Materialism: Yes or No?

[stonehead]

Inspired by this chain of posts, that I didn't want to derail its own thread: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/thoughts-on-freedom-limit-of-speech.5801/post-77641

Materialism is the idea that the fundamental unit of reality is physical objects. Matter and energy exist, and all other phenomenon like consciousness are the emergent consequences of physical reality.

This is contrasted with Idealism: The belief that the fundamental unit of reality is the thinking mind, and Dualism: The belief that the reality is comprised of both material things like matter, and non-material things like consciousness.

Where do you stand?

 

[llillilll]

I mostly think in a materialistic way. I consider consciousness to be the product of my physical brain.

 

[Some_porcupine]

i am in doubts there
materialism, deconstructing all by its value or having none that is measurable, leads to nihilism;
because, i presume, there must be some innate "feeling", "shape" that makes things what they are.
they are, but what gives them meaning, reason to be, this way? its "quality"...

we have (imagine) shape and form
shape is, how *it* looks
form is, how it came to be (?)

but why theses shapes have order, say, this form?

 

[bnuungus]

Dualism for sure. As always I find the answer is in the middle rather than the extremes

 

[vulonkaaz]

so materialism is like the idea that nothing exist besides physical measurable matter and that all we are is just a bunch of organic robots that stay alive cause our brains act like some kind of computers and stuff ?

this is a foolish idea that is just symptomatic of how narrow our comprehension of the world really is, also easily refutable (for exemple my father asked questions to someone who died, and some times later some medium or whatever came to him absolutely unprompted with the answers he seeked, there is no way to explain this if matter is the only thing that exist, if you listen around you can certainly find other anecdotes like that)

as of myself i don't know if i agree to idealism or dualism, what even is matter ? i have no way to know and the only thing that i'm 100% sure of is that I exist

 

[ryan]

I think it's quite obvious that materialism is false, it lacks explanatory capability for things we experience every day, namely, experience itself. I don't believe subjective personal experience can ever be explained in a physicalist framework. Even as an "emergent property of the material world" (whatever that means), it's still something qualitatively different than the material world and irreducible.

The best takedown of the idea I've ever read is from Experience of God by David Bentley Hart (he is a theologian but the arguments against materialism hold without Christianity being true)

https://ubcgcu.org/2013/10/15/david-bentley-harts-provocative-take-on-naturalism/

 

[WKYK]

Unlike the other people in this thread I've actually failed to find something that can't be explained by materialism over time. Sure there's a lot we don't understand, but I think chalking it up to something beyond our world is a mistake that humans have always made historically. I should say, I'm not against idealism or dualism nor do I deny their possible existence, but at the moment I've only seen a constant pattern of materialism in the way our world works.

for exemple my father asked questions to someone who died, and some times later some medium or whatever came to him absolutely unprompted with the answers he seeked

I was typing up my response to this point with an argument about how mediums tend to just say what they think you want to hear, but I realized I've never tried a medium myself nor do I know how to find a good one. So could I ask, how you go about finding a good medium? If it's not too pricey I'll give it a try, that could be what turns me dualist.

it lacks explanatory capability for things we experience every day, namely, experience itself.

I think this will change in 5-10 years when we map the human brain. Then we will be able to explain everything about humans, which is utterly horrifying. Despite being a materialist I agree with porcupine:

materialism, deconstructing all by its value or having none that is measurable, leads to nihilism

Even though I believe in it, I really wish there was more to the world than just the physical. It feels so confining being stuck here with so little power; evil is everywhere yet this is the world we are trapped in with no escape.

​

 

[vulonkaaz]

So could I ask, how you go about finding a good medium? If it's not too pricey I'll give it a try, that could be what turns me dualist.

i actually don't know since i never went to see one myself (nor did my dad actually as i said it was totally unprompted, if i remember correctly it was like the medium told someone to tell my dad about stuff)

one thing for sure if the guy is real he won't even have to ask about you to give you the answers you seek

 

[ryan]

I think this will change in 5-10 years when we map the human brain. Then we will be able to explain everything about humans, which is utterly horrifying. Despite being a materialist I agree with porcupine:

You can map my brain down to the finest quantum detail and you will still never know the experience I'm having reading your post right now as I'm having it. Just as in the thought experiment of Mary's Room, you can spend your entire life researching the color red and all of it's physical properties, but unless you actually experience it with your own eyes you will be missing a fundamental piece of information about the world around you.

We're not talking about some God of the Gaps unknown explanation of a physical phenomenon like the Big Bang, we're talking about something so fundamentally and ontologically different from the matter/energy paradigm as to be inexplicable in a purely materialist worldview.

 

[WKYK]

you will still never know the experience I'm having reading your post right now as I'm having it.

Say we were to completely map your mind, then put it in the exact same condition with the exact same variables as the moment you read my post, measured the way your neurons fired, where they fired, and then replicate that same feeling in someone else by firing their neurons in a way that evoked that same experience. Would that person not then understand the experience you had reading my post? Realistically we wont ever reach that level of precision with creating environmental variables so in practice you're right, I'll never know the experiences you've had but I don't think it's because our experiences are beyond the physical world, just because they're too complex.

