... and science starts to come round to a metaphysics that was at the root of taoism and hinduism thousands of years ago.
Materialism was, and continues to be, a mistake.
Materialism was, and continues to be, a mistake.
It alters how we think about the fundamental makeup of matter, but it's still a way of describing a material universe that obeys some laws of physics, with no implication of things sometimes associated with non-materialism (dualism, panpsychism, afterlife).
Quantum mechanics already significantly shook up how we thought about matter. Our conception of matter fundamentally being some kind of relation coefficient of information is weird, but still wouldn't be as surprising and paradigm-breaking as, say, some sort of reality where everything is consciousness, a la Donald Hoffman.
It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.
Materialism in this case just means that we have access to objective reality. Idealism is not necessarily supernatural, but it does claim that we do not have access to objective reality beyond our perception and interpretation.
The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look. It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.
> It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.
Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.
True.
>It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.
How can we say that with confidence, though? What if we're just still scratching at the surface of fundamental physics? What if in 3,000 years we have much more than our subjective interpretations and do pretty much understand what's going on?
This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
>Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.
I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
> This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
I'm just extrapolating the trend - of course I don't know what end-game physics looks like, but I'm basing my understanding over what's happened so far.
All we have to build our interpretations on are what we know now. That's the reason we no longer believe in supernatural causes - we've figured out better explanations for enough phenomena that we can reasonably assume the rest are explained naturally too. From the models we have so far, we know that the universe is organised bottom-up and our understanding of what we consider "complete objects" like a cat or a solar system are just the emergent phenomena of collections of rules (or are engineered based on those rules in the case of manmade objects). So if objects don't actually exist in the way we perceive them, I'm not sure what credibility is left for materialism if the whole concept of 'object' only exists in my interpretation.
> I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
That may well be true, but I had to look 'naturalism' up because I hadn't heard the term before. It's probably the angle from which I've approached metaphysics that's to blame for that though.
This is metaphysics, not physics. Physics is a set of models about what should happen in response to specific events (modelling cause and effect); metaphysics is about trying to understand the nature of reality.
Or are you suggesting that quantum mechanics is a bad model?
1. Quantum Mechanics is a fairly accurate representation of the world, or at least about as good as we can come up with given our current state of technology.
2. Quantum Mechanics is a fairly inaccurate representation of the world.
2a. Incorrect theories dominating for centuries is a natural consequence of the scientific method and trying to determine the nature of the universe.
2b. Incorrect theories dominating for centuries is a result of an imperfect implementation of the scientific method in our modern society.
2c. The scientific method is incapable of providing humans with a true and accurate understanding of the world.Quantum weirdness, remember, is defined by physics. It's tested by physics. And it's perfectly compatible with materialism. The problem is in people's understanding.
Full disclosure - I'm no subscribing to finish reading the article. But what it sounds like is "if we change our philosophy to match physics, physics is easy". Quantum physics has always made sense. The only issue was that it wasn't intuitive.
There isn't really any reason to expect physics to match our intuition, when our intuition isn't built for dealing with the sorts of things modern physics deals with.