Materialism

I've always had a bit of a problem with materialism. The problem is that I'm not quite sure what it means."Read a bloody dictionary", you suggest helpfully. OK: Now, at first glance, this seems reasonable enough, and indeed true. But if you look at it more closely, you start to wonder if it is a theory. What would falsify it? What sort of thing could we find that we would declare not to be matter?'Cos, after all, what do scientists do when they find something that isn't a solid or a liquid or a gas or a plasma or a liquid crystal or a Bose-Einstein condensate or ... etc, etc. Why, they say "We have discovered a new form of matter which is neither a solid nor a liquid nor a gas nor a plasma nor a liquid crystal nor a Bose-Einstein condensate nor ... etc, etc". They do not, ever, say "We have found something that isn't matter, thus falsifying materialism".So can we identify a point at which this must stop? Can we think of anything that can't be called matter, or having a substrate which can't be called matter? If not, is materialism actually a theory, or just an agreement about how to use words?---I guess this goes in the "Is It Science?" forum.

Quite. Part of the problem is: if we found ghosts, what's to stop us from announcing that they're made of a new form of matter which we've just discovered and which we'll call "ghostium"? Now, you may say that that would be silly, but unless we can find a definition for matter that would exclude whatever-it-is-that-ghosts-would-be-made-of-if-there-were-ghosts, then it's not so silly that people couldn't do it.

Well, if you can see ghosts they must reflect light. This suggests that they're ... stuff. I mean, assuming they exist and have the properties usually ascribed to them. I would say that they have a material substrate, namely the brain.

How about the velocity of an object? It has a material substrate, namely the object, but is not itself material.

Well, that would depend on what you mean by "thing". If you mean a material object, then no it isn't, that's the point. But in that respect isn't it like the other things (or not-things, pesky English language) that you mention, such as feelings? Is boredom (for example) a "thing" --- or is being bored something (pesky English language again) that my mind does, just as a car travels at 30 mph (or "has" a velocity of 30 mph)?To take another example, consider inflation. It would sit uneasily on the tongue to say "There is no inflation" or "Inflation doesn't exist" --- that makes it sound like we're saying the inflation rate is 0%. But it is far from being a material substance. (It does have a material substrate, the exchange of physical things such as goods and money.) Might we not say that it stands in the same relation to the economy as an emotion does to my mind or brain?

Yes ... but if you destroyed all the recordings of (say) In the Hall of the Mountain King, burned all the scores, and shot everyone who's ever heard it, would it still go on existing "as a non-physical idea"?

But if you then traced the causal chain back further, you'd find more physical events, you'd find electrical impulses going from his brain to his fingers, and then back still further you'd find neurons firing in his brain, and back still further you'd find photons from his computer screen hitting his retina ...I've never seen why mental materialism, as applied to humans, is anathema to so many religious people. Why should the mind, or the "soul", not be instantiated as meat? --- especially since it evidently is.

Less inspiring is the laziness of the dualist, who supposes that a thing exists precisely because he's given up looking for it.Unless the dualist can find a break in the causal chain, somewhere where the laws of physics get mugged along the route from the photons leaving the screen to the fingers hitting the keyboard, then the mind is simply what the brain does.

Er ... those would be things that happened "by material means" in the first place. Unless you can find that elusive magical event, the break in the unbroken chain.

What do you mean "reproduce" it? We have the material means, they're called brains. I can in fact reproduce brains, I'll need nine months and some women. I don't see what else you want. It's not like I'm saying "I swear, I saw a brain think once, but now it's gone, you'll just have to take my word for it". We got lotsa brains. I don't have to do anything.But if you would care to show us a mind without matter, that would be great.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, this picture of what's going on seems to raise some questions (apart from "do you have a shred of evidence", of course, we'll come back to that one).For it would seem that when we combine this model with what we know about brain damage, my mind doesn't actually know anything. It has no memories, it can't understand English, let alone read or write, it cannot identify commonplace household objects or their uses, it can't recognize faces or remember names ...But, you say, if someone has a normal brain, then the mind has access to these faculties as it chooses. But what's puzzling me is on what basis could it possibly choose?By analogy, if I knew how to read and write, but nothing else, and I was set down in the British Library and allowed to read any book I liked, what are my chances of forming a coherent picture of the world? How would I know which books to read? Suppose I start with Alice In Wonderland, or spend my whole time reading the books on the art of macrame. Now suppose me to have no long-term memory, so that I have to build up this picture of the world by taking notes as I go along ... You see, a library is only useful if I know quite a lot of stuff to start with.Now consider the analogous behavior of the mind in your model. Suppose the sofa in the corner of the room catches fire. What my mind needs to do is look up in my brain certain important facts about fire, how it spreads, what happens if I get some on me. But it doesn't know that these are the important facts before it looks them up. For all my mind knows, it might as well look up the history of sofas or the Italian word for "haddock" or the lyrics to Does Your Chewing-Gum Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight. This would be impractical --- and also it is clearly not what's going on.

This is hilarious but off-topic.

But people who study the brain seem to know the opposite from their observation and experience. Ah, the argument from personal incredulity. Have you ever convinced ayone of anything with that? This isn't much of an argument. If I had measles, I would be far more aware of the rash and the fever than of the virus, but the virus is still the cause of the symptoms and not vice versa.