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Yes I totally agree. My perspective comes from a mix of zen and systems/cybernetics; matter and other temporarily stable configurations like life are stable att

Yes I totally agree. My perspective comes from a mix of zen and systems/cybernetics; matter and other temporarily stable configurations like life are stable attractors in the state of energy flow. So the fundamental essence of reality is energy, rather than matter. The difference been transient energy like "events" and static-appearing things like matter is that the latter is constantly maintaining itself in a feedback loop. Believing it to be matter is a mistake, and one that leads you to misleading metaphysical beliefs like the idea in the article above, or that all qualities can be reduced to quantities, or all things can be understood by looking at the pieces that it is made of. It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics.

goldenkey 5y ago
> It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Indeed. Even the stationary solutions to Schrodinger's equation, which correspond to unchanging states, involve constantly revolving real and complex parts that balance eachother out to keep the amplitude squared at a constant. The idea of an object and a lego universe is really the west's biggest folly. I recommend this movie to anyone looking to shake up their perspective: http://www.digitalphysicsmovie.com/ http://www.digitalphysicsmovie.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_state
namero999 5y ago
> It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Well put. This boggles my mind too. It also seems to me that it should be evident that ultimately, either we rely on infinite regression (essentially explaining nothing) or at a certain point we pick an ontological primitive that we don't explain. And that our choice should be informed by how much of the known world can be explained in terms of such a primitive. I can't fathom what would lead anyone to choose matter for that purpose, and at the same time it seems like the mainstream, unquestioned choice.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  we don't even have the option of infinite regression because we cannot know the total state at a quantum level, both because of uncertainty and because quantum mechanics violate locality.
nynx 5y ago
It's been shown that memory/personality/self is stable with no brain activity [0]. Perhaps consciousness is a transient process, but memory is not and consciousness can be restarted from stable memory. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_arrest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory...
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I didn't claim that memory specifically is immaterial, but that the material is not the "fundamental thing" of monistic metaphysics. Consciousness certainly isn't a transient process, as it is stable over time (until it isn't). It seems most reasonable to say that it's a self-sustaining process (autopoietic or self-referential) emerging from the body.
  - nynx 5y ago
    Given that we know of nothing that isn't material, I'm unsure of why it's reasonable to think material is not the fundamental thing of consciousness.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      I'm not suggesting anything supernatural, but that energy is prime and that matter is a construction of energy.
      - danparsonson 5y ago
        That's not a surprising or controversial statement though - physics for the last hundred years (since Einstein) has increasingly moved towards accepting that matter and energy are for all intents and purposes the same thing. I don't think that changes the tenets of materialism, just refines them.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        The term you're looking for is physicalism, of which materialism is one belief, the other being emergentism, which its replacement. There are a number of beliefs that rest upon the bedrock of materialism that persist today despite materialism being outdated. The prime example is reductionism, the idea that anything can be understood by looking at its parts - this is not true, and while this idea is as outdated as the materialist view, it unfortunately persists. Many other ideals like quantification rest on reductionism and are also becoming outmoded in academia but not in the public perception of what are considered rational ideas.
danparsonson 5y ago
> It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Why does QM contradict materialism? I understood materialism to be the opposite of spiritual beliefs rather than being about strictly Newtonian physics (although I guess that's how it started). Quantum mechanics describes the behaviour of matter and therefore is surely central to a materialist world view? What would be the correct word to describe the view that consciousness is the result of physical processes? I thought that was materialism. > So the fundamental essence of reality is energy, rather than matter. They're basically the same thing though, yes? E=mc^2 and all that?
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  You're thinking of physicalism, of which materialism is a sub-category. Physicalism is the assertion that there are no supernatural phenomena (which I agree with); materialism suggests that the essence that everything is built out of is matter. I think most people would agree that materialism is outdated (given that atomism has been outdated for >100 years), but many of the implications of materialism (that the whole can be explained by the parts, ie reductionism, and the idea that all important properties can be quantified, as two examples) still persist. The (superior) alternative to materialism is emergentism. Materialism and emergentism both imply other ideas and ways of thinking about the world, which are the actual important things.
  - danparsonson 5y ago
    Ah OK. I think you're splitting hairs a little bit there - I would consider those two terms (materialism and physicalism) to be interchangeable; the basic idea is the same but one is a refinement of the other using modern knowledge. You could say physicalism is materialism v2 :-) As for emergentism... that's materialism v3, so (in my head at least) these are all different ways of saying the same thing.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
feanaro 5y ago
Many people professing to be materialists are actually physicalists. The claim is not that everything that matters is matter. Rather it's that everything that matters is physical state.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  If you (not you personally, the general 'you') still believe that reductionism can explain all phenomena then even if you claim to be a physicalist, you are still stuck in materialist patterns of thinking.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    Ah, I'm sorry to see this answer so late, but I find this interesting so I'll respond anyway. I find "reductionism" to be a very vague and often unclear term. When used correctly (at least how I understand it), it is meant to denote phenomena where in principle, with infinite computational power, you still could reduce the total behaviour to a combination of underlying lower-level behaviours. But with irreducible phenomena, this way of understanding it is suboptimal and does not produce understanding in practice, because it is missing the forest for the trees and introduces a lot of information which can effectively be ignored. In this way, moving up a level, or doing a kind of basis shift, we can understand the phenomenon much more easily. In these situations, we say that reductionism does not hold. But I've also seen people use the term in a mystic, almost magical way, where supposedly the upper phenomena cannot be put into a connection with the lower underlying phenomena even in principle. They seem to be seeing it as a kind of break in causality, so that the upper phenomena stands on its own, unrelated to the lower layer. With the above in mind, why do you specifically think that reductionism determines someone specifically as a materialist and not a physicalist? Can you expand a bit more on that?
