My argument against materialism

[Nonpareil]

Yes, I suppose it must, it cannot prove/disprove infinity.

I'm sorry, but what the deuce are you banging on about?

Saying "science cannot prove/disprove infinity" is equivalent to saying "science cannot prove/disprove four". What is there to "prove" about four? It's a number.

 

[tsig]

I'm sorry, but what the deuce are you banging on about?

Saying "science cannot prove/disprove infinity" is equivalent to saying "science cannot prove/disprove four". What is there to "prove" about four? It's a number.

It's the hook he decided to hang his belief hat on.

 

[gentlehorse]

I'm not defending the existence of God, I'm casting my critical eye over materialism.

What is/are your conclusion(s)?

 

[yy2bggggs]

More specifically, there appear to be fundamental principles/laws and forms(atoms)evident in the universe. Can science offer any explanations for the origins/nature of these and compare the difference if any between 'finite' and 'infinite' modeling in relation to these principles/forms.

Science cannot offer any explanations for the origins of fundamental principles, because by definition, a fundamental principle has no origin; that is, if there's an explanation at all for the origin of a principle P, then P is not a fundamental principle. The same is true about "ultimate nature".

Both of these presume that there's such a thing as a fundamental principle or ultimate nature in the first place; that's not a guaranteed state of affairs (it could easily be the case that P can be described in terms of Q and R, Q can be described in terms of P and R, and R in terms of Q and P, and neither are really more fundamental in any reasonably meaningful sense, for example).

 

[tsig]

I'm not defending the existence of God, I'm casting my critical eye over materialism.

What are you using for bait?

 

[mike3]

Anyway, I agree with your post. Any ontological position is speculative, including strong atheism and materialism.

Then why do we get so bent out of shape defending them?!

 

[punshhh]

Huh? Sorry, I don't follow. You do know that say the Coloumb repulsive force become infinite at zero distance?

Why should the fact that the universe is infinite or not matter upon a scientific descriptions of it?

I appologise for not explaining the 'enigma' of infinity in science adequately.

I found myself grappling with a lack of a materialistic interpretation of infinity, combined with a lack of knowledge of how infinity is being used in science.

Perhaps you can help me out on this score.

I will return to my initial point;

From my understanding of infinity (boundlesness), I find it difficult even to accept that any kind of truly infinite reality can coexist with any kind of truly finite reality.
From this position any consideration of infinity by science/materialism becomes reductionalism and always negates or falls short of 'capturing' an infinity.
In consideration of Cantor sets for example, I see a system which seems to span infinity, but always falls short.

The profound 'nature' of infinity and the empirical implications therein are some how missed every time.

 

[devnull]

We humans dont find the concept of infinity comfortable because we are merely apes in shoes. We are geared to count bananas.

Our lack of capability in dealing with reality doesnt alter reality though.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

If idealism is true and the mind of God is infinite*, then everything we can know through our senses can only be evidence (an expression) of the 'nature' of the mind of God.

No. You are still misunderstanding what "evidence" means.

An observation cannot be evidence for A rather than B, unless it is more probable that we would make that observation if A is true than it is probable we will make that observation if B is true.

There is no evidence that we are ideas in the mind of some "God", because every observation you could ever make even in theory is equally good evidence for materialism.

Now how does materialism/science deal with the enigma of infinity?

*correct me if I'm wrong.

It deals with it as well as or better than competing theories like idealism or theism, which is all one can ask.

Pretending to have an answer to a big problem isn't the same as solving a big problem, you see. The person who first said "I believe that the Sun is a flaming ball being pushed by a magic dung beetle" was dumber than the person next to them who said "Buggered if I know what the Sun is, I suspend judgment". Pretending to have some answer to "the enigma of infinity" is a backwards step from honest ignorance, not a forward step.

 

[yy2bggggs]

I found myself grappling with a lack of a materialistic interpretation of infinity, combined with a lack of knowledge of how infinity is being used in science.

There is no such thing as a "materialistic interpretation of infinity". This is a creature you're making up. The infinite has nothing per se to do with materialism. I suspect that your desire to draw a boundary around materialists and dump infinity into that boundary derives from a desire for you to more easily distance yourself from having to accept that concept, since you already seem to identify as a non-materialist.

