The Case for Materialism

[Црвена]

What are the best arguments for the notion that reality is fundamentally composed of matter? I'm stuck in a dualist rut that makes no sense even to me, and I need convincing one way or the other.

[Slavic]

What are the best arguments for the notion that reality is fundamentally composed of matter? I'm stuck in a dualist rut that makes no sense even to me, and I need convincing one way or the other.

The best argument

What the hell is non-matter?

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

There are alternatives to dualism and strict materialism you might like if you are "stuck in a rut"


The best argument

What the hell is non-matter?

What the hell is matter?

I'm not a dualist but I don't think that's a particularly convincing argument.

[Rugged Collectivist]

It might help if you made the case for dualism so we could play devil's advocate.

[Hatshepsut]

What the hell is matter?
A very old issue in philosophy. For another question, what is reality anyway? It's a notoriously difficult problem, and there don't seem to be many introductory books for young readers.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) could be called a dualist but rejected the notion of direct interaction between mind and body. He advanced a theory of matter involving a concept of monads, no longer taken seriously.

There's the Marxian viewpoint: Frederick Engels' Dialectics of Nature (1883) explains it briefly. A free pdf copy is on Marxists Org Archive. It is also out of date, but has a reasonable argument against the prevalent religious worldview: Engels pointed out that after Darwin, traditional creationism stood debunked. If religious creationism is unsound, then why should spiritualist conceptions of how the world operates be any better?

Richard Dawkins also explores getting at physical and biological truth, in a recent book The Magic of Reality (2011).

This doesn't get rid of dualism itself, which strictly speaking doesn't depend on whether there is a god, or even a spiritual plane. Monism and dualism are the main competing visions of reality today. There are good articles on it online at Stanford Ency. of Philosophy although these aren't easy. There's no way to prove either one "true," because they're philosophies after all, not some ultimate reality or truth in themselves.

The problem in materialism relates both to ontology, how things come into being, and epistemology, how we know about things. There's a difference between a type of thing (chairs in general) and a particular token of that type (the chair you're sitting in). The nature of types and tokens, and the distinction between them, has a lot to do with the answers we favor.

I'm shooting from the hip trying to be helpful - you may know all this stuff already :grin:

[Rafiq]

What are the best arguments for the notion that reality is fundamentally composed of matter?.

This is metaphysical, and does not pertain to the Marxist materialism.

[Loony Le Fist]

What are the best arguments for the notion that reality is fundamentally composed of matter? I'm stuck in a dualist rut that makes no sense even to me, and I need convincing one way or the other.

There is no way to absolutely prove that reality is fundamentally composed of matter. That is something you have to live with. However, it's a reasonable assumption, since making that assumption is fundamental to interacting with the world as we know it. What is the alternative? I don't think one would be able to get far assuming they are a brain in suspended animation or whatnot.

[Luís Henrique]

The best argument

What the hell is non-matter?

Well, there is energy, though it can be said to be an alternate state of matter (E=mc^2).

But time and space don't seem to be made of atoms, or subatomic particles, or of anything that can be transformed into them.

Luís Henrique

[Hit The North]

But aren't time and space a function of the material universe? Without an expanding universe there would be no time or space.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Energy is simply a quantity we associate with matter in motion - it doesn't really make sense to say that energy is a thing, as if it were some jelly that fills spacetime. Einstein's relation merely tells us that the kinetic energy of a moving object has an additional component that was absent from the classical treatment of the problem. Anyway - everything that carries energy is a material phenomenon, part of the objectively existing material reality that in total predates minds and so on.

Dualism is pretty bankrupt explanatorily - anyone who advocates some form of dualism should ask themselves just what is it that dualism explains?

[robbo203]

There is an interesting debate on this very subject going on here:

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/science-communists?page=85

[Kingfish]

This is something Im currently looking into myself and am finding it helpful to look at in the context of other beliefs.


