Shucks, it’s hard to be a materialist!
I have these two smart, atheistic, science-respecting-type friends. Their respect for science falls short of any active pursuit of the subject. Each one can enjoy a good documentary that bashes creationism or socially conservative evangelism- such low-hanging forbidden fruit!- but the interest ends about there. Still, I think of them both as rational, generally skeptical thinkers.
My intellectual pursuits run more to the science side than do theirs. I’m only a lowly social sciences buff, with a truly shaky grasp of the “hard” stuff, but I have taken enough courses in research methods and statistics to understand much of the philosophy of science. I often have to represent science to these smart but humanities-focused friends.
I can’t remember how materialism came up between the three of us, exactly. I remember attempting to stumble my way through a question about social cognitive neuroscience, and the fact that some criticize the field as nothing but “gee-whiz, lookit what lit up right there!” I said that it comes as no surprise that a real-life mental process has visible, biological trappings.
Or maybe it came up when discussing the classic battle of therapy versus medication for depression. I told my friends that major depression probably always involves real, observable changes in serotonin or other neurtransmitters. I said that this doesn’t prove that medicine is the answer in all cases. Maybe a depressing situation can push a distressed person into having the chemical trappings of depression. Therapy that cheers a person up could cause the chemical problem itself to recede.
For some reason, my rational friends struggled with the marriage of the mental and the chemical. How strange, how eerie it was that every mental process has a biological sign, they said.
I shrugged at this and set my sarcasm level to stun. “Well of course it’s biological,” I moaned, “If you’re a materialist, this shouldn’t surprise you.”
They blanched. What did I mean?
