bkst

>Entire quantum physics is a mathematical model of physical things by definition.

Quantum physics doesn't follow from definition, it follows from experiment. You are confusing a priori statements with a posteriori statements.

>Photons behave in very physical ways, just not in classical ways

What are "physical ways"? What are the properties of "physical ways"? When confronted with a hypothetical 'way', how can we know if that 'way' is physical or non-physical?

The answer is that physicists assume that all existents are physical and then conclude, based on that assumption, that materialism is correct. This is circular logic because materialism is simply the doctrine that everything is physical. So all they have done is assume that materialism is correct and then conclude that, because materialism is correct, materialism is correct.

In order to argue that materialism is correct you first have to define what materialism is, and what it is not. Is the materialism hypothesis even falsifiable? Or is it the kind of hypothesis that changes as soon as it is refuted?

>because I believe at least that an internally consistent external world exists and a global conspiracy of physicists doesn't.

The assertion that the world must be internally consistent is quintessential rationalism, not materialism or empiricism at all. Science's core value is empiricism, NOT rationalism. Empiricism and rationalism are at odds with one another and make incompatible claims.

>I'm just the same; I don't pretend to have a deep and detailed understanding of quantum physics, but I accept it as true because I believe at least that an internally consistent external world exists and a global conspiracy of physicists doesn't. If you quizzed me, at some level of detail I'd have to start guessing. My incorrect guesses shouldn't be mistaken for intentional rejection of established theories.

This is one of the weakest epistemic arguments I've ever heard. But also very honest.

You're basically saying that your central ontological conviction is that a group of humans called physicists are the ontological authorities, but you can't actually tell us what ontology it is that those authorities advocate, but whatever it is, you're sure they're right and their opponents are wrong.

This is a brutally honest admission: most fans of science have no idea what science is actually saying and couldn't survive a brief cross-examination of their "scientific" worldview. They would keep getting tripped up and go back to "I agree with what Joe says, and even though I can't explain what it is that Joe says, I am sure he is right and you are wrong, and I'm sure that Joe would have great arguments to defeat you with."

Of course, this is an illogical argument and completely fails. If you can't describe the position of the authority (PoA) that you trust in, then you can't compare the position of the authority (PoA) to the position of others (PoO).

If you don't know PoA, then you don't know that PoO is not equal to PoA. You can't, on your own, determine if PoA == PoO or if PoA != PoO. Since you can't make this comparison, you can't make any argument at all and can't make any meaningful statements about PoO. You can't even claim that someone's argument conflicts with your authority's argument, because it's impossible to know that PoA != PoO when you don't know what PoA is.

The only epistemic position you are left with is to robotically repeat the profession of the faith:

"There is no truth but physics and physicists are that truth's prophets."

Most self-proclaimed atheists are in the same boat as you, but far less aware of their ignorance of their own doctrines.

Most atheists totally fail to articulate an internally consistent scientism, and also fail to articulate a scientism that is compatible with the scientism that physicists articulate.

Again and again they fall back on "the prophet is right, but I don't know what he is right about."

Their ontology and epistemology is a "I'll believe what they're believing" kind of finger-pointing.

So now you see why philosophers like me think "New Atheists" are anti-intellectuals--and why we have criticized New Atheists of having the same religious ignorance and fervor that is common among Christians. To rationalists, Christians and New Atheists look like two authority-based religions with different prophets.

The technicalities are the entire point!

If the fundamental nature of reality can't be analyzed technically, what can be?

The evidence that things are non-physical is quantum physics experiments showing that the fundamental components of existence lack the properties of physical things.

The two slit experiment shows that photons behave in non-physical ways.

The indeterministic wave function shows that reality does not depend on strict physical laws but on randomness, and randomness is not mechanisitic. Materialism is based on mechanics but quantum strangeness violates mechanics, therefore mechanics is empirically wrong.

