Question for materialists

_{Tom Peeler

October 22, 2022

Intelligent Design}

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It’s been a while since I’ve been “out here” and I am wondering if materialism is still considered by some to be a rational position to hold. I understand “materialism” to be the idea that every existing thing is comprised of the periodic table of elements (rearranged in a vast number of ways described by the standard model and general relativity) and no more. Is this a fair definition? Thanks.

Comments

Materialism is a ridiculous concept.
Who are you arguing with?Alan Fox_{October 23, 2022
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It’s been a while since I’ve been “out here” and I am wondering if materialism is still considered by some to be a rational position to hold. I understand “materialism” to be the idea that every existing thing is comprised of the periodic table of elements (rearranged in a vast number of ways described by the standard model and general relativity) and no more. Is this a fair definition? Thanks.
:) Materialism is a ridiculous concept. The biggest problem is that to be formulated you need something that is not in the periodic table of elements: reason.whistler_{October 23, 2022
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For William https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equationAlan Fox_{October 23, 2022
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AF, the empir-ICAL must not be confused for the empir-ICIST. KFkairosfocus_{October 23, 2022
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VL, kindly note OP:
I understand “materialism” to be the idea that every existing thing is comprised of the periodic table of elements (rearranged in a vast number of ways described by the standard model and general relativity) and no more. Is this a fair definition?
I responded to TGP on this in a PS, in large part by citing a leading, Nobel Prize holding materialist, Monod. He in effect tries to redefine science as applied materialism. This is right there in his leading bestseller book and in a TV interview. In so doing, he identifies what he understands materialism is, from a leading horse's mouth. Notice:
Monod: [T]he scientific attitude [= evolutionary materialistic scientism and it pulls on its coat tails fellow travellers who are not strictly materialists] implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product—predictable if not indispensable—of the evolution of the universe.
So, I am manifestly on topic. Now, we can freely go further to flesh out Monod, that the physical cosmos and/or quasi physical extensions exhaust fundamental reality. That would include things like quantum foams popping up sub universes as fluctuations, it would include multiverses and whatever root reality exists. That's why there is held to be no plan, no intention in the universe. And that's why the prestige of science is drawn on to make it seem plausible to the College educated and the secularised masses who look to Big-S Science as the utterly dominant source of reliable truth. Where of course the origins narrative runs from hydrogen to humans by way of a big bang, cosmological evolution, solar system evolution, chemical evolution, spontaneous origin of cell based life, body plan level macroevolution, human evolution, language evolution, societal evolution, all claimed to be driven by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity. (For those who need it, this extends the understanding of materialism beyond our periodic table of elements and associated particles, the four forces etc.) I have for 35 years pointed out that in effect Haldane is right, such a narrative cannot credibly account for the rational responsible freedom required for us to have enough credibility to be rational and knowing creatures. That is, just on its own terms and what we need to have intellectual credibility enough to reliably warrant and know, it is self referentially incoherent and self falsifying. As a common example, I noticed how marxist critiques of those they target are self referential. So were freudian and behaviourist thinkers. That extends to their successors today, it is a pattern to the point that we need to watch out for it. That was long before I heard of an abductive design inference on signs or a theory or a movement. It was there as I thought about the thermodynamics and information issues that led me to see that the long since known architecture of the cell has to answer to those issues and it fed back into my longstanding interest in astronomy and cosmology. Along the way these things helped me bridge information, systems architecture and the impact of the informational school of thought on thermodynamics. But that is a personal story in outline. The key point is, we have from a key horse's mouth, a clear path to understanding evolutionary materialistic scientism. KFkairosfocus_{October 23, 2022
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Empiricism is the idea that we can only know anything that we are aware of, that has some physical existence. That includes quantum effects, William. And gravity.Alan Fox_{October 22, 2022
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Materialism to me is the philosophical abuse of reductionism which turns science into the religion of scientism.AaronS1978_{October 22, 2022
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...provided that it does not give an independent existence to nonphysical things such as minds.
