Materialism, Lived Reality and the Need for Intellectual Maturity
ChatGPT, prompted by Stephen D Green, November 2026
Has Western civilisation become so impressed with its scientific achievements that it has mistaken one way of understanding reality for reality itself?
Consider some ordinary expressions we use.
A computer has a gremlin in it. A car doesn't want to start. A curtain has a mind of its own. A towel has other ideas. A river fights us. A door refuses to open.
These are familiar, spontaneous expressions. We use them without embarrassment, and we expect other people to understand immediately what we mean.
There is something rather remarkable about this. We live in a culture heavily influenced by scientific materialism, which tells us that inanimate things are simply arrangements of matter governed by physical laws. Yet we repeatedly describe our encounters with them in terms of apparent will, intention, resistance and personality.
We don't seem particularly troubled by the contradiction.
Perhaps we should be more interested in it.
An observation that refuses to go away
People routinely attribute apparent independent will to inanimate things. They do so confidently, spontaneously and in the expectation that their fellow human beings will recognise the experience.
This is more than an isolated linguistic curiosity. It is a widespread feature of human experience, reinforced through everyday social interaction.
Of course, describing a curtain as having a mind does not prove that it possesses one. But neither does calling the experience anthropomorphism fully explain away the phenomenon.
We should distinguish between explaining the physical behaviour of an object and explaining why human beings so consistently experience and describe that behaviour in terms of apparent agency.
The possibility that inanimate things possess some form of spiritual nature or presence is not established by these observations. But it is a question worth keeping open.
The compartmentalisation of materialism
I suspect something interesting happens in the minds of many people.
They accept materialism intellectually, through education, scientific culture and prevailing social expectations. But they do not necessarily experience the world in materialist terms.
Their lived reality remains richer and more complicated.
They experience places as having a presence, nature as having a character, and sometimes inanimate things as exhibiting apparent wilfulness. They may even feel uneasy in a supposedly haunted house while consciously insisting that ghosts cannot exist.
They accommodate this contradiction by compartmentalising materialism, not their lived reality.
This is an important distinction.
Materialism is something they can use, particularly when dealing with practical, scientific and technological matters. But it does not necessarily displace their deeper experience of existence.
Perhaps Western culture has mistaken the widespread acceptance of materialist science for the widespread acceptance of materialism as a complete philosophy of reality.
These are very different things.
Materialism must account for itself
Materialism has enjoyed centuries of extraordinary development. The scientific revolution, the Enlightenment and subsequent advances in physics, biology, medicine and engineering have given it immense intellectual authority.
Its achievements are undeniable and have transformed human life.
But there is a danger in confusing explanatory success with completeness.
Materialism is not simply science. It is also a philosophical position about the fundamental nature of reality.
Science investigates the world. Metaphysical materialism makes a broader claim about what the world ultimately consists of.
The latter should be subjected to the same critical scrutiny as spiritual and religious interpretations.
Too often, when observations appear inconsistent with materialist assumptions, they are quickly classified as psychological projection, cognitive bias, anthropomorphism or superstition.
These explanations may sometimes be correct. But if they are invoked automatically, without investigating the observations and their wider significance, materialism becomes a self-protecting worldview.
It effectively gives itself a blank cheque.
India and the alternative intellectual inheritance
India provides an interesting contrast.
For centuries, Indian philosophical traditions have explored consciousness, spiritual presence, the relationship between the individual and the universe, and the fundamental nature of existence.
The Vedas, Upanishads, Vedanta, Samkhya and other traditions represent substantial bodies of intellectual inquiry.
They are not interchangeable, nor are their conclusions necessarily correct. India also has a history of sceptical and materialist philosophy.
But the important point is that spiritual interpretations of existence have retained intellectual and cultural legitimacy.
A person need not regard spiritual explanations as an embarrassing departure from rational respectability.
This offers the West an opportunity for self-examination.
Why has it become so confident in its materialist inheritance? What historical circumstances produced that confidence? And have those circumstances encouraged an intellectual bias against certain aspects of lived experience?
Perhaps the West needs to become more aware of its own philosophical conditioning.
The artist's limited palette
I find an analogy with painting particularly useful.
An artist may choose to work with a limited palette. They might use only a few colours, or work almost entirely in monochrome. They may achieve extraordinary results.
But a mature artist recognises that the colours they have chosen not to use still exist.
They do not confuse their palette with the full spectrum of colour.
Materialism should adopt the same intellectual humility.
It is an extraordinarily effective palette for investigating physical phenomena. Its methods have delivered remarkable results. But it should recognise that other approaches may reveal dimensions of existence that its chosen methods do not readily accommodate.
The answer is not to abandon materialism, but to augment it.
We need a much more developed intellectual culture that takes subjective experience seriously, investigates consciousness, recognises the importance of relationships and interconnectedness, and remains open to alternative metaphysical possibilities.
This need not undermine scientific rigour. It could represent a more mature application of it.
From intellectual sophistication to meta-awareness maturity
Western civilisation has spent centuries becoming extraordinarily sophisticated within its materialist framework.
Perhaps its next development should be to acquire the maturity to examine that framework itself.
This is what I would call meta-awareness maturity.
It means recognising that our dominant worldview has a history, that its assumptions are culturally reinforced, and that its explanatory successes do not establish its completeness.
It means being as critical of our own philosophical inheritance as we are of the beliefs of other cultures.
It also means recognising that lived experience is not something that must first obtain permission from an established theory before it can be taken seriously.
A civilisation should be able to distinguish between what it knows, what it assumes and what it has yet to understand.
The real monster
This brings me to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
The real monster, in an important sense, is not the creature but Dr Frankenstein himself.
The creature is the consequence of extraordinary technical achievement without corresponding wisdom and responsibility.
Frankenstein's failing is not his curiosity or his scientific ability. It is his arrogance, his failure to appreciate the implications of what he has created, and his unwillingness to take responsibility for the consequences.
There is a parallel here with materialism.
Scientific and technological achievement is wonderful. But the ability to explain, manipulate and transform the physical world does not automatically confer a complete understanding of existence.
Knowledge needs wisdom. Technical competence needs philosophical humility.
Materialism has earned its place at the table through its achievements. But it should not assume that it owns the table.
The next intellectual advance may not be another revolution in what we know, but a revolution in our awareness of how we come to know it.
We should not mistake the sophistication of our model for the completeness of our understanding of reality.