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Materialist and emergentist are both types of physicalist, so a materialists is already a physicalist, just missing some of the pieces. > But I've also seen people use the term in a mystic, almost magical way It's really unfortunate that holism in general has attracted the likes of woo-peddlers and magical thinkers because it discredits the core idea. My perspective on reductionism (and by implication, materialism) versus holism is that reductionism tends to focus on the smallest pieces rather than appropriately scaling up and down the ladder of abstraction depending on what level you are operating on. So for example, when looking at behaviour you want to deter (crime, environmental damage etc) a reductive approach would be to just attempt to counter the individual's behaviour with punishment (ie, making such behaviour illegal). The holistic view would be to examine not just the behaviour of the individual but the incentives and structures that drive said behaviour and try to fix that, because without removing the incentive the behaviour will not be truly removed. I believe that reality is organise from the bottom-up, so there's nothing being added at the higher levels that is apart from physical reality. But the thing that reductionism typically misses out on is that reality is made of material _and relationships_ and when you take the material apart into the smaller parts, you break said relationships and much of the picture. The reductive approach to understanding reality is to do exactly that, to take things apart to understand them, but many things stop working when you remove the individual part from its environment, and thus in those scenarios you need to understand the whole picture. So often I see people trying to address a problem that manifests at point A (say, a particular component of a software system) by fixing it at point A, where the correct fix is actually elsewhere. It was running into this pattern over and over in my software engineering work that made me discover systems theory in the first place but I see the same mistake all over the place.
Koshkin 5y ago
> belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart What is this, then? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-the-highest-resolution-atomic-image-ever-captured/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-the-highest-r...
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  it's not that atoms don't exist, it's that atoms are the smallest part of reality - that they are indivisible. That's what atomism is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    Actually, atoms may well be the smallest parts of reality that we can ever "see." Structureless particles such as electrons are "points" which, due to their infinitely small size, makes them impossible to see even in principle. (Incidentally, this is exactly makes them true "atoms," i.e. indivisible, and they are always created and destroyed as a whole.)
simonh 5y ago
Firstly you're drawing an unwarranted distinction between physicalism and materialism. There is no consensus that there is a distinction, many philosophers consider them interchangeable, and there are competing accounts of possible distinctions. Materialism is not a theory of physics, it's a theory of the relationship between physics and various philosophical questions. Asserting that it's somehow incompatible with quantum mechanics is completely unwarranted. Bear in mind the term Physicalism wasn't even introduced into philosophy until the 1930s, long after quantum mechanics had become firmly established, and nobody with any credibility in philosophy was seriously suggesting then that quantum mechanics disproved materialism.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  > Firstly you're drawing an unwarranted distinction between physicalism and materialism. Let's not argue the definition of words then. The distinction I'm drawing is whether said philosophy believes that higher-order models of reality at any given level can be derived from understanding the smallest parts. The "yes" side, I'm calling materialism, but you could also call reductivism or perhaps objectivism. The "no" side, I'll call emergentism or constructivism. Neither side implies a supernatural aspect to reality. > Materialism is not a theory of physics, it's a theory of the relationship between physics and various philosophical questions. Asserting that it's somehow incompatible with quantum mechanics is just silly. Only if you're relying on the equivalence of materialism and physicalism. Quantum mechanics violated many ideas considered to be ground truth at the time, including locality and deterministic certainty. I'm far from an expert in this area, but my understanding is that the thing I'm calling materialism is dependent on the idea of the universe as a lego-style composition, and that quantum mechanics violate this concept. But this view is also espoused by Fritjof Capra, a particle physicist. Perhaps somebody should tell him that it's silly!
  - simonh 5y ago
    All that quantum mechanics does is substitute wave functions instead of 'atomic' particles. A future theory might substitute something else, strings, branes, whatever. It doesn't matter, from a philosophical point of view it's just physics. It has no bearing on the relationship between physicalism or materialism and other competing philosophical theories. This is the sort of thing Deepak Chopra gets so badly wrong with his vague mumbo jumbo. Hmm, I just looked up Capra. Obviously I've not read his book, but it looks like he talks a lot about 'the relatedness of all parts', well that's just kind of obvious. I note you talk about emergent phenomena. Sure of course, that's all physicalists and materialists are saying. It's not like we've never thought of this stuff before. That's not something that disproves what were saying, or something that we've not considered. It's the whole point.
sifar 5y ago
This may be a bit naive but I am curious, how do you then define energy ? Does/can it exist independent of matter ? All we observe is it's transformation, arising out of interacting matter. I like the processes with feedback loop view of matter.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Energy might not be the right word, as I believe energy is a subset of these concepts but not the totality. The right word is something like causal relationships. The idea is that stable loops create higher-order behaviour; this works at all levels of abstraction, whereas the "energy" model is generally only used to describe interaction at the atomic and subatomic levels. This idea is taken primarily from cybernetics, but it also pops up in other places because it's a transdisciplinary concept. In fact, cybernetics and systems theory were specifically created out of observations of common patterns that appear across disciplines, and created by transdisciplinary teams of academics from both the humanities and the sciences/mathematics.