It would appear, then, that physicalists don't understand quantum physics or what the term "wave" or "field of potential" refers to in that theory.William J Murray_{October 22, 2022
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Viola Lee @9, So I guess you didn't watch Sabine Hossenfelder's video on determinism and superdeterminism, right? -QQuerius_{October 22, 2022
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But no one in this thread is defending materialism, Q. We're just discussing what the word means, as is the topic of the OP. That's why KF's post was a distraction. Given the extreme language KF often uses to characterize people, I don't think a little snark is unjustified (and it was also a legitimate question.) Here's some more of the article that significantly adds to the part you quoted. It says,
Mechanical materialism is the theory that the world consists entirely of hard, massy material objects, which, though perhaps imperceptibly small, are otherwise like such things as stones.
Everyone in this thread is pointing out that that definition is very out-dated. Britannica goes on to say,
“It is therefore natural to extend the word materialist beyond the above paradigm case (of mechanical materialism) to cover anyone who bases his theory on whatever it is that physics asserts ultimately to exist.”,This sort may be called physicalistic materialism. Such a materialist allows the concept of material thing to be extended so as to include all of the elementary particles and other things that are postulated in fundamental physical theory—perhaps even continuous fields and points of space-time. Inasmuch as some cosmologists even try to define the elementary particles themselves in terms of the curvature of space-time, there is no reason why a philosophy based on such a geometricized cosmology should not be counted as materialist, provided that it does not give an independent existence to nonphysical things such as minds.
This is what both Belfast and I have said.Viola Lee_{October 22, 2022
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Viola Lee @7,
Hey, KF, no one here is defending materialism. Have you actually read the posts???
Pretty snarky if you ask me. If you consult online Britannica, Materialism is defined as follows:
materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them. The word materialism has been used in modern times to refer to a family of metaphysical theories (i.e., theories of the nature of reality) that can best be defined by saying that a theory tends to be called materialist if it is felt sufficiently to resemble a paradigmatic theory that will here be called mechanical materialism. This article covers the various types of materialism and the ways by which they are distinguished and traces the history of materialism from the Greeks and Romans to modern forms of materialism. . . . The theory denies that immaterial or apparently immaterial things (such as minds) exist or else explains them away as being material things or motions of material things.
For additional information, see https://www.britannica.com/topic/materialism-philosophy I've typically used the term, deterministic materialism. However, theoretical physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder defends materialism by further defining it as "superdeterminism," denying free will, spooky action at a distance, and supporting the hidden variables (i.e. missing information) interpretation of quantum mechanics. https://youtu.be/ytyjgIyegDI I'm seem to remember vigorous (endless) debates here regarding neuroscience and free will. Do you? Perhaps I should use this less popular term, superdeterminism, in the future. -QQuerius_{October 22, 2022
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Hey, KF, no one here is defending materialism. Have you actually read the posts???Viola Lee_{October 22, 2022
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TGP, great to see you popping up, hope you hang around for a bit! KF PS, Evolutionary materialistic scientism and fellow travellers = a description of much of Naturalism, travel in the orbit of physicalism. Lewontin lets cats out of the bag, but maybe Monod needs to be put in the spotlight:
In writing about naturalistic origins of life, in Chance and Necessity, Monod proposed that life is the result of chance and necessity. This reflects the naturalistic attitude, and is tied to the a priori rejection of design as a possibility highlighted by Lewontin thirty years later; yes, an assumption held to be pivotal to scientific “objectivity.” Clipping:
[T]he basic premise of the scientific method, . . . [is] that nature is objective and not projective [= a project of an agent]. Hence it is through reference to our own activity, con-scious and projective, intentional and purposive-it is as | makers of artifacts-that we judge of a given object’s “naturalness” or “artificialness.” [pp. 3 – 4] . . . . [T]he postulate of objectivity is consubstantial with science: it has guided the whole of its prodigious develop-ment for three centuries. [--> false!] There is no way to be rid of it, even tentatively or in a limited area, without departing from the domain of science itself. [--> ideological captivity to evolutionary materialistic scientism][p. 21]
Further to such, in a 1971 television interview, he asserted — tellingly — as follows:
[T]he scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product—predictable if not indispensable—of the evolution of the universe.— Jacques Monod [Quoted in John C. Hess, ‘French Nobel Biologist Says World Based On Chance’, New York Times (15 Mar 1971), p. 6. Cited in Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972), p. 66.]
