> 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 mo

> 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. 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.