 

[ryan]

Say we were to completely map your mind, then put it in the exact same condition with the exact same variables as the moment you read my post, measured the way your neurons fired, where they fired, and then replicate that same feeling in someone else by firing their neurons in a way that evoked that same experience. Would that person not then understand the experience you had reading my post? Realistically we wont ever reach that level of precision with creating environmental variables so in practice you're right, I'll never know the experiences you've had but I don't think it's because our experiences are beyond the physical world, just because they're too complex.

That would still only be a perfect replication of my experience, not the experience I had, not the act of me actively, subjectively and consciously experiencing this moment. I would still be the only one to observe my own experience, and you would still be the only to observe that particular replication of my experience through some theoretical Matrix-like contraption.

Here's another one: In a Physicalist worldview, what is the difference between a real observer and a philosophical zombie (i.e., someone who carries the physical properties of an observer, but who is not actively observing anything. An NPC). In my view this is entirely explainable: The conscious act of the observer is an entirely non-physical component to our universe, because there is more in this world than just energy/matter. So the two are qualitatively different, because one carries the non-physical property.

In the Physicalist worldview, why are we not NPCs? Why does it seem that all of us have some sort of innate non-physical quality that confronts us at every waking moment? And how could a non-physical quality like this be explained in a physical framework? Again, we need to differentiate here between the physical state of our brains when we are having an experience, and the actual experience that we are having subjectively (between the matter-of-fact of red and the seeing of red). The only way I can see around that for the Physicalist is to deny the existence of experience at all, some sort of anti Ghost in the Machine hypothesis, which seems like a fools errand, disproved by Descartes 400 years ago. And personally, I've never heard of any rational explanation for why we should deny something that seems readily apparent to every living being who has ever existed besides a strict dogmatism to a poorly thought out metaphysics.

 

[WKYK]

I would still be the only one to observe my own experience, and you would still be the only to observe that particular replication of my experience through some theoretical Matrix-like contraption.

That's a really good point, let me look into this more and I'll get back to you later. I'm not a huge philosophy guy so I appreciate you talking with me, I probably come off as quite the noob when it comes to this stuff haha.

 

[Some_porcupine]

reminds ^ me of that meme i maybe posted here too (and i dont want to repeat and reupload the same imgs 5x)
that we only know what we know, and our views are too, skewed by our experience and limited perception by our brain and senses,
therefore onjectivity, experienced by/via us/ourselves, is always only subjective - like that

 

[ryan]

That's a really good point, let me look into this more and I'll get back to you later. I'm not a huge philosophy guy so I appreciate you talking with me, I probably come off as quite the noob when it comes to this stuff haha.

Cheers! Sorry if I came off as aggressive, I'm new here and I'm just eager to be posting

 

[kodeb8]

Oh yeah you're a materialist? Then what does "nothing" look like? Checkmate!

 

[InternetGeist]

I found Spinoza's explanation of reality to be an interesting alternative. Both the physical objects and the mind are just finite modes of the infinite attributes, namely thought and extension, obtained by one single substance. Consciousness does not necessarily trigger corporeal motions or produce sensory experiences, nor would the mechanics of the body trigger some kind of realization in the brain. The interaction between body and mind is purely spontaneous and parallel.

It is hard to characterize his version of monism as idealism, materialism, or dualism if we are arguing that the thinking mind and the physical objects are one that share the same essence and do not cause each other.

 

[_TF]

I feel like there was an essential mistake that was made the moment you gave labels to reality.

To qualify the mind and the body and the soul, are all human products. We've put things in boxes to understand them better.
However nothing can prove that these assumptions on reality are correct.

Materialism is all that's tangible? But what do you know of what's tangible? We're only 3 dimensional entities, all we qualify as tangible is what's tangible to us, maybe we simply can't interact with things because we're only 3 dimensional.
Same goes for intangible things, perhaps ideas and concepts are just not tangible to us, but are to people from higher dimensions.

We may just be flatlanders to higher entities.


View: https://youtu.be/-gLNlC_hQ3M

 

[mydadiscar]

ah sweet, the yes or no threads are back

 

[alCannium27]

Materialism -- just to think, our behaviors can be modified by parasites and bugs in a cat's fur to like the cat more is enough to show me that we are nothing more that sacks of flesh driven by electric pulses in the noodles. We are nothing but a complex sack of proteins and no organic matters. Drink a cup of coffee or beer, and watch yourself becoming another person.

Do not mistake the inheritant design flaw of the biological being for conciousness, the fact our experiences and behaviors can't be copy-pasted into another bio-suit is a disadvantage, not something to wax on peotic about

 

[no_chill]

Materialism is a paradigm of mind only established in young times with the rise of industrialisation.

It was simply called body and was an abstract in older times.

We are nothing but a complex sack of proteins and no organic matters. Drink a cup of coffee or beer, and watch yourself becoming another person.

Sorry for being like this on agora but exactly this thought process makes you an hylic. It's the quintessence of globohomo. And its rather something you find on reddit.