goldenkey 5y ago

> It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Indeed. Even the stationary solutions to Schrodinger's equation, which correspond to unchanging states, involve constantly revolving real and complex parts that balance eachother out to keep the amplitude squared at a constant. The idea of an object and a lego universe is really the west's biggest folly. I recommend this movie to anyone looking to shake up their perspective: http://www.digitalphysicsmovie.com/ http://www.digitalphysicsmovie.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_state

namero999 5y ago

> It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Well put. This boggles my mind too. It also seems to me that it should be evident that ultimately, either we rely on infinite regression (essentially explaining nothing) or at a certain point we pick an ontological primitive that we don't explain. And that our choice should be informed by how much of the known world can be explained in terms of such a primitive. I can't fathom what would lead anyone to choose matter for that purpose, and at the same time it seems like the mainstream, unquestioned choice.

beaconstudios 5y ago
we don't even have the option of infinite regression because we cannot know the total state at a quantum level, both because of uncertainty and because quantum mechanics violate locality.

nynx 5y ago

It's been shown that memory/personality/self is stable with no brain activity [0]. Perhaps consciousness is a transient process, but memory is not and consciousness can be restarted from stable memory. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_arrest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory...

beaconstudios 5y ago
I didn't claim that memory specifically is immaterial, but that the material is not the "fundamental thing" of monistic metaphysics. Consciousness certainly isn't a transient process, as it is stable over time (until it isn't). It seems most reasonable to say that it's a self-sustaining process (autopoietic or self-referential) emerging from the body.
- nynx 5y ago
  Given that we know of nothing that isn't material, I'm unsure of why it's reasonable to think material is not the fundamental thing of consciousness.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I'm not suggesting anything supernatural, but that energy is prime and that matter is a construction of energy.
    - danparsonson 5y ago
      That's not a surprising or controversial statement though - physics for the last hundred years (since Einstein) has increasingly moved towards accepting that matter and energy are for all intents and purposes the same thing. I don't think that changes the tenets of materialism, just refines them.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        The term you're looking for is physicalism, of which materialism is one belief, the other being emergentism, which its replacement. There are a number of beliefs that rest upon the bedrock of materialism that persist today despite materialism being outdated. The prime example is reductionism, the idea that anything can be understood by looking at its parts - this is not true, and while this idea is as outdated as the materialist view, it unfortunately persists. Many other ideals like quantification rest on reductionism and are also becoming outmoded in academia but not in the public perception of what are considered rational ideas.

