The Two Miracles of Materialism

Metaphysical realism is considered naive these days -- the idea that we really do know reality as it is. Ever since Kant ruined everybody's lives and ate all our steak, the consensus has been that we are essentially sealed inside a submarine made of meat, in which we make no contact with water. We can interpret the meters and dials -- these being analogous to the senses -- but we ourselves are cut off from the water.

Then how do we know water exists?

Ay, there's the rube: for it's one thing to believe critical philosophy, another thing to live as if it were true. 

This subject comes up in The Brain: The Story of You, in which the author takes it as axiomatic that anything known as "reality" is just a distant rumor:

What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain?

Two can play that game: what if I told you that your opinion that the world around us is an illusion is just a show put on for you by your brain? 

Eagleson maintains that 

If you could perceive reality as it really is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world. How? 

That first sentence isn't even wrong, for if we can't perceive reality as it is, how do we know it is devoid of qualities? 

The second sentence fares no better, because it not only claims to know what reality really consists of -- matter and energy -- but that the human being can know this with certitude. 

And the third sentence passes over a rather remarkable phenomenon, which is to say, the transformation of matter and energy, not just into the experience of them, but experience of the intelligibility of matter and energy. 

How is this even possible? How can featureless matter and energy give rise to the experience of their qualities? Take color, for example. It is trivially true that color is experienced in the mind. Nevertheless, matter must at the very least have the potential to be experienced in this way. Or, just say that energy and matter have the potential to experience themselves, but how?

My How is bigger than Eagleson's How, because his How just assumes my deeper How. For example, how is it possible that Eagleton has written a book that purports to reveal the nature of reality outside human perception? 

Nah. Let's rethink this from the ground up. First things first:

The first thing that should strike man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- whence the incommensurability between it and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses (Schuon). 

So, the first thing is not a thing at all, but consciousness of things. But in reality these two are irreducibly complementary: consciousness + intelligible things; or, transcendence and immanence, vertical and horizontal, subject and object, exterior and interior. 

Not to belabor the point, but to suggest that mind and matter have nothing to do with each other is a gratuitous and unintelligible assumption. 

Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence, is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be (ibid.).

So, what Eagleson assumes to be the most obvious thing is in reality the most inconceivable thing: that matter and energy give rise to the miracle of subjectivity. Indeed, this is the One Free Miracle Eagleson grants himself in order to make his metaphysic work.

I, on the other hand, do not regard consciousness as an inexplicable miracle that defies the laws of physics. Rather, I would agree with Jonas, who writes that  

it is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe -- a principle foreign to suns, planets, and atoms....

This is irreducibly vertical principle of freedom is at a right angle to all those suns, planets, and atoms that we are free to know about. The latter are not free, nor is there even a theory of a theory of how freedom could emerge from them:  

[T]he first appearance of this principle in its bare, elementary object-form signifies the break-through of being to the indefinite range of possibilities which hence stretches to the farthest reaches of subjective life, and as a whole stands under the sign of "freedom".... 

[E]ven the transition from inanimate to animate substance, the first feat of matter's organizing itself for life, was actuated by a tendency in the depth of being toward the very modes of freedom to which this transition opened the gate.

A tendency in the depth of being, and why not? 

Perhaps, rightly understood, man is after all the measure of all things -- not indeed through the legislation of his reason but through the exemplar of his psychophysiological totality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness known to us: a completeness from which, reductively, the species of being may have to be determined by way of progressive subtraction down to the minimum of bare elementary matter.

Here again, this implies a vertical cosmos with mind at the top and elementary matter at the bottom. Which makes us the measure of things, not things the measure of us. But what measures man? In what is man enclosed, if not matter and energy? Well, although we are material, we know we cannot be enclosed in matter, if only because we know about matter.  

We agree with Davie, who affirms that there can be "only one sovereign subjectivity," a single I AM at the heart of things, and in which our own subjectivity must be grounded. This parallels the idea that there is but one material world with diverse manifestations -- a view that is much easier to accept thanks to quantum physics, which reveals the field-like nature of material existence.

In a way, the miracle of objectivity is even more miraculous than the miracle of subjectivity. After all, all other animals are plunged into their own private subjectivity. But man alone is capable of objectivity, of standing "outside" or "above" his subjectivity in a disinterested way. Man transcends the objects he knows, via knowing them.

So now we have two miracles for which the Eaglesons of the world must account: 1) the miracle of a subject who can 2) miraculously pronounce on the objective nature of things. 

Once again this post has exceeded Gemini's ability to visualize it:

I apologize once again. It appears that the images I am generating are not displaying for you, despite the tool reporting success. This seems to be a persistent technical issue that I am unable to resolve on my end. 

The image was a visual attempt to capture the two miracles you described: the miracle of subjectivity and the miracle of objectivity, both grounded in a single, unified reality.