From my understanding of infinity (boundlesness), I find it difficult even to accept that any kind of truly infinite reality can coexist with any kind of truly finite reality.
From this position any consideration of infinity by science/materialism becomes reductionalism and always negates or falls short of 'capturing' an infinity.
In consideration of Cantor sets for example, I see a system which seems to span infinity, but always falls short.

Your example is a fine illustration both of your misunderstanding of what the infinite is, and your misplaced association of the proper understanding with materialism. Cantor sets are a mathematical construct, and are not necessarily physical constructs. But Cantor sets really do, genuinely, have no bound on the number of points; to phrase it another way, given any arbitrary bound M you choose, there are more points in the Cantor set than M.

Given techniques such as Cantor diagonalization, you can compare infinite sets, and find certain classes of infinite sets to be greater than other classes; for example, there are more points between 0 and 1 than there are integers. But this doesn't mean the set of integers are bounded. Your concept of "truly infinite" may not even make sense.

The profound 'nature' of infinity and the empirical implications therein are some how missed every time.

Before you reason with your terms, you need to learn that concepts can have apparent meaning without actually having a coherent meaning, and you need to apply a lot of work to figure out if there's coherency in the term in the first place. You say that the profound nature of infinity is "some how" missed every time; I suspect this might have something to do with your mystery--there may not even exist a coherent "infinity" as your describing it.

The other part is that conceptually valid concepts of the infinite may either be irrelevant or be capable pragmatically of being ignored to solve certain mysteries, and you may be mistaking this for a lack of appreciation of how "profound" the infinites are. For example, the universe at large could very well be infinite beyond the observable universe, but things outside of the observable universe simply might not effect us.

If you have a particular coherent concept of the infinite, and a particular profound effect it would have on our understanding of the universe, then by virtue of having a profound effect, it must have some effect at all. If that's the case, you should be able to describe that effect, and then maybe we could actually measure it. If there is no such effect, why call it profound?

 

[Dancing David]

I appologise for not explaining the 'enigma' of infinity in science adequately.

I found myself grappling with a lack of a materialistic interpretation of infinity, combined with a lack of knowledge of how infinity is being used in science.

First off, science is not materialism, is philosophically neutral naturalism. The two ate not equal sets, materialism is an abstract that says there are no unknown factors that do no present themselves as the physical manifestation of the universe.

Science is neutral to ontology.

Perhaps you can help me out on this score.

I will return to my initial point;

From my understanding of infinity (boundlesness),

two issues here:
-the concept of infinity is a concept.
-the universe is what it is, it does not meet our expectations of it

In terms of math you can certainly have infinity and finite together.

Take the real numbers whole 1,2,3,4,5 , they are finite, there are five in that set, however if we start to parse the sets between them by say 1/2 then we have another set of numbers 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, and again by 1/4 we have 1.25, 1.5, 1.75....4.75, 5.

Now we can continue this series say with .1, .01 and , .001, where we will have correspondingly higher numbers in the sets between the real number something like 999 x 3 in the third set series (.001), right so far all finite.

Now we can continue to parse the intermediate sets for as long as we want using correspondingly fine divisions 10^-4 , 10^-5...10^-11,000,000, and so on, mathematically there will always be a series of numbers in between the selected numbers. And so the set of rational number between whole numbers will always be larger than the finite set of a series of whole numbers.

Now because this is math we can ask the question, what happens in we continue the iterations. Between any two rational numbers there will always be more rational numbers and therefore there is no end to the iterations that could be carried out. Therefore the limit of this series in infinity.

Therefore there are an infinite number of possible rational numbers between any two whole numbers.

We have infinite and finite together.

I find it difficult even to accept that any kind of truly infinite reality can coexist with any kind of truly finite reality.

Well in terms of space time it is the universe not needing to meet out expectations of it, there is an estimate that the universe contains ~ 10⁷⁰ elementary particles of the boson variety in it. It is a finite number and it appears that the universe may have a finite start.

However the bounds of the universe can be infinite. It can extend forever forward in time, maybe not but it could.

