Maybe you once wondered what happens to you when you die. Or where you were before you were born. What answer you will give to yourself depends on your worldview. What you believe to be real and to be a cause for this world to unfold also impacts what you believe and choose to be.
A deterministic viewpoint has no space for any real cause, because the world is a chain of cause and effect. Each effect is the cause for the next effect, and each cause is an effect of what happened before. There is no freedom here, no responsibility, no justice, no individual, just matter unfolding itself according to the laws of physics. This is a variation of materialism, thought trough in a very consistent way. Maybe you know someone with this worldview, or supported it yourself at some point. This conception undermines all motivation for self-initiative, because that is considered to be an illusion. It is the ultimate victim mentality, free of all personal responsibility. Society with all its shining concepts of democracy and freedom, the idea of dignity and ethics, of good and evil, none of it makes any sense from this perspective. Who sees the world like this often tries to find joy in financial wealth, power, self-presentation with status symbols, and in following basic instincts. Or simply does what seems to be expected. The legal system is not for justice, but just defining consequences to incentivize the behavior of citizens and achieve order. Without freedom, the idea of justice collapses. Then there is only the idea of order. Order is a consequence of laws. When mankind is caused in its existence and behavior by the laws of physics, then the laws of men are also a consequence of the laws of physics and can be traced back to those. Here we exist only as a physical body, and we emerge and expire with it. The question of any before and after is considered bullshit.
Most materialists I know do believe that their existence is caused by their body, but they still hold on to concepts like responsibility and justice. At some point I started wondering how it is logically possible to combine that. Traditional physics assumes that matter always behaves predictably. To not end up with the deterministic perspective described above – believing that responsibility is an illusion – an element of freedom must be assumed in matter. Only then can matter create a free spirit. And only a free spirit can take responsibility. Only a free spirit can can be accused of doing an injustice. It does not make sense to direct that accusation towards a stone. A stone does not do anything on its own initiative. I can think of only one way to get from the deterministic view of traditional physics towards a free human being, or in the case of this worldview maybe also towards a free computer, and it is chance. The traditional concept of matter disappears when we look for smaller and smaller particles – and is replaced by energy and statistics. We can consider mass as condensed energy. The exact state in a snapshot can be seen as a product of chance and is not predictable. How do we get from chance to freedom? By freedom using chance to introduce new causes to the world. But what force is this freedom? Could we call it spirit? And what is matter, what is really causing it? And how is it taking shape so that a free spirit can act with it? When we keep researching here, we begin to leave materialism behind, or at least rethink it in a new way.
We see next to the constantly reshaping matter also the seemingly unchanging laws of physics. They are the constant in this world that otherwise always changes, decays and restructures. But there is another constant. Life remains, although it appears in bodies constantly emerging and passing. As long as we can look back, life has always been there. We connect life to certain conditions, consider planets to be habitable or not. I learned that this planet was once lifeless, uninhabited, before the emergence of life. And before that this planet did not even exist for a long time, until the solar system formed. If and how life emerged on earth, that we have not yet agreed on. There is a possibility that life made its way to earth and existed already before. What life is exactly, what shapes it can take, where it is possible, those are questions that modern science does not provide answers that I consider convincing. Sure, the bodies we have now need certain conditions – but are there other bodies that can support life? Is a body even necessary?
The section about the materialist already hints that the physically visual and measurable bodies can be considered as a container for living beings. They enable us to act in the physical world, manipulate it, and use it for our development. Coming from a materialistic worldview, only a small change is needed to include this idea into your Weltbild. We don’t need to give up on matter. It is sufficient to consider the possibility that living things, as we experience them here, are not caused by matter alone, but by matter and spirit together. A living being without physical body can neither think nor act the way we think and act here. And our physical body would neither exist nor be alive without a living being inhabiting it. Our body only becomes possible through living beings that are causing it. Matter does not create it on its own account. The formation of organisms is not embedded in the forces between the smallest particles. We do not even find a daisy in those forces. We will need to expand our research beyond matter if we want to know how life and its forces work. Only then can we understand the interplay of spirit and matter.
The formation of highly complex organic structures is so natural to us that we rarely even question it. If we reject spirit, then we try to explain the complex as a result of something more simple, which forms as a necessity or by chance. The complex is seen as a result of simple things that trigger each other and then become self-sustaining. It is an attempt to somehow make the development and growth of organic structures approachable for chance. If someone would say that something relatively simple like a smartphone can form somewhere in the universe just by chance, without an intelligent being designing and building it, we would probably not be convinced.
Have you already found the idea of reincarnation in the previous sections? Only with this idea we can really grasp concepts like freedom, responsibility and justice. A single human life on its own often appears neither free nor just. However, we don’t need to achieve everything in just a single life. Even if it seems like we have neither memories nor experience from a previous life, the experience of this life will still add to what we already have.