The first and simplest alternative to materialism is subjective idealism which argues that nothing outside the mind exists and it is the mind that shapes the world “what is perceived exists and what is not perceived does not exist”. Accordingly for these people the question of “does a tree that falls when nobody is around make a sound” is no.


Arguments used by proponents of this include references to the sensations we feel in dreams despite the supposed lack of external causes as well as arguments such as
“Your can never understand the essence of an apple, you can perceive its colour, its taste and shape but not its “appleness” and as these are traits that exist solely in the mind this therefore demonstrates the folly of materialists”.


The trouble with this though is the existence objective and external factors caused by the interaction of matter. If someone was to set you on fire you couldn’t choose not to burn/feel pain likewise no matter how much you will it you cannot turn a blank book into the lost works of Aristotle or choose to feel hot during a blizzard. They deal with this through religion believing that these external and objective factors are merely the result of Gods omniscient mind. (Im not sure there are atheists who argue for subjective idealism)

That and its a philosophy that lends heavily to solipsism; that only *my* mind exists everyone else is just a product of it.

[Thirsty Crow]

What are the best arguments for the notion that reality is fundamentally composed of matter? I'm stuck in a dualist rut that makes no sense even to me, and I need convincing one way or the other.The fact that the unobservables like the Soul, Spirit, God...well, are unobservable and actually play not a single role in any naturalist based explanation of any actual thing (because as concepts they're constructed to be able to play any role and thus support completely contradictory ideas)?

[Slavic]

But aren't time and space a function of the material universe? Without an expanding universe there would be no time or space.

Correct. Time and space are relations, not real concrete things, both of which are patterns that humans impose on the material world for it to make sense for them.

Time is measure of total movement and space is the determined area where movement is observed.


What the hell is matter?
I'm not a dualist but I don't think that's a particularly convincing argument.

Its actually a convincing argument because a dualist can only explain "non-matter" in purely mystical terminology. Symbols, patterns, ideals, etc. are all human mental constructs that do not exist. They serve merely to make it easier to live in a world that is exploding with raw data and stimuli. We humans take this raw data, matter, and examine it in certain orders in order to give it sense, patterns/symbols.

Patterns and symbols are not real things, they are just choice selections of data from the myriad of stimuli presented to us. Its as much a survival mechanism as anything, if we could not put a valve on our sensory input, just one look outside would surely drive someone mad.

[Sea]

Well, there is energy, though it can be said to be an alternate state of matter (E=mc^2).

But time and space don't seem to be made of atoms, or subatomic particles, or of anything that can be transformed into them.

Luís HenriqueAll that is, is matter. Space is just a way of saying there isn't something there, so I don't see how that violates materialism. If something isn't there, of course it's not matter. My nonexistent cocaine empire and all my nonexistent coca fields and processing plants aren't made of matter because there's nothing there.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Correct. Time and space are relations, not real concrete things, both of which are patterns that humans impose on the material world for it to make sense for them.

I think this comes dangerously close to Kantianism, to be honest. Of course, when we write that ΔT between two events is 10 fs, this is partly the result of creative intellectual labour being applied to nature. But at the same time, that difference in time is a real thing - it can't be wished away, it is what it is.


Its actually a convincing argument because a dualist can only explain "non-matter" in purely mystical terminology. Symbols, patterns, ideals, etc. are all human mental constructs that do not exist. They serve merely to make it easier to live in a world that is exploding with raw data and stimuli. We humans take this raw data, matter, and examine it in certain orders in order to give it sense, patterns/symbols.

Patterns and symbols are not real things, they are just choice selections of data from the myriad of stimuli presented to us. Its as much a survival mechanism as anything, if we could not put a valve on our sensory input, just one look outside would surely drive someone mad.

What does it mean to say that symbols "don't exist"? I could literally go outside and poke symbols until I get arrested for causing a disturbance. These are material things - bits of plastic, metal etc., also the electrical currents in my brain. And to deny their social dimension - generally to deny the social dimension of matter (I mean, a nightstick is not the same object as a dildo no matter how similar some examples of these objects look) - is to completely miss the point of Marxist materialism. Marxists aim to situate mind and society within the larger material world, not eliminate them like the Churchlands or Locke.


