The Crassly-Haunted Cosmos

Materialism, Animism, and The Shape of Ignorance

What Is a Person?

When you think of “people,” what springs to mind?

This isn’t a setup for a one-sided conversation about reproductive politics or animal rights—I’m thinking basic.

Humans, right? Humans are “people.”

Or, if you’re of a historically-normal-but-unusual-in-modernity bent, humans in your “group” (however you define it).¹

Humans are people, because people are conscious. People have emotions. People have soulful connections to other people. They gaze in wonder at the beauty of the natural world. They understand death. They are conscious, and they are conscious of the separation between their own sense of self and the other minds in the mix.

Humans have, over the centuries, spent a lot of time telling themselves stories about what it means to be human. Humans are different from animals (and, sometimes, slaves) because we have souls.

What are souls?

A soul could be spirit breathed into us by the gods.² It could be our true eternal essence that pre-existed us in the cosmic realms, and that chose to be born into this time, into this life. It could be the great spirit of the universe breaking off pieces of its own consciousness and sending them into mortal bodies as part of an eternal dialectic.

We don’t really know what they are—but if there’s one thing all religions on the planet agree on, it’s that we can’t be just material. “Mindless matter in motion,” “deterministic chemical reactions,” we know we’re not anything like that. We feel things. We choose things. Goddammit, WE ARE SPECIAL, and we know it, and we know that this specialness makes us, in some cosmic sense, superior, separate from, and qualitatively different than the rest of creation.

The Platonist’s Intuition

The ancient Athenian philosopher Plato had an intuition about the way that the universe was structured. Reality, he held, was not “all around us.” It was out there, on another plane of existence (well, several others, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll talk about them as if they were a single, broad category), and that other, spiritual plane is what really mattered. Everything on Earth was just a corrupted and twisted reflection of the world of divine perfection.

To illustrate his point, Plato told the Parable of the Cave. Imagine the material world as a cave filled with people. The inhabitants of the cave are chained to stalagmites, watching a shadow-play on the cave wall. Because their backs are to a fire that they cannot see, they have no idea that reality is not the strange shadow-play on the wall, but is, in fact, going on behind them as real people walk between the chained men and the fire. Enlightenment, in Plato’s view, consists of recognizing that life is just a dream and endeavoring to rid oneself of the illusion of the cave and escape the world of matter. This, he held, was the purpose of education.

You know this story as The Matrix. You’ve heard it invoked by St. Paul when he compared the world of fleshly existence to the world that awaits Christians after the general resurrection of the saints by saying “Now we see through a glass, darkly.”³ In a less explicitly religious form, it is the foundation of the Marxist idea of “false consciousness.”

The world is an illusion, and life is but a dream. This veil of tears we call life must be a dream, or a test, or a realm we’re passing through, because we are above the indignities we must suffer every day to endure it.

We must eat. To eat we must kill. And after we eat, we must shit—a smelly, humiliating act that seems no different than that same function when we see it performed by animals (but at least we have the dignity to be embarrassed by it). We must be born, but to do that we must endure blood and pain and mess and passing through the genitals of another person.

Our mood changes with problems in our digestion. Pain can bring our equanimity to a screeching halt. Hunger and thirst and sexual appetite can derail our entire lives, and the longer those drives go unslaked, the more dangerous to our judgment they become. We go through life scrambling to satisfy the urges of our bodies, saying all the while “I know I can be better than this!”

This conviction about our potential, our ability to somehow “do better” or “be better,” is why philosophers and prophets throughout the ages have argued that we know that we are not merely material, not merely animals.

Nothing comes from nothing. A mere animal is a slave to its instincts—it has no real desires or ambitions of its own. Matter—molecules in motion and the energetic particle activity that drives it—makes up rocks and suns and insects and foxes, and it even makes up our bodies…but it doesn’t define us. Matter can’t make choices. Matter has no free will.

Matter can not be moral.

But we are moral. And this is how we know we are better. It’s how we know we have spirit.

It’s why we can be sure there is a God, and a divine plan, and that everything will somehow work out.

A Dog’s Life

Look at this face.

