I’d like to write today about what I believe is a highly erroneous philosophy, albeit one which is hugely popular nowadays: mechanism. What is mechanism? It’s the theory that all phenomena may be explained by physical causes. That is, a billiard ball moves as it dœs because of the force and angle with which it was struck, the gravitational pull of every other object in the universe, the interaction of the ball’s atoms and the felt’s and so on. That’s good enough so far as it gœs.
But mechanism gœs even further: it believes that life can be explained the same way. A plant exists as it dœs simply as the result of various physical processes which have been continuing since life first arose; a dog runs because of other processes; and a man lives, breathes, loves & believes due to the chemical interactions going on in his body.
In short, mechanism denies the existence of the soul; in its view,
love, belief, hatred, envy and so forth are merely chemical phenomena.
So baldly stated, one would hope that most folks would reject it, but
many do not. Indeed, many embrace it; in their view men are merely
machines. A criminal is not jailed because what he did is wrong, but
because he is broken (thus the focus on fixing
him, rather than
on punishment).
An interesting—and recent—argument against mechanistic theory derives from Gödel’s proof in the early 20th century that there are statements which we know to be true, but which are mathematically unprovable. A machine can only prove what is mechanically (i.e. mathematically) provable, and therefor cannot prove these sentences. And yet we know they are true, and thus we cannot be machines.
What is the alternative to mechanism? Vitalism, about which I shall write further...