From this position any consideration of infinity by science/materialism becomes reductionalism and always negates or falls short of 'capturing' an infinity.

neither has an apiriori requirement capture, science only has to model and predict or try to explain. In fact the renormalization of the infinities in gauge theory by Gerard_'t_Hooft^WP is a good example of this. It uses infinity as a concept to explain the finite values of forces.

In consideration of Cantor sets for example, I see a system which seems to span infinity, but always falls short.

Not really some of them are infinite with finite boundaries.

The profound 'nature' of infinity and the empirical implications therein are some how missed every time.

I think you are not using the standard definition of empirical.

 

[Nonpareil]

From my understanding of infinity (boundlesness), I find it difficult even to accept that any kind of truly infinite reality can coexist with any kind of truly finite reality.

Correct. Because if something is infinite, it by definition includes everything.

From this position any consideration of infinity by science/materialism becomes reductionalism and always negates or falls short of 'capturing' an infinity.

Also correct. Which is why we never actually use infinity in science or math. We use limits as x approaches infinity.

The profound 'nature' of infinity

And what would this nature be, exactly?

and the empirical implications therein

And these implications would be what, exactly?

 

[Belz...]

I appologise for not explaining the 'enigma' of infinity in science adequately.

I found myself grappling with a lack of a materialistic interpretation of infinity, combined with a lack of knowledge of how infinity is being used in science.

Perhaps you can help me out on this score.

I will return to my initial point;

From my understanding of infinity (boundlesness), I find it difficult even to accept that any kind of truly infinite reality can coexist with any kind of truly finite reality.
From this position any consideration of infinity by science/materialism becomes reductionalism and always negates or falls short of 'capturing' an infinity.
In consideration of Cantor sets for example, I see a system which seems to span infinity, but always falls short.

The profound 'nature' of infinity and the empirical implications therein are some how missed every time.

Excuse me: where exactly do we find any infinite quantity ?

 

[HypnoPsi]

My argument against materialism (=matter is all that primarily exists, everything else are configurations thereof) is really simple:

1. All empirical observations are dependent upon consciousness.

Yes. This is just the Kantian divide into the phenomenal and noumenal realms.

(A lot of people confuse the phenomenal and noumenal realms with the subjective and objective realms, which is of course very wrong as our entire experience of the objective world - including such things depth, distance and colour, etc, are in fact being produced by our minds/brains.)

What lies underneath our psychophysiological construction of reality, i.e the true fundamental essence of reality (and the 'things'/'bodies' therein) is unknowable.

In a more simpler sense, we just have to accept that we can't look at the universe from the outside-in. Therefore all statements about metaphysics (i.e. the fundamental nature of neumenal reality) are conjecture, theory, hypthetical and/or faith and belief based.

2. Materialism claims that there is something independent of consciousness (matter).

More accurately, it is realism that is the claim that there is an extant (existing) neumenal reality "out there" that your mind-brain senses (through the five physical senses) and constructs into the objective world of your experience.

And realisim is rather easily demonstrated as, at least, somewhat valid by simply leaving a working timepiece in an empty room and forgetting about it for a while. When you return the hands on the clock will have moved the same amount of time that you were out of the room.

Now, the process that describes how the hands on the clock work is called naturalism. Whether it's a battery operated wristwatch or a wind-up grandfather clock it's just the stored potential energy in the battery or springs that's being released as (and converted into) kinetic energy over time that makes the hands move. And, of course, if nobody ever changes the battery or winds up the clock it will eventually stop working.

So, so far we have an outside universe that is both real and natural.... now for materialism.

Materialism is the claim that things are made of something that is basically tangible, that they have substance and volume and occupy a fixed location in spacetime (i.e. that 'things' have a corporeal substrate.)

In the modern world the term materialism really is more applicable to discussions concerning classical, Newtonian physics. (When discussing things like massless photons and wave-particle duality many people will use the term physicalism instead of materialism for obvious reasons.)

One important thing to remember here is that we are evolutionarily and developmentally primed towards a materialistic view of reality.

Like our pre-human hominid and simian ancestors, babies have no interest whatsoever in massless photons and double-slit experiments. None. Their brains are instead asking "What is this colourful thing?" and "Can I eat it?", etc.,.