The Schrodinger's cat situation shows that reality is dependent on observers--but matter is said to exist without regard to observers at all. The physical moon still exists when you aren't looking at it. The Schrodinger's moon does not--just as Berkeley claimed in 1713.

Bosons show that two objects can take up the same space at the same time.... but physical things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. This is like saying that you can drive a bulldozer into a house but the bulldozer and house don't have to destroy each other, that they have the option of happily occupying the same space. The materialism hypothesis would say this is impossible. "Physical" things do not behave like bosons, therefore bosons aren't physical things.

The evidence that the materialism hypothesis is wrong is quantum physics, where things don't behave in the ways that the materialism hypothesis claims they should. Therefore the materialism hypothesis has been falsified and refuted and is wrong.

>Oh dear. More quantum mumbo jumbo and obvious fallacy.

If you were a philosopher you could actually refute my so-called fallacies with logic rather than insults :\

>1. Quantum mechanics tells us that matter obeys the Schrodinger equation and has wave properties. Therefore, the classical definition of matter is slightly wrong. This in no way implies that matter doesn't exist.

It's not "slightly wrong"... it's TOTALLY wrong. Schrodinger's cat is completely incompatible with classical materialism. You can't just be "slightly wrong" at this.

>You're right that "matter" as imagined by many classical scientists doesn't exist (because they didn't fully understand it), but you're ignoring the fact that it obviously still exists independently of how classical scientists imagined it to work.

It doesn't exist but it obviously exists???

It either exists or it doesn't, or we don't know either way. "Matter" is no longer treated by science, the concept has been dropped by physics. Science has "mass" but this mass behaves nothing like "matter."

>Quantum (in)determinism is still up in the air. We don't know exactly how it works. Anyone who uses it for philosophical arguments is probably not making a good argument.

Tell that to every physicists who speaks in public then. All of them try to reason about quantum physics and this is a major area of interest. I agree that it is "up in the air" but... philosophy has ALWAYS been about stuff that is up in the air. So to say that quantum physics is somehow off-limits to philosophical argument is just absurd.

>In what way do bosons refute materialism? Is helium-4 immaterial? Obviously not. I can hold it in a bottle. I can feel it on my skin. I can fill my lungs with this boson and talk in a squeaky voice.

Well you are just flat out not familiar with the standard philosophical canon, because none of those empirical phenomena depend on matter to be explained. They can all be explained by, for instance, empiricist idealists like Berkeley. No empiricist is claiming that sense perceptions don't exist. We are claiming that sense perceptions are not underpinned or explained by matter, that is to say, we are saying that materialism does not actually explain those things at all and that materialism can't be right. Materialism being a 2500 year old philosophy that everything is deterministic, solid, extended, based on atoms, etc etc.

The fact that we (the empiricist idealists) made these arguments before quantum mechanics proved us right is just grist for the comedy mill. When all of reality is shown to be underpinned by substances that have none of the classical properties of matter/materialism, then that philosophy is debunked.

But for some reason people still cling to the word and want to then redefine the word to mean its 180 degree opposite.

Shrug

Most human beings don't consider themselves logical. 80%+ of people consider their most meaningful and important beliefs to be faith based.

So I have no problem with those people claiming to believe in matter. It's the materialists who also claim to be rational that make no sense.

It's nice that you aren't wedded to the ancient and refuted superstition that is tied to the word "materialism". But you are mistaken if you think your peers aren't... most self-proclaimed materialists, if asked to describe their beliefs, will describe them inline with the classic Newtonian or Cartesian formulation of matter. They will say the world is deterministic, stable, extended, takes up space, etc.

Most self-proclaimed atheists claim to be materialists and profess a belief in this old type of materialism. Very few of them will say they aren't wedded to the word like you do. I completely respect your rejection of the word--it shows me that you are a logical person who has developed a more sophisticated worldview than the simple materialism that most non-theists still claim is true.