This is the face that greets me every morning.

It is the face that dogs my steps (pun intended) on my hikes every day.

It’s the face that is sleeping curled up at my feet, under my desk, as I type these words.

She’s my right hand at bear defense here in my mountaintop hideaway. She has a vocabulary of around a hundred words, and she knows how to read the thoughts on my face. She has complex routines she goes through. She has desires. She’s creative. She gets into arguments with herself when presented with two desirable choices.

She’s upset when there’s strife in the family. When someone cries, she licks their tears away. When her claws grow too long, and one splits, she gingerly approaches the place where the nail clippers are kept, and she submits herself to the indignity of having her claws trimmed while they’re hurting her. She controls her impulse to lash out and bite the hands that care for her, because she understands that discomfort and indignity are the price of getting her feet to stop hurting.

She wrestles with temptation when there are french fries on the counter, but she never counter-surfs. And when someone hands her a fry for her very own, she takes it gingerly and offers a paw in thanks—this isn’t a trick. Nobody trained her to do it. It’s her own, personal response to french fry generosity.

She feels love, affection, excitement, anger, intimidation, humiliation, joy, sorrow, longing, ennui, contentment, peace, and the ecstasy of the hunt (whether for a ball or a bear).

And, some day in the not-too-distant future, this animal who owns my heart will breathe her last, and I will bury her in a plot in one of my hillsides that I’ve already selected. I will mourn her just like I would mourn any other dearly-loved friend, and I will remember her until it is my turn, too, to join her in the earth.

She is, in every since except her species, a person.

And, going by the standards of human intuition, that plain fact is one of the most offensive things in the universe.

Excavating the Indignities of Life

Offensive?

Well, first off, if canine consciousness is that complex (and it is), and it’s far from the most advanced non-human animal consciousness on the planet (and it is—several whale species, several primates, and elephants are all much more demonstrably complex than dogs), ⁴ then what does that say about us?

It says we’re murdering bastards, doesn’t it? If all other animals are also actually conscious (whatever that means), and we must kill and eat them to stay alive, we’re monsters! And let’s not even get into the possibility of plant consciousness, because that one’ll really ruin your day.⁵

But it also says something far worse.

If you don’t need a non-material soul to have ethical intuitions, or a sense of fairness, or empathy, or wonder, or joy, or grief, or love, or politics, or any of those other deeply human emotions and experiences that we prize so highly…

…then maybe we are “just” animals.

Well, we are animals—everyone knows that. But we’re not just animals, right? We experience a hunger for the divine. We have that great intuition that we’re meant for something better. And we know that something can’t come from nothing.

Animals don’t have free will, after all.

Animals don’t know God.

So what, then, is “free will?”

Is it the ability to make choices? All animals do that. They’re acting on their inborn drives, impulses, and desires. Expressing those is what we call “will.”

So what, then, would make the difference between “will” and “free will?”

What would will have to be free from in order to be “free”?

The only answer that makes any sense is that if we had a “will”—that is, the ability to choose and act—that was independent of cause.⁶

So tell me, what choice have you made, in your life, that was unprompted by any desire, stimulus, need, burden, or emotion? That was independent of the context, experience, and value set that you already espoused?

I’ll give you a hint:

You’ve never done it.

Like any other animal, you make choices when your various drives, desires, and values come into conflict with one another. If my dog is carrying a bone and comes across a ball, she drops the bone next to the ball and examines both for a moment—fate has presented her with a glorious, tragic opportunity. She has before her her two favorite things in the universe, but she has only one mouth. She can carry the bone, or she can carry the ball—but she can’t carry both.

She will make a choice. I’ve seen her do it twice today. Just like you, she decides based on what she wants more, and that “want” comes from her nature.

But if you’re offended now, wait till you hear this:

What would it mean if you did have a non-material soul that animated you? A ghost in your personal machine?

One way or another, that “spirit” would have to interface with the world through your meat body.

If you ingest the wrong chemicals, if your head gets hit the wrong way, if you get a degenerative brain disease, your personality will change, your values will change, your abilities will change, and the very stuff of who you are will change. Your spirit doesn’t get a vote.