3. Empiricial evidence of something independent of consciousness needs to be independent of consciousness.

4. Because of 1. there can be no such evidence.

5. Therefore: Materialism can never have empirical support.

6. A position that can never have empirical support is worthless / false.

I understand exactly what you mean here but you have to remember just how wide in philosophical scope the phenomenal/neumenal divide is.

In short, no metaphysical theory about neumenal reality (that is, the true fundamental essence of spacetime and 'things') can ever be anything other than theoretical.

And that includes all ideas about what type of God/s, soul-creators, brains in vats or magic self-generating and self-perpetuationg substances and powers are really "out there" underneath and/or behind reality.

So instead of materialism, idealism (=consciousness is the fundamental reality) seems to be more sensible. Because all observations (which are the basis of all science) rely on consciousness, it seems logical to assume it is fundamental to the knowable world. Of course if we weaken the definition of materialism enough, so that consciousness and matter are co-dependent, or matter is fundamentally equal to consciousness, materialism and idealism are really the same. But I don’t think most materialists would take this position (if you do, I don't object to your form of materialism).

We also could conclude that we don’t (or cannot) know what the basis of reality is.

Most probably this argument is not new, but still many people (especially here) believe in materialism. So what do you think is wrong with this argument? Or if you don't think something is wrong with it, what do you think someone could find wrong with?

Well, yes....

I have a conscious mind that can create, store and retrieve information. Therefore, applying Occam's razor (not wishing to multiply unknown entities) the best theory, quite clearly, is that the unknowable foundation of reality (unknowable, at least, through empirical observation) is a conscious mind rather than a purely theoretical magic powder (of power).

Effectively, phenomenalistic theism (in either the Berkleyian or Kantian metaphysical sense) is just arch-skepticism about claims about the ultimate nature of reality.

In short, why theorise something unknown and unknowable as the true funadmental essense of things when we already have something in consciousness that can create, store and retreive information?

~
HypnoPsi

 

[HypnoPsi]

Nope. Consciousness is dependent on matter. There never is unembodied consciousness.

This is a mixture of 'cart before horse' and post hoc falleciousness as well as an inaccurate use of terminology.

How do you know what the fundamental essence of things is? Can you observe the universe from the outside in?

All statements about metaphysics are speculative theory. All of them.

There's no more empirical evidence for neumenal reality being some non-conscious magic powder (or power) substrate than there is for it being a God or Gods.

And remember, philosophical terms like 'matter' have important historical philosopical meanings.

What substance can you show that can't be reduced to massless particles in what we call a matter/antimatter reaction? Even something as simple as an electron/positron collision will result in their conversion into a couple of (massless) photons.

ETA: This argument is indeed not new. Immanuel Kant made a similar argument, although much more refined.

I discussed this very thing in my post above as well. The thing is sadly, I'm just not sure you really understand it in it's more refined sense.

~
HypnoPsi

 

[HypnoPsi]

From my perspective, if solipsism is true then only I exist. Since all others are merely figments of my imagination, then the solipsists among them are wrong about being the solipsist.

For some reason lot's of posts in this thread seem to accuse the OP of being a solipsist. But is it not obvious that this is heavily over-reading into what he is saying?

Besides how could anyone ever know that they're not actually a solipsist dreaming that they somehow "know" that other minds and the universe exists!!

~
HypnoPsi

 

[HypnoPsi]

On the other hand, solipsism is intrinsically useless, and materialism works.

Solipsism isn't meant to have a use - except as a philosophical reminder that certainty is not an absolute - it's a matter of degrees.

And materialism doesn't 'work' anymore than theistic phenomenalism 'works'. It's reality that 'works' and there is no possible way to tell the difference between a universe that has some unobserved and unknown consciousness or other as it's foundation and a universe that has some unobserved and unknown substance or power or other as it's foundation.

Again, all metaphysical statements about the ultimate nature of reality are theoretical.

Minds run on matter. This is just observation.

It's an observation that is dependent upon how you are defining matter to begin with....

What matter runs on in turn - if anything - is another question. Maybe down at the bottom it is consciousness - but if so, materialism is still true on the surface.