This is of course a Nobel Prize winner speaking and writing on the record. Chance and Necessity was in fact a highly influential, widely celebrated book. This is not some half baked soapbox debater.
kairosfocus_{October 22, 2022
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VL Materialism is the talk; but it is not always the walk. A materialist who actually lives as though her husband is an assortment of molecules responding to chemical interactions, who actually lives as though her feeling of free will is merely a cultural artefact and that she really has no more free will than a wheelbarrow, who sees her children as robots directed by their genes and environmental pressures, would likely be regarded as a psychopath. “Love” might be a reification but it works better than dissolving an amalgam of causes into its possible constituent parts of self-interest, need for approval, youthful imprinting and the rest. I remember when the Higgs Field was established as not a statistical coincidence and I considered the peculiarity of a thing - a lepton in this case - as having no intrinsic mass, immaterial by one definition, yet acquiring mass when it reacted in a Higgs field, it looked like acquiring mass led to materiality. That led to musing on whether things like Fairness, Justice, Authority, Love , are continuations of the physical world, abstractions which exist acquiring mass in different kinds of fields.Belfast_{October 22, 2022
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Belfast writes,
Science has long disputed the classical understanding of matter, and described it as an illusion arising from a false belief that what is obvious and observable can be extrapolated into the sub-atomic world; or, as Nobel Laureate, Hans Bethe, put it, “our intuition is based on our experiences in the macroscopic world. There is no reason to expect our intuition to be valid for microscopic phenomena.” Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, …, all conveyed the conception that, at sub-atomic levels, there is no matter as such, only relationships, or potentials; and elementary subatomic particles don’t exist except as an explanatory tool, so an elementary subatomic ‘particle’ is a pattern of excitation in a quantum field. Though abstract, it exists.
Yes, this is what I was saying about the modern understanding of materialsim, or physicalism. The OP was not asking for a defense of materialism as an explanation for everything, but rather just a clarification of what the modern understanding of the term is, which is what Sev and I have responded to. Belfast, you write, “The argument runs that the brain is bits of matter, and matter moves following laws of physics.” However, as you and I both agree, I think, “bits of matter” is an outdated concept. Macroscopically the brain is “bits of matter”, but so is my table. What they are at the foundational quantum level is something different. Let me make it clear, again, I’m not defending philosophical materialism (I am not a materialist), but we are trying to have a consistent view of what modern materialism refers to, and it is that, to quote you (or maybe Bethe: I’m not sure where his words end and yours begin), “there is no matter as such, only relationships, or potentials; and elementary subatomic particles don’t exist except as an explanatory tool.”Viola Lee_{October 22, 2022
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Materialism is a view that the world can be explained, admitting no exceptions, by natural laws. Its definition is malleable, if not in flux, hence the nonsense about the “new” materialism and “bits of hard stuff”. Science has long disputed the classical understanding of matter, and described it as an illusion arising from a false belief that what is obvious and observable can be extrapolated into the sub-atomic world; or, as Nobel Laureate, Hans Bethe, put it, “our intuition is based on our experiences in the macroscopic world. There is no reason to expect our intuition to be valid for microscopic phenomena.” Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, …, all conveyed the conception that, at sub-atomic levels, there is no matter as such, only relationships, or potentials; and elementary subatomic particles don’t exist except as an explanatory tool, so an elementary subatomic ‘particle’ is a pattern of excitation in a quantum field. Though abstract, it exists. In other words materialism has had/is having an agonising time trying to convey an acceptable definition of ‘matter’, and poet, Richard Wilbur, put it well when he wrote, “Cloudy, cloudy, is the stuff of stones.” “Scientific” materialism is the ‘strong view’ of metaphysical materialism and it, also, asserts that the physical world is all there is; it thus lies in a general philosophy of materialism, but with the word ‘scientific’ added for a cachet of distinction. Materialism has no scientific credentials. Materialism is a philosophy not subordinate to scientific methods. Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner is one who argues that, while some philosophical concepts may be logically consistent with present-day quantum mechanics, materialism is not one of them. Tacking ‘scientific’ to materialism as Whitehead and James etc., did was as silly as tacking ‘scientific’ to Stoicism, or any philosophy - Positivism imploded when it tacked on ‘Logical’. The root of materialism today is that everything which exists, and every event that occurs, had a natural cause; it holds that matter/energy interactions are enough to explain any phenomenon, including human consciousness, as the outcome of material interactions. Notions of free will, for example, do not, cannot, exist, for if humans are wholly matter, and matter is ruled by matter/energy interactions, then there is no space for free will. The argument runs that the brain is bits of matter, and matter moves following laws of physics, so what is considered as free will, etc., are mathematically objective outcomes of matter movement. In Materialism, all causes are natural causes, all effects are natural effects. Cause and effect is very properly at the root of all physics so words like ‘interactions’ and ‘attraction’ and ‘result’ and ‘stress’ and ‘product’ pepper every scientific paper. And It is the absence of a natural cause for the origin of the universe, and life, and, indeed, for the natural origin of ‘matter’ itself that will eventually cause the jettisoning of materialism as a philosophy of any use to humanity.Belfast_{October 22, 2022
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Good material, Sev. This is important:
As the name suggests, materialists historically held that everything was matter — where matter was conceived as “an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist” (Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, par. 9). But physics itself has shown that not everything is matter in this sense; for example, forces such as gravity are physical but it is not clear that they are material in the traditional sense (Lange 1865, Dijksterhuis 1961, Yolton 1983). So it is tempting to use ‘physicalism’ to distance oneself from what seems a historically important but no longer scientifically relevant thesis of materialism, and related to this, to emphasize a connection to physics and the physical sciences.