If I were to sever your corpus callosum (the interface between the right and left hemispheres of your brain), you would have two distinct personalities that were sharing control of one body, that each had different sets of memories, that each were vaguely aware of each other.⁷ Could a scalpel really split your soul?

The “you” that you know is entirely rooted in and growing from your body, just as a tree is entirely rooted in its home soil. If you—the real you—were an immaterial spirit bound to this humiliating sack of meat, that would mean a couple pretty disturbing things.

First, it would mean that you—both the “you” that you know, and the edited version of you that you let other people get to know—aren’t real. The real you is something different, something you will never experience being because your consciousness is contained in (or mediated through) the meat. You’re not really you, and you’re not really here, and none of this life matters at all except and unless it’s all some kind of strange test imposed by a higher order of spirit.

If you’re anything like Plato, you might think that having an immaterial soul gives you free will and a kind of dignity that lets you rise above the physical world…but does it? If that soul is trapped in the context of your time, place, culture, and meat, how is its will free? If it’s experiencing the morning defecation, the humiliation and heartbreak and grit and grime and grief of human life, if it cannot, in fact, escape any of these experiences except through dissociation (whether brought on by mental self-manipulation or through chemical assistance)…how is it more dignified?

Who’s the more degraded? The beggar that lives on the street, or the king who’s been stripped naked and thrown out into the street?

The king, of course, has the consolation that he was once a ruler.

He has a loss on which to brood.

A resentment he can nurse.

He has cause to hate his life.

So he doesn’t have to feel like an ingrate, a nihilist, or a petulant when he does it.

But that doesn’t mean he isn’t all those things, nor that his wallowing in such feelings doesn’t prove that his fundamental indignity is rooted in his nature, rather than in his circumstance.

What does an immaterial soul get you?

It doesn’t get you salvation—a God who can resurrect the soul can resurrect the body.⁸ A universal consciousness could be imbued in the fabric of the universe as much as it could be distinct from it.⁹ There’s no theological mileage to be gotten out of the concept in any religious tradition I’ve ever delved into (and I’ve delved into a lot of them).

There’s no philosophical mileage either. Adding the word “Free” to the front of a concept like “Will” doesn’t actually give you even a theoretical frame in which your desires, values, priorities, and decisions are unconditioned and unconstrained. While yes, a mature person knows how to deliberately choose one desire over another, one preferred fate over another, those desires and preferences are wholly constrained and conditioned by one’s culture, era, lineage, genetics, species, and body plan—no whale ever dreamt of flying in a rocket into outer space.

So what does an immaterial soul get you?

It answers no philosophical questions.

Consider:

In the forge, I have learned how to manipulate metal and, through doing so, I have come to understand its nature through raw interaction with its behavior under different conditions. When one bends a cold piece of steel back and forth, over and over again, it grows less ductile, then it becomes totally stiff, then it breaks. This progression is called “metal fatigue.”

Did you learn anything about metal by the addition of the name of the phenomenon? Did learning the name teach you that the reason metal does this is because its crystalline structure changes when it’s worked? Or that the carbon atoms in the steel move about in the presence of heat and friction, and can take on different textures? That it is the texture and alignment of those crystals, and the strength of the molecular bonds across their boundaries, that determines whether a piece of steel will bend or break under a certain load?

Of course not. Because the term “metal fatigue” describes none of this. It merely references the end-point of a series of behaviors, one that everyone recognizes when it happens.

Likewise, talking of a “soul” doesn’t unravel the riddle of consciousness or individuated experience, it merely places a label on it. It’s an important label. It points at something we don’t have another all-encompassing term for: the experience of being “me.”

It also answers no scientific questions. If “matter in motion” is not capable of producing the universe we see around us, and the other life forms we surround ourselves with, then what is? If “consciousness” is something independent of matter, why can’t we detect it by any means other than intuition? Why can we not even define it?

There is no such thing as a scientific theory of spirit—not because the concept of spirit is false, but because it is incoherent. Incoherence is bad in epistemology, but it’s fantastic for politics, demagoguery, and priestcraft.

