Human Immortality V

See Human Immortality IV and earlier posts. For the full reference to the work quoted, see Human Immortality.

"Thus the theory which makes the external causes of our sensations material reaches a climax of inconsistency. Its one defence was the principle that the causes of the sensations must resemble the sensations they cause. But now it turns out that that which the causes are to resemble is a mere abstraction from our sensations, which is so far from being a sensation which we experience, that we cannot even imagine what such a sensation would be like." (p. 33)

In dialectical materialism, "matter" means only the external cause of sensations so there is no need to make that cause "material." (Of course, "external" means "external to consciousness.") That the causes of sensations must resemble the sensations caused is not a defense of materialism. On the contrary, the nature of the causes must be discovered by empirical investigation. There is a dramatic contrast between the world as we perceive it and that same world as we scientifically understand it but it remains a single world, both perceived and understood.

We sense concrete, not abstract, extension but apply abstract extension in mathematics while physicists currently understand material objects not as abstract extensions but as large numbers of moving and interacting particles.

Extended, impenetrable "matter" does not exist but something external to consciousness, called "matter" by dialectical materialists, does exist. Similarly, in Marxist theory, "workers" are those who survive economically by selling their labor power, not necessarily those who work in factories. Capitalism continually transforms its means of production as scientists continually transform their understanding of matter. The material environment is transformed by mental and manual labor and understood by mental labor so this comparison between the changing composition of the working class and the changing understanding of matter is not fanciful. Rigid categories of mechanical materialism or of doctrinaire socialism are inadequate for thinking about either nature or society.