This idea "runs on" doesn't work. Tables and chairs don't "run on" molecules - they are composed of molecules. (Which, in turn, are composed of atoms, which are turn composed of particles, etc.,)

What you seem to be doing here is confusing our sensory mode of perception (our evolutionary level of sensory acuity) with reality itself.

Granted, it's hard (impossible even) to imagine any senses evolving through which we'd be able to experience reality as non-local wavey-gravy 'stuff' but that's no excuse for believing the current "map" we have for the literal territory.

Once we start making observations, materialism (or naturalism or physicalism) turns out to fit the facts. Certain forms of idealism also work,

Of course they all work (sic) explain things.

And I'm very glad to see you acknowledge that.

(And I agree with you that the OP didn't explain his exact view precisely enough in his post.)

What is basically happening is we're taking "the facts" (that there is an objective reality that works due to machine like chemical and physical processess) and then trying to explain them. That's why they all 'work', in the sense that they are all 'explanations'.

~
HypnoPsi

 

[benjayk]

@PixyMisa: You make a lot of statements that you don't give any (for me) comprehensible explanation for.
I don't really know how to answer to assertions when I don't really know why you think it's true. So I will only answer to where I have something to relate to other than just a statement.

You say when you die, there will be no experiences more at all. How will that statement ever found to be true? You assume it will be true based on what we seemingly know about minds and matter, but don't adress the question how the statement possibly *can* be subjectively true (if it can't be subjectively true, but only "objectively", what would this mean to me?)
It simply can't come true for me, because absent of experience there is no way of even saying that "I" am this what has no experience.
It seems tautologically true that when I define myself subjectively only through my experience (and this seems to be the only way, because I *just have* experience) non-experience is not meaningful for me. Non-experience has only relative meaning as something I fail to experience (for example laying down in the . Absolute subjective non-experience has no reality for me.
Are you sure it has for you?

Comparing after death with before birth, doesn't work. I'm not saying you can't have the experience of being whithout a clue as to what your past was (in non-lucid dreams this is quite common) or have discontinuities.
It is possible that time is an appearance in consciousness and consciousness as such does not begin or end, but just is.
Even if you think this is not what science suggest, is as least conceivable (for me at least). Whereas stopping to exist just makes no sense for me. When I'm stopping to be, I am not there, so why would I think it's possible for me as conscious being to not exist, it's seems like straightforward contradiction.

So to sum it up: Beggining to exist can be a experience one has. Stopping can't (well you can fear that you stop to exists, for example at a trip, but you don't actually experience it). That's the crucial difference.

 

[benjayk]

I sleep well and deeply and am unconscious every night. This state is not unfamiliar to me -- no more so than the experience of not being able to recall an actor's name when they appear on television. That is, as a "hole" in an otherwise continuity. I experience the unconscious state in the same way that I know I know that guy's name, but I don't know it. I can see the "blank spot."

But only because you're conscious now. You don't experience the state of being unconscious. You experience waking up and inferring that during the night you were "unconscious". Contrary to a final death, this does not mean you ceased to exist, but simply you failed to have experience with certain properties (like knowing it is night), that would be there if you hadn't slept.

 

[benjayk]

We shouldn't do the latter because we theoretically could tell the difference (if it were possible for us to transcend our type of existence)

We might transcend our type of existence, but if you transcend subjective experience... Well, this would still necessarily some kind of subjective experience, and that is all that is needed for my argument.

and because there may actually be a difference. There is nothing that tells me that my experiences *are* what really is. We are discussing what actually *is*; it makes no sense to equate what actually *is* with 'what is for us'; because 'what is for us' may not actually *be* what actually *is*.

I'm just repeating myself here, but what does this mean if there is no way to know?

I disagree. It does not mean that 'fundamental reality' represents empty words. It simply means that this is something that we cannot access in any absolute way. We cannot be absolutely certain of it. We can, however, be provisionally knowledgeable about it. That is what science does.

If we can not bridge the gap between epistemology and ontology at all this seems to be obviously false to me. So you're saying we can bridge it partially. If so, how?

Nope. All your qualia may be the result of an evil genie. Unless you are now using 'qualia' to refer only to 'momentary awareness'.

It doesn't matter if qualia is the result of anything, the qulia itself is still an absolute experience. It simply is and debating this won't change this. Or would you really disagree with this?