Materialism and Emotion
I’ve been thinking about philosophical materialism a lot lately — loosely stated, the view that the only things that truly exist are material, made of matter. I’ll admit, I don’t formally know too much about materialism, there are a ton of different types, and the form I am most familiar with, eliminative materialism, is often described as a pretty extreme form.
A few weeks ago some friends and I watched a movie called Brain Dead (staring both Bill Pullman AND Bill Paxton). In the movie they have the technology to produce or affect mental states by making physical changes in the brain, in one scene the patient is sitting in a chair with the top part of his head cut off and they are poking him in the brain to produce different mental states. It’s pretty cheesy, but it got me thinking about things.
A friend of mine that is an electrical engineering graduate student told me about some research he’s worked on involving mice where they alter the mice through physical changes in their brain, but all of their research deals with physical changes in the mice, to help with certain muscular diseases, and not mental states. But if you believe in eliminative materialism, the same should hold true for mental states. They are controlled by, and should be able to be affected by, physical states in your brain.
I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of all of my mental states, all my feelings, beliefs and emotions being the result of some physical states in my brain. On one hand it is what I believe. I don’t think there’s more too it than that. But it’s hard at times to come to terms with it. I think it complicates the free will/determinism argument quite a bit, and I very much want to believe in a romantic idea of free will. I almost feel like it relieves us of some amount of responsibility, if mental states are all physical, and we don’t have control over our physical attributes, then we don’t have control over our mental states. In someways I agree with that, there have been times I’ve felt one way, and wanted to feel another but couldn’t, but I’m still grasping on to this idea of free will, it’s very important to me, as is the idea of responsibility. If we’re not free how responsible for our actions are we?
I was thinking about all of this when I got an email from a friend and she used some interesting language. She was describing a situation in which myself (and I think most people) would use the term “heartbreak”, but she referred to part of her brain being gone and the feeling of longing for someone as being without half her brain. I hadn’t given it much thought before, but that sort of language is a lot more telling than referring to your heart. Not only do they refer to the same emotions, I think the language about the brain also refers to something more. It refers to that feeling that you’re not all there, that you can’t concentrate or work fully because you are missing part of your brain. A feeling I think is common with “heartbreak”.
There is a scene in the movie Waking Life where they talk about the usage of language. It started out that we were talking about physical things that could be seen and measured. At some point we created language for immaterial things, feelings and beliefs, things like love. One problem with this is that we can’t know that we’re ever talking about the same experiences. We can generally agree about the physical objects in front of us, but feelings and emotions are much more difficult to know we’re talking about the same things.
Then I think about all of these emotions being the result of physical characteristics in the brain. If two people experience emotion differently are the physical qualities in their brains different? Is it a matter of more or less of a certain chemical that produces a more intense feeling?
I look forward to the day when the eliminative materialists have mapped out our brains so well that we know exactly what causes different feelings and thoughts. It fascinates me (and scares me a bit) when they figure out how to manipulate those thoughts, emotions and memories.
At the same time I feel like something is lost to all of this science. When our emotions can be reduced and explained away to physical states I feel some romantic ideals are lost.
