Materialism

Materialism, broadly speaking, is the absurd belief that everything there is, is material. Materialists believe in particular, that the brain is what causes consciousness to exist, and they take reality to be the physical place where the brain exists. As for dreams, most materialists consider those to be generated by the brain.

This view is obviously self-contradictory: anyone who claims that experience is generated by the brain, and that the brain exists as a physical object, is relying on their own experience to deduce this fact. Hence, they are actually assuming that experiences are true, which would not necessarily be the case if they were merely generated by the brain.

Materialists, ironically,¹ tend to place a great deal of emphasis on logical reasoning at the expense of other forms of understanding.

Materialism is like a particular kind of reductionism, and like most forms of reductionism, it does not tolerate paradoxes. It is this need to understand everything that is the worst aspect of materialism, since it limits, rather than enhances, the believer’s ability to interact with reality. To the extent that anyone is sincerely a materialist, they must also be a nihilist, since our understanding of matter does not allow for the emergence of meaning; luckily, most materialists are not sincere in their beliefs, or at least too careless to see their consequences.

See also 

• Bohr’s horseshoe
• Atheism

1. The irony is that materialists believe logic to be something created by the brain due to random interactions between tiny particles. Hence, logical reasoning should not, in principle, have any objective truth value. ↩