So, if there is no scientific benefit to the hypothesis of a disembodied or non-localized spirit, and if there is no philosophical benefit to it, and if there is no extra dignity to be conferred on life by such a concept, then what’s left? Why have we spent the last several thousand years dancing around this particular metaphysical maypole?

The Crass, The Material, and the Secrets of the Human Heart

People who deride the denial of animism (that is: the spiritual animation of matter) use terms like “matter in motion,” “determinism,” “chemical reactions” and “just.”

If we are “just” molecules, then whence comes consciousness?

If we’re just the result of chemistry, then how can we be special?

If we’re so embedded in contexts that our will is not any freer than our toes, can our decisions matter?

Beneath all of these questions lies the same emotion:

Resentment.

These questions are nonsense, and you can see that they’re nonsense once you think of the life of a dog, or a deer, or any wild creature. You can see that they’re nonsense when you allow yourself to notice that nothing in the world is “just” anything.

A tree is not “just carbon foam that photosynthesizes.” It is a member of an ecosystem, and a transformative step in the chain of energy flows. It is a thing of beauty that provides shade and food and shelter to humans and critters alike. It builds a body in pursuit of its own survival, and that body will go on to enrich the soil from whence it came, or to build a house, or to become the deck-planks on a boat that sails across the world, or the headboard on a bed where the next great thinker or artist is conceived.

Hydrogen is not “just” a single-electron, single-proton atomic element. It’s the building block of everything in the universe, the element through which electrochemical reactions are mostly mediated, the key ingredient in acids and bases and water.

There is no such thing as “just.”

“Just” is a lie that philosophers and theologians invented to cover the nakedness of their contempt for life.

And this is the true benefit of the pursuit of the “immaterial.” When you decide that the only way for life to have value is if that value is conferred upon it by something else, you find justification for your conviction that life is worthless without something extra. That the world is contemptible, that animals are undignified, and that you are justified in feeling as if you deserve to be greater-than all other things, just because you wish you were.

And if there is a God who made us, who ordained this experience, and who believed that something about it was worth the trouble of sending all the souls through…

…how could such a belief not stand out as the the most stunning, contemptible form of ingratitude possible in the whole of creation?

If you found this essay helpful or interesting, you may enjoy the Reconnecting with History installment on Understanding Before Thinking, and this essay on learning to think through language and story: Are You Fluent in English?

When not haunting your Substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.

1. The historic norm for humans—one that obtains in pretty much any culture that isn’t a trading, raiding, or imperial culture—is to consider the outgroup somewhat less-than human. In the modern day, we call this “tribalism.”

2. The word that comes to us as “spirit” literally means “breath” in Latin, which is why an alcoholic beverage which has been boiled into vapor and re-condensed—i.e. "distilled”—is called a “spirit.”

3. 1 Corinthians 13:12

4. Several cephalopods also may have complex consciousness and individuated awareness, but they are so alien that it’s impossible to say for sure. What we do know is that they’re extremely intelligent.

5. This is not a joke. But it is too big to go into here.

6. Some of you reading this may be ready to shout at you screens right now because this isn’t what you mean when you say “free will,” so hear me out here:

If you mean “my experience of having a choice,” then, for our purposes here, that’s just “will.”

If you mean “Choosing to follow God without being puppeteered by Him,” you’re not exactly being orthodox, but that’s your business, not mine. The position is nonetheless incoherent if one ALSO believes that God is sovereign—either directly or indirectly—over the material, social, and spiritual conditions of the universe. You can’t both have that God and have a God who is not determining the flow of life. They are lexically contradictory phenomenon, akin to God creating a rock so big he can’t move it. There are other solutions to the predestination conundrum, but you can’t get to them from “free will.”

7. This is an actual medical treatment employed to alleviate extreme forms of refractory epilepsy. The effects described here are known as “disconnection syndrome.”

8. The orthodox version of at least one of the planet’s great religions is premised upon precisely this argument.

9. The universe’s greatest macro-structure, after all, looks suspiciously like the architecture of the brain.