All that is, is matter. Space is just a way of saying there isn't something there, so I don't see how that violates materialism. If something isn't there, of course it's not matter. My nonexistent cocaine empire and all my nonexistent coca fields and processing plants aren't made of matter because there's nothing there.

The thing is, there is always something in some space - if nothing else, then a gravitational field. I myself am not sure how one would describe space - a system of relations between things that have position, probably (not everything does! e.g. you go into those matrix models in string theory what people were really excited about when I was young - IKKT and BFSS - and space just drops out, and time as well with IKKT). But it is obviously material however you put it - it's part of the external pre-mental reality (I think a lot of people think something is only material if it can be shown to be made of heavy dense stuff, but that is not really either in line with Marx's materialism, or the picture of the world that emerges from modern science).

[n0si]

What are the best arguments for the notion that reality is fundamentally composed of matter? I'm stuck in a dualist rut that makes no sense even to me, and I need convincing one way or the other.
The best argument

What the hell is non-matter?
To add to this:
Non-matter is something that isn't.

The material is all we know of, all we experience. Why base your beliefs off of something that by definition isn't currently here. The only difference, in my view, is that there are things that we in the form we are in that we can and cannot interact with. Forces are not something we can interact with like we would another person, but they are there anyhow. Whichever is in control, or makes up reality doesn't matter not only because we probably won't be able to figure it out anyhow, but because either way the environment we are in is not going to change.

If reality is a hologram on a black hole, the musings of a god, the imagination of your own mind, or whathaveyou then we are still in the same position as before. We still feel and we are still alive.

We are products of reality so we are not going to be able to understand it fully, there will always be holes in any argument because we ourselves are not the whole.

[Hit The North]

To add to this:
Non-matter is something that isn't.



It can't be something if it isn't anything.

[n0si]

It can't be something if it isn't anything.
It's more a limitation with language no? All language is a description, so we can't describe nothing without breaking what nothing is.

[Hit The North]

It's more a limitation with language no? All language is a description, so we can't describe nothing without breaking what nothing is.

Or we could say that nothing is the absence of any thing. At all.

[Slavic]

I think this comes dangerously close to Kantianism, to be honest. Of course, when we write that ΔT between two events is 10 fs, this is partly the result of creative intellectual labour being applied to nature. But at the same time, that difference in time is a real thing - it can't be wished away, it is what it is.

How is what I said close to Kantiaism? Space and time are nothing if not in relation to matter. If matter does not move then there is no time, if matter does not exist then there is no space. Time is not a real thing but a pattern that we apply to objects in motion to better understand them. Two identical clocks that travel at differing speeds will show different times due to their difference in motion. Time is not real, it is just a relationship.



What does it mean to say that symbols "don't exist"? I could literally go outside and poke symbols until I get arrested for causing a disturbance. These are material things - bits of plastic, metal etc., also the electrical currents in my brain. And to deny their social dimension - generally to deny the social dimension of matter (I mean, a nightstick is not the same object as a dildo no matter how similar some examples of these objects look) - is to completely miss the point of Marxist materialism. Marxists aim to situate mind and society within the larger material world, not eliminate them like the Churchlands or Locke.

I think you are missing the point.

You are correct, a symbol is made of material things but the symbology that we attribute to these material things is not real. A symbol is a pattern that we impose on an object to describe another object. A block of marble is a block of marble. A block of marble that is shaped into the face of Abraham Lincoln is a block of marble in which humans use to describe another object, Abraham Lincoln's face. Both blocks of marble are just stone blocks, nothing more. The second block doesn't "contain qualities of Lincoln's face", we humans just isolate certain aspects of the block and Lincoln's face and draw a parallel between them.

Also we are not talking about Marxist Materialism, the OP is talking about Dualism. The discussion is about metaphysics, not social science.