danparsonson 5y ago

> It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Why does QM contradict materialism? I understood materialism to be the opposite of spiritual beliefs rather than being about strictly Newtonian physics (although I guess that's how it started). Quantum mechanics describes the behaviour of matter and therefore is surely central to a materialist world view? What would be the correct word to describe the view that consciousness is the result of physical processes? I thought that was materialism. > So the fundamental essence of reality is energy, rather than matter. They're basically the same thing though, yes? E=mc^2 and all that?

beaconstudios 5y ago
You're thinking of physicalism, of which materialism is a sub-category. Physicalism is the assertion that there are no supernatural phenomena (which I agree with); materialism suggests that the essence that everything is built out of is matter. I think most people would agree that materialism is outdated (given that atomism has been outdated for >100 years), but many of the implications of materialism (that the whole can be explained by the parts, ie reductionism, and the idea that all important properties can be quantified, as two examples) still persist. The (superior) alternative to materialism is emergentism. Materialism and emergentism both imply other ideas and ways of thinking about the world, which are the actual important things.
- danparsonson 5y ago
  Ah OK. I think you're splitting hairs a little bit there - I would consider those two terms (materialism and physicalism) to be interchangeable; the basic idea is the same but one is a refinement of the other using modern knowledge. You could say physicalism is materialism v2 :-) As for emergentism... that's materialism v3, so (in my head at least) these are all different ways of saying the same thing.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago

feanaro 5y ago

Many people professing to be materialists are actually physicalists. The claim is not that everything that matters is matter. Rather it's that everything that matters is physical state.

beaconstudios 5y ago
If you (not you personally, the general 'you') still believe that reductionism can explain all phenomena then even if you claim to be a physicalist, you are still stuck in materialist patterns of thinking.
- feanaro 5y ago
  Ah, I'm sorry to see this answer so late, but I find this interesting so I'll respond anyway. I find "reductionism" to be a very vague and often unclear term. When used correctly (at least how I understand it), it is meant to denote phenomena where in principle, with infinite computational power, you still could reduce the total behaviour to a combination of underlying lower-level behaviours. But with irreducible phenomena, this way of understanding it is suboptimal and does not produce understanding in practice, because it is missing the forest for the trees and introduces a lot of information which can effectively be ignored. In this way, moving up a level, or doing a kind of basis shift, we can understand the phenomenon much more easily. In these situations, we say that reductionism does not hold. But I've also seen people use the term in a mystic, almost magical way, where supposedly the upper phenomena cannot be put into a connection with the lower underlying phenomena even in principle. They seem to be seeing it as a kind of break in causality, so that the upper phenomena stands on its own, unrelated to the lower layer. With the above in mind, why do you specifically think that reductionism determines someone specifically as a materialist and not a physicalist? Can you expand a bit more on that?
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Materialist and emergentist are both types of physicalist, so a materialists is already a physicalist, just missing some of the pieces. > But I've also seen people use the term in a mystic, almost magical way It's really unfortunate that holism in general has attracted the likes of woo-peddlers and magical thinkers because it discredits the core idea. My perspective on reductionism (and by implication, materialism) versus holism is that reductionism tends to focus on the smallest pieces rather than appropriately scaling up and down the ladder of abstraction depending on what level you are operating on. So for example, when looking at behaviour you want to deter (crime, environmental damage etc) a reductive approach would be to just attempt to counter the individual's behaviour with punishment (ie, making such behaviour illegal). The holistic view would be to examine not just the behaviour of the individual but the incentives and structures that drive said behaviour and try to fix that, because without removing the incentive the behaviour will not be truly removed. I believe that reality is organise from the bottom-up, so there's nothing being added at the higher levels that is apart from physical reality. But the thing that reductionism typically misses out on is that reality is made of material _and relationships_ and when you take the material apart into the smaller parts, you break said relationships and much of the picture. The reductive approach to understanding reality is to do exactly that, to take things apart to understand them, but many things stop working when you remove the individual part from its environment, and thus in those scenarios you need to understand the whole picture. So often I see people trying to address a problem that manifests at point A (say, a particular component of a software system) by fixing it at point A, where the correct fix is actually elsewhere. It was running into this pattern over and over in my software engineering work that made me discover systems theory in the first place but I see the same mistake all over the place.