I'm not solipsistic at all... I'm using the socially established definition. I'm engaging in the 2500 year old tradition and usage of the word. I'm using the word in the same way it was used by Thales, Democritus, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Locke, and all scientists before the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, and most scientists still today.

I'm using the word in the same way that most non-physicists still use it--where for instance biologists in crafting their theories assume that lifeforms obey classical materialist principles despite the findings of quantum physics that those principles are wrong.

You can't claim that I invented the definition of materialism anymore than you can claim that I invented 1+1=2.

I'm a rationalist.

An honest rationalist is logically compelled to be an immaterialist. Immaterialism does not imply theism.

What is strange about today is that the materialists themselves have discovered their own refutation, but instead of just acknowledging it, they redefined their favorite word "matter" to have all the properties of the things that are incompatible with matter. They proved themselves right by redefining their word to mean its opposite--to mean what the opponents of materialism always claimed.

What are the properties of mind?

* unextended, like the photon (Descartes)

* indeterministic, like the collapse of the quantum wave function that occurs "randomly" rather than "deterministically"

* perceiving, like Schrodinger's observer who causes the collapse of the wavefunction when he perceives the cat

Berkeley the famous immaterialist empiricist idealist said, "To be is to be perceived" ... and now quantum physics says the same thing... but insist that they are still materialists.

It's really quite hilarious.

>I tell you what my definitions are, not the other way around. Update your arguments, which, in this case, probably consists of discarding them.

I've never spoken to you in my life.

The definition of materialism has been established since 450 BC. It has nothing to do with you.

You can't say that 1=0 just because you define it that way. You have to actually prove that they're the same.

Using your tactic I can prove unicorns exist by redefining unicorns to not have horns. Under my new definition of unicorns, unicorns exist, and I'm going to go around shouting from the rooftop that unicorns exist and I've proved they exist. Anyone who tells me that unicorns don't exist is guilty of failing to recognize my private definition of unicorns. But this argument is absurd, just as your argument that matter exists because you have redefined matter in a new way that is incompatible with the previous definition of matter is absurd.

If your new definition of matter is incompatible with your old definition of matter, then why are you using the same word? It's not matter. It's something else. So use a new word. It's not a unicorn, it's a horse--something that has already been claimed to exist by the philosophers of horses.

You can't say that you've refuted the philosophy of horses and proved that only unicorns exist by redefining unicorns to not have any horns and then pointing at horses as proof of your unicorn theory. This is how crazy materialists sound. Completely illogical.

Materialists in 2015 are going to barns and pointing at horses to prove that unicorns exist, because they've redefined unicorns to now be without a horn. It would be funny if it wasn't so popular.

Berkeley didn't refute Jerf-Materialism. I was arguing against normal materialism, which holds that all things are matter, and that matter is a deterministic, solid, stable, extended substance that has mass, takes up space, is made up of smaller bits of matter, has an exclusion principle with the space that it takes up, interacts with neighboring matter through contact, and so on. This is still what most people think of as matter. Even the people who discovered the empirical evidence that refutes the existence of matter still claim to believe in matter, it's just odd.

Guess what guys! If it doesn't walk like a duck, doesn't talk like a duck, doesn't quack like a duck... it's NOT a duck!

And your private language is not relevant to this discussion.

You can't resolve the interactionist problem by just fuzzing the definition of matter.

Materialism is the philosophy that all things are matter.

Quantum physics refutes the philosophy of materialism because it's incompatible with the philosophy of materialism.

If photons are not matter, then something is not matter, and if something is not matter, then materialism is wrong.

From that Wikipedia page:

'there is no single universally agreed scientific meaning of the word "matter". Scientifically, the term "mass" is well-defined, but "matter" is not. Sometimes in the field of physics "matter" is simply equated with particles that exhibit rest mass (i.e., that cannot travel at the speed of light), such as quarks and leptons. However, in both physics and chemistry, matter exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties, the so-called wave–particle duality.'

