Caroline Warman. Can I bring Diderot into this, so the French side of it? So we've heard about Dahlbach.

In fact, the system of nature was partly written by Diderot, who's sort of hiding a bit behind the great power of Dolbach, and that's one of the interesting. things about him that he, Dolbach, was powerful enough to make the statement that nobody else really was powerful enough to make, just protected enough socially, in social terms, I mean. So what Diderhor, how he comes in on all of these questions is just endlessly, endlessly fascinating. So free will, for example, in his novel, Jacques Le Fatalist, Jack the Fatalist, you have a determinist, you have a determinist model, but it's immensely complex. And so every single time, what Diderrault does is

take the existing model of materialism and complexify it. So what you've got is a sort of model of human interaction, which is like Brownian motion, to be honest. So it's endless cause and effect, almost and it looks random, but it's not because there's so many levels of

interaction. So that's how he deals with that particular, it's not a dealing with it, it's a sort of saying there is no freedom fundamentally, although socially there needs to be freedom so that we can follow our sort of natural urges. So they're sort of divided. Its freedom and free will are quite

divided with Didor. And then the question of the question of consciousness, he comes back to again and again and again and always in these sort of amazing sort of metaphorical model, so in Dallanbeir's dream, for example, the what's

the mind? The mind is a sensitive harpsichord or a harpsichord that can feel itself, that plays itself. And that sort of doesn't quite do it for him. He comes back later to it in a very late work or the elements of physiology. And he said, actually, memory and the mind is a book which writes on itself.

And so he's always trying to make a model that can deal with the medical sort of situation and integrate it. This becomes one of the great themes that Anthony here, the German philosopher, Kant. He accepts materialist ideas, but he wants to reconcile determinism and freedom. what Kant wants to do is to reconcile moral experience with a deterministic picture of the world which he accepts, again, he thinks all physical things operate on Newtonian principles. But he tried to carve out a realm for freedom in moral experience.

I think it has to be said that he satisfied nobody with his explanation of this, possibly not even himself. but he was, of course, pointing to a very deep problem that we conceive ourselves human beings as moral beings, beings with freedom, as Anthony Grayling has said. We see ourselves as operating on various principles and values. We see ourselves reasoning, arguing logically, doing all kinds of things that don't seem to have much to do

with the one thing after another causal explanations that we get in modern science. Now Leibniz gave a very good metaphor for this. Leibniz, another philosopher of the 18th century, said that if you could walk around a brain, you would see all the neurons and things interacting and all the processes going on in the brain, but what you would not see would be thoughts and ideas.

What consciousness does is to unify these disparate activities within the brain to produce a notion, a sense of a single self, a unified self, which isn't in the brain. And this unified self then thinks, acts, chooses freedom. And what is particularly troubling for materialistic views is it acts in a top-down way. it's all right for Hobbs to say that sensation is produced by these physical things hitting my sense organs all the movement is going from the physical to the mental there so the mental could just be an epiphenomenon you know a kind of sort of artifact an additional bit that is produced by the physical but if you think as i think we all do of the mental as actually causing

things that we do, according to considerations that have nothing to do with the causal interaction of the scientific picture, what's called top-down causation, then I think materialism still has a big problem. Anthony Greland, can we come towards some summation of it? I know I've asked the three of you to cover an immense amount, and we haven't covered as much as we'd hope to do it, but it's because it's been richer along the way. Do you feel that we're at the stage where words like feelings, memories, memories, desires will be as sort of ancient as pre-Galilean views of the universe.

You feel that if materialism finds out how it really works, then these will be regarded as the first stage of a multi-stage rocket and they'll fall away and we think in other terms about how we are. Well, there are some philosophers and a married couple by the name of Paul and Patricia Churchill and spring to mind here, American philosophers contemporary ones, who have very robust in their view on. this matter. They are what are called eliminative materialists. That means

that we can eliminate reference to intentional concepts like hope, memory, desire, thought, and so on. Once we've really cracked it and explained how the brain gives rise to all mental phenomena. And this is a

very robust view because issues a kind of promissory note which says that ultimately we'll be able to reduce all explanation of that psychological moral, social terms. Two, first brain physiology and then physiology will eventually be

understood in chemical terms and chemistry will be understood in physical terms. So ultimately physicists might have the answer to it to all these questions. Now that seems to me to be an over-ambitious view. And it's over-ambitious because even if you were a far-going materialist in the sense that you think that the universe is only

a material realm, and I'm one such person, I nevertheless think that our very, very rich repertoire of psychological concepts is indispensable. Understanding other human beings, interpreting their behaviour, predicting what they'll do, expressing and explaining our feelings. And you don't think that's going to be susceptible to materialist examination? Well, I think it will be very interestingly explorable on materialist scientific principles,

but that we won't be able to get rid of talking in those terms because it is so powerful and insightful, so useful, if you like. Well, thank you all very much. I'm sorry we didn't get to Hegel. and Marx and quantum physics. I'm really sorry about that. I wanted to talk about Philip Pullman as well. You want to talk about Philip Pullman as well, you see. There you go.

We do try to put a quart into a symbol, and thank you very much for trying so hard to do it. I enjoyed it very much. Anthony Grayling, Anthony here, Caroline. Warman, and next three, the enclosures, 18th and 90th century enclosures. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.