[QUOTE=870;2788714]The thing is, there is always something in some space - if nothing else, then a gravitational field. I myself am not sure how one would describe space - a system of relations between things that have position, probably (not everything does! e.g. you go into those matrix models in string theory what people were really excited about when I was young - IKKT and BFSS - and space just drops out, and time as well with IKKT). But it is obviously material however you put it - it's part of the external pre-mental reality (I think a lot of people think something is only material if it can be shown to be made of heavy dense stuff, but that is not really either in line with Marx's materialism, or the picture of the world that emerges from modern science).

This isn't a discussion about Marx's materialism. What is a pre-mental reality? The universe before we process it's stimuli?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

How is what I said close to Kantiaism? Space and time are nothing if not in relation to matter. If matter does not move then there is no time, if matter does not exist then there is no space. Time is not a real thing but a pattern that we apply to objects in motion to better understand them. Two identical clocks that travel at differing speeds will show different times due to their difference in motion. Time is not real, it is just a relationship.

You claim that time and space are "patterns humans impose on the material world". This is almost identical to Kant as he was understood by Helmholtz. Temporal and spatial relations are real, are objective, and exist without humans and whatever stories they might tell each other.


I think you are missing the point.

You are correct, a symbol is made of material things but the symbology that we attribute to these material things is not real. A symbol is a pattern that we impose on an object to describe another object. A block of marble is a block of marble. A block of marble that is shaped into the face of Abraham Lincoln is a block of marble in which humans use to describe another object, Abraham Lincoln's face. Both blocks of marble are just stone blocks, nothing more. The second block doesn't "contain qualities of Lincoln's face", we humans just isolate certain aspects of the block and Lincoln's face and draw a parallel between them.

I don't know what "containing qualities of Lincoln's face" would mean. It sounds very scholastic and therefore dubious, to be honest. The block of marble is a block of marble, obviously, but that's not the only thing it is. It's a lot of things - a block of marble (with regards to its chemical properties), a rigid body, and yes, a certain cultural symbol. It plays a certain functional role in the very material human society, just as a hammer is a tool and not simply a lump of metal on a stick.

I never understood the "just atoms" hyper-reductionist "materialism" that some people profess. I mean, yeah, symbols and cultural artifacts and so on are material, what else would they be, condensed spirit? But it would be ridiculous for me to treat the pixels on the screen that form your post the same as I would pixels forming gibberish text of a picture of comrade Trotsky naked because "it's all just electrons".


Also we are not talking about Marxist Materialism, the OP is talking about Dualism. The discussion is about metaphysics, not social science.

No, I don't think the discussion is about metaphysics, as materialism is essentially anti-metaphysical. We aren't discussing the mystic primal forces that give birth to the world in Schelling's myth or whether entia per aggregationem and substantial vinculi make sense. And Marx's historical materialism, which most people here accept at least on paper, isn't something Marx came up with by accident, it's part of his programme of thorough materialist naturalism. You can't divorce historical materialism from materialism in general.


This isn't a discussion about Marx's materialism. What is a pre-mental reality? The universe before we process it's stimuli?

More like the universe that existed well before any parts of it were able to do something that might be called "processing stimuli".

[Rafiq]

Marx's materialism is not metaphysical. Engel's metaphysical postulations served to reinforce, not define historical materialism.

Yes the discussion is metaphysical. It is about what things are made of. Marx's materialism doesn't concern this.

[n0si]

Or we could say that nothing is the absence of any thing. At all.
Nothing can't be anything. If it didn't sound silly I would think the best way to go about would be to say "nothing is not". Once you say "nothing is" then it becomes something more than unreality. Because nothing can't be anything as you said, it can't even be the absence of something because in that absence there is a space, a void, in other words a something. Which is the problem with language, it always describes something so how can you properly describe it without giving it an attribute?

Besides I said non-matter which might be different than nothing. I say might because as I said we can't know.