Koshkin 5y ago

> belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart What is this, then? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-the-highest-resolution-atomic-image-ever-captured/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-the-highest-r...

beaconstudios 5y ago
it's not that atoms don't exist, it's that atoms are the smallest part of reality - that they are indivisible. That's what atomism is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism
- Koshkin 5y ago
  Actually, atoms may well be the smallest parts of reality that we can ever "see." Structureless particles such as electrons are "points" which, due to their infinitely small size, makes them impossible to see even in principle. (Incidentally, this is exactly makes them true "atoms," i.e. indivisible, and they are always created and destroyed as a whole.)

simonh 5y ago

Firstly you're drawing an unwarranted distinction between physicalism and materialism. There is no consensus that there is a distinction, many philosophers consider them interchangeable, and there are competing accounts of possible distinctions. Materialism is not a theory of physics, it's a theory of the relationship between physics and various philosophical questions. Asserting that it's somehow incompatible with quantum mechanics is completely unwarranted. Bear in mind the term Physicalism wasn't even introduced into philosophy until the 1930s, long after quantum mechanics had become firmly established, and nobody with any credibility in philosophy was seriously suggesting then that quantum mechanics disproved materialism.

beaconstudios 5y ago
> Firstly you're drawing an unwarranted distinction between physicalism and materialism. Let's not argue the definition of words then. The distinction I'm drawing is whether said philosophy believes that higher-order models of reality at any given level can be derived from understanding the smallest parts. The "yes" side, I'm calling materialism, but you could also call reductivism or perhaps objectivism. The "no" side, I'll call emergentism or constructivism. Neither side implies a supernatural aspect to reality. > Materialism is not a theory of physics, it's a theory of the relationship between physics and various philosophical questions. Asserting that it's somehow incompatible with quantum mechanics is just silly. Only if you're relying on the equivalence of materialism and physicalism. Quantum mechanics violated many ideas considered to be ground truth at the time, including locality and deterministic certainty. I'm far from an expert in this area, but my understanding is that the thing I'm calling materialism is dependent on the idea of the universe as a lego-style composition, and that quantum mechanics violate this concept. But this view is also espoused by Fritjof Capra, a particle physicist. Perhaps somebody should tell him that it's silly!
- simonh 5y ago
  All that quantum mechanics does is substitute wave functions instead of 'atomic' particles. A future theory might substitute something else, strings, branes, whatever. It doesn't matter, from a philosophical point of view it's just physics. It has no bearing on the relationship between physicalism or materialism and other competing philosophical theories. This is the sort of thing Deepak Chopra gets so badly wrong with his vague mumbo jumbo. Hmm, I just looked up Capra. Obviously I've not read his book, but it looks like he talks a lot about 'the relatedness of all parts', well that's just kind of obvious. I note you talk about emergent phenomena. Sure of course, that's all physicalists and materialists are saying. It's not like we've never thought of this stuff before. That's not something that disproves what were saying, or something that we've not considered. It's the whole point.

sifar 5y ago

This may be a bit naive but I am curious, how do you then define energy ? Does/can it exist independent of matter ? All we observe is it's transformation, arising out of interacting matter. I like the processes with feedback loop view of matter.

beaconstudios 5y ago
Energy might not be the right word, as I believe energy is a subset of these concepts but not the totality. The right word is something like causal relationships. The idea is that stable loops create higher-order behaviour; this works at all levels of abstraction, whereas the "energy" model is generally only used to describe interaction at the atomic and subatomic levels. This idea is taken primarily from cybernetics, but it also pops up in other places because it's a transdisciplinary concept. In fact, cybernetics and systems theory were specifically created out of observations of common patterns that appear across disciplines, and created by transdisciplinary teams of academics from both the humanities and the sciences/mathematics.