Also, the article is clear that there is some ambiguity about the term “materialism”. I recently discussed this with someone (Querius), distinguishing “old” materialism from “new” materialism. Modern materialism includes everything that modern physics accepts as existing, including all the facets of quantum mechanics, fields, etc. that go way beyond just thinking of the elemental particles that make up atoms as summarized in the periodic table.Viola Lee_{October 22, 2022
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From my perspective, "materialism" - in the very simplistic sense that everything is made from tiny lumps of hard stuff - is an archaic usage. The more recent term is "physicalism" which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains as follows:
Physicalism is, in slogan form, the thesis that everything is physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don’t deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don’t seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social, or mathematical nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are physical, or at least bear an important relation to the physical. [...] Physicalism is sometimes known as ‘materialism’. Indeed, on one strand to contemporary usage, the terms ‘physicalism’ and ‘materialism’ are interchangeable. But the two terms have very different histories. The word ‘materialism’ appears in English towards the end of the 17th century, but the word ‘physicalism’ was introduced into philosophy only in the 1930s by Otto Neurath (1931) and Rudolf Carnap (1959/1932), both of whom were key members of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians active in Vienna prior to World War II. While it is not clear that Neurath and Carnap understood physicalism in the same way, one thesis often attributed to them (e.g. in Hempel 1949) is the linguistic thesis that every statement is synonymous with (i.e. is equivalent in meaning with) some physical statement. But materialism as traditionally construed is not a linguistic thesis at all; rather it is a metaphysical thesis in the sense that it tells us about the nature of the world. At least for the positivists, therefore, there was a clear reason for distinguishing physicalism (a linguistic thesis) from materialism (a metaphysical thesis). Moreover, this reason was compounded by the fact that, according to official positivist doctrine, metaphysics is nonsense. Since the 1930s, however, the positivist philosophy that under-girded this distinction has for the most part been rejected—for example, physicalism is not a linguistic thesis for contemporary philosophers—and this is one reason why the words ‘materialism’ and ‘physicalism’ are now often interpreted as interchangeable. Some philosophers suggest that ‘physicalism’ is distinct from ‘materialism’ for a reason quite unrelated to the one emphasized by Neurath and Carnap. As the name suggests, materialists historically held that everything was matter — where matter was conceived as “an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist” (Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, par. 9). But physics itself has shown that not everything is matter in this sense; for example, forces such as gravity are physical but it is not clear that they are material in the traditional sense (Lange 1865, Dijksterhuis 1961, Yolton 1983). So it is tempting to use ‘physicalism’ to distance oneself from what seems a historically important but no longer scientifically relevant thesis of materialism, and related to this, to emphasize a connection to physics and the physical sciences. However, while physicalism is certainly unusual among metaphysical doctrines in being associated with a commitment both to the sciences and to a particular branch of science, namely physics, it is not clear that this is a good reason for calling it ‘physicalism’ rather than ‘materialism.’ For one thing, many contemporary physicalists do in fact use the word ‘materialism’ to describe their doctrine (e.g. Smart 1963). Moreover, while ‘physicalism’ is no doubt related to ‘physics’ it is also related to ‘physical object’ and this in turn is very closely connected with ‘material object’, and via that, with ‘matter.’
Seversky_{October 22, 2022
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