This essay is dedicated to the elevation of the soul of Dalya Davida bas Yisroel.
I.
Let’s assume you have agreed, at least in theory, to avoid the mistake of all mistakes. You know that you do not exist entirely within the world, that place of objective interaction. On the contrary, it would be closer to the truth to say that the external world exists altogether within the self or soul. What are the consequences of this belief?
Today, it is rare to fundamentally distinguish the world from the soul or self because it is the explicit or implicit belief of many thinkers that the soul or self is merely a particular instance of the world, a particular slice of the world in a time or place possessing unusual (but by no means genuinely isolating or transcendent) qualities, such as “consciousness.” In the past, I have called this the Big Lie. These thinkers have an entire worldview that aims to explain the self in terms of the world (in the old philosophical parlance, to explain how the world causes the soul). Once something is fully explained in terms of something else, the choice of treating it as a separate thing becomes relatively arbitrary, a matter for aesthetics or ethics or the like. And nowadays, most of these self explainers explain themselves to be composed, like everything else, of matter.
“Matter” is a slippery term, so to avoid confusion, it will help to state upfront exactly what they mean by this. They do not necessarily subscribe to the thoroughly-debunked 18th- and 19th-century fantasy of a purely mechanistic clockwork universe, in which things are determined by the collision of particles conferring momentum like billiard balls. We live in a sophisticated age influenced by relativity and quantum mechanics, in which matter has been revealed to be energy, and the “billiard ball” particles fail to behave like any physical object familiar to the naked eye.
However, even with the old mechanism replaced, scientific naturalism remains. All things are made up of extended stuff. That stuff, in truth, possesses a small number of primary qualities such as mass and shape, but none of the rich variegated qualities we experience in day-to-day human life. An apple is an apple-shaped mass of colorless stuff ultimately defined by the vast number of particles it contains. Those particles aren’t red, and they don’t taste sweet. Almost all the qualities of our experience exist only in the experiencer's mind, a mind that participates in reality only through the material chain of cause and effect that can also be reduced to particles interacting according to generalized laws of nature described by mathematics. Furthermore, the prevailing wisdom is that “mind” and “experience” also, are nothing more than the very same interactions, perhaps in a much more complex, compounded form. In short, the world is made of matter, and you, as a human self, are merely a strange subset of that material world exhibiting much rarer characteristics like thinking, moving, seeing in colors, and writing books about why you’re nothing other than matter. You are just a particular bit of matter in a universe of matter. As one of the foremost formalizers of the materialist worldview sums it up:
[T]here is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain. According to the materialists, we can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same
physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth.1
Although there are other ways to make the mistake of all mistakes, such as becoming intimidated by the spiritual qualities of the external world, its most common form by far is this physical, material conception. If we are to free the self from this error and thereby from exile, we must fight against its assumptions at every step. If we are to gain the requisite self-confidence—the literal confidence of a self that has been created by G-d—we must refuse the materialist worldview. You, a self, do not arise from the material universe.
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