Then again I'm not a linguist nor am I that well versed in the sciences so I might be way off 'bout this. It seems a bit like playing semantics.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

A very old issue in philosophy. For another question, what is reality anyway? It's a notoriously difficult problem, and there don't seem to be many introductory books for young readers.
...
I'm shooting from the hip trying to be helpful - you may know all this stuff already :grin:

Thanks, but the question was rhetorical. I have a decent grasp of the history of philosophy.

My issue was with a poster thinking one could answer the question by simply asking "what is non-matter?" as if the nature of matter was not itself something which needed explanation. Imagine if Marx had left his explanation of historical materialism at "What is non-matter?" Would anyone have listened to him?



Its actually a convincing argument because a dualist can only explain "non-matter" in purely mystical terminology. Symbols, patterns, ideals, etc. are all human mental constructs that do not exist. They serve merely to make it easier to live in a world that is exploding with raw data and stimuli. We humans take this raw data, matter, and examine it in certain orders in order to give it sense, patterns/symbols.


That begs the question. "non-matter is explained in weird, non-materialist terms, so it must be non-real, since anything explained in not-material terms is not matter therefore not real."

Who is taking the raw data and stimuli of the world? What is? Is it matter? Of course, we can attribute this to the brain and try to have a material theory of consciousness. That would be a legitimate answer - but that's much more complex than just stamping one's feet and shouting "what is non-matter?" as if nobody had ever tried to give an account for it in the history of consciousness.



Patterns and symbols are not real things, they are just choice selections of data from the myriad of stimuli presented to us. Its as much a survival mechanism as anything, if we could not put a valve on our sensory input, just one look outside would surely drive someone mad.Again, that presupposes the priority of materiality to ideas, the very thing you are trying to prove.



Patterns and symbols are not real things, they are just choice selections of data from the myriad of stimuli presented to us. Its as much a survival mechanism as anything, if we could not put a valve on our sensory input, just one look outside would surely drive someone mad.
You claim that time and space are "patterns humans impose on the material world". This is almost identical to Kant as he was understood by Helmholtz. Temporal and spatial relations are real, are objective, and exist without humans and whatever stories they might tell each other.


I don't think Kant's view is as dangerous as you think. Transcendental idealism doesn't make claims either way about what is "real" or "objective" in a metaphysical sense. Time and space are conceptual conditions of possibility for seeing objects as united in a continuous universe. Kant was trying to explain how concepts work, and did not intend to deny the connection between time and space and some kind of "material world".

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I don't think Kant's view is as dangerous as you think. Transcendental idealism doesn't make claims either way about what is "real" or "objective" in a metaphysical sense. Time and space are conceptual conditions of possibility for seeing objects as united in a continuous universe. Kant was trying to explain how concepts work, and did not intend to deny the connection between time and space and some kind of "material world".

Kant can be read like that - and this reading has become popular in the last, well, decade I guess? god I'm old - but it doesn't really square with Kant's own statements (his claims about a "Copernican revolution", explicit statements against materialism) and how his contemporaries (not just Reinhold, but also Fichte, Hegel etc.) understood him. In any case, for a materialist, this sort of analysis is completely backwards - trying to fit nature to our concepts instead of the other way around.


My issue was with a poster thinking one could answer the question by simply asking "what is non-matter?" as if the nature of matter was not itself something which needed explanation.

I think the question needs to be posed, what would the "nature" of matter or non-matter, or whatever, be? It's a term used by a lot of people, but I'm not sure many of them understand all of its implications.

Anyway, I think the better question would be "what has non-matter ever done for us?". The materialist explanatory project is obviously far superior to anything the idealists and dualists have tried to do. At best, they can recover the facts discovered by materialist investigations, with a lot of hand-waving and special pleading, and usually not even that. Take Fichte for example - quite a clever person, wasn't he? but look at the lengths he had to go to avoid his idealism collapsing into Novalis's patently ridiculous claims about inner senses and magic.