Modern physics does not actually define matter. Matter was once synonymous with mass, but redefining mass to include properties that are incompatible with matter/materialism does not bolster matter/materialism's existence.

If mass is defined in such a way that it is incompatible with matter, then either mass or matter have lost their meaning. In fact, it is the word "mass" that has lost its meaning, while the word "matter" has been dropped by science.

It's not me that is confused, it is the materialists who are confused.

Quantum physicists and popularizers of science go around claiming to be materialists when quantum physics is completely incompatible with materialism and nothing in quantum physics behaves like matter. Feynman 'sum over histories' applies to all things, both macro and micro, and anything that behaves in that way is incompatible with the properties of matter. Since all things behave like quantum wave-particles, all things have properties that are incompatible with the properties of matter. If all things have properties that are incompatible with the necessary properties of matter, then no things can have sufficient properties for those things to be matter. If no things can have the properties of matter, then no things can be matter. If no things can be matter, then no things are matter. If no things are matter, then matter doesn't exist. If matter doesn't exist, then materialism is wholly refuted.

The logic against materialism is bullet proof from every angle. People just keep it up out of inertia.

It's not that consciousness exists independent of matter, it is that what materialists keep calling matter... does... not... exist...

Matter just doesn't exist. In what way is the quantum wavefunction material? It's not deterministic, it's random. It's not solid, you can have two bosons in the same place at once. It doesn't have precise position or momentum but exists as a kind of smudge. It doesn't even move through time in the way that matter is defined as moving.

"Matter" has mass, yet photons don't even have mass. Massless particles take up no space. Matter takes up space. Therefore massless particles are not matter. Massless particles underpin all of reality, yet people want to say reality is made up of matter.

Wavefunctions are not matter. Photons are not matter. Electrons are not matter--they behave like waves and the properties of waves are incompatible with matter.

So where is this matter? It's just a fiction. Berkeley already called it in 1830. There is no way you can be an empiricist materialist these days, without being ignorant.

The interactionist problem was solved by Berkeley when he proved, without refutation, that matter is the fiction while mind is the obvious empirical fact.

Quantum mechanics came along and re-confirmed what he already proved.

"Matter"--something solid, mechanical, deterministic--is nothing but an ancient Greek myth. There is nothing in nature that has the properties of matter, therefore nothing is matter, therefore matter doesn't exist.

Quantum randomness is not deterministic. Bosons refute materialism. The wave-function itself refutes materialism.

Materialism is an ancient greek faith-based religion. Berkeley killed it a long time ago but people were so shocked they still haven't accepted that their God is Dead.

>If they love the book and not the content, why do they care if the content is available.

They want to have something that others can't have.

>Wouldn't you rather own the only copy of a famous atlas, then an obscure one?

Some would, but there are plenty who prefer the obscurity. Most aristocrats are more interested in impressing their friends and immediate circle with off-beat style than in starting a popular museum or being seen as gaudy. Obscurity is hip--and sometimes it can even be affordable.

I'm not trying to "help the situation" by posting on HN.

I'm informing a fellow nerd who asked a question.

Rare book dealers don't read HN so I don't see how I could offend anyone.

The rare book community is the community that has facilitated these crimes. There are more black hats than white hats--no money at all for white hats in this business.

Private book traders make all their money by selling unique items to rich people. The rich people doing the buying want to own something special that other people can't have.

Bibliophiles are technophobes. They love the paper page, the book binding, the book stacks. They don't love the content of the books, and they don't want to share them. They have "aristocratic" ideas about who deserves to have access to these special items. Every last one of them is a hoarder that wants to have things that others can't have.

They hate book scanners. They hate ebooks. They hate digitization. It just threatens their business, their status, their one-of-a-kinds.

Rare books is all about prestige and exclusivity. Digitization is a threat to this.

I'm a book scanner--someone who loves the contents of books more than the objects--and my kind are scorned like the gargoyles from Snow Crash.