Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[The Grand Nudger]

The masses are told and believe all kinds of shit.  Every so often we get one here, they waffle around babbling about how we're made of light or some such noise and then leave.

[Pat Mustard]

I feel like I'm at a bit of an impasse now... so much so that I don't know whether I should downgrade myself from an atheist to an agnostic.

You can be both you know.

And frankly under different assumptions you can be both gnostic and agnostic about your atheism. For example when people talk to me about yhwh (or any other human created god for that matter), I'm a gnostic atheist. But when people talk to me about a generic god, or some sort of pantheist "oversoul" I'm an agnostic atheist.

[Bunburryist]

Hang on, there.  Define "material" if you're so sure that reality is definable from any perspective.  What is "stuff"?  What is "energy"?  What is gravity, or anything else?  What do we really know?

Given that I know all I know only through my capacity for subjective experience, you're going to have to come up with some pretty sound logic if you're going to demonstrate that ANYTHING at all is more than that, without accepting philosophical assumptions that beg the question.

I'll say right now, and unambiguously-- it cannot be done.  You cannot demonstrate even that the keyboard you're typing on is anything more than a collection of ideas.

My way of dealing with the "define material" problem is to take materialist at their word, and define material world, first, as "the world in which, IF MY EXPERIENCE HAPPEN IN MATERIAL BRAINS, those experiences exist in.  Matter, then is what things in that world are made of.  Put another way, there is a world in which there exist organisms in which there are brains, and if it is in such a brain that this experience I learn to call "the world happens," then that world is a material world.

My problem with the "idea" concept - and why I never would identify myself as an "idealist"  - is that I have no idea what "mind" or "ideas" are, much less that a reality could be "made of" it.  Idealism, to me, is another version of "non-materialism" - it's a "the other thing that isn't matter" definition.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's taking materialists at their word?  I ask, because they sound like your words.

Start here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter
-then head here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialis...objections

[Bunburryist]

Chomsky once said something like, 'Before you start asking questions about 'physical' and 'non-physical', you have to define what physical even means.'

It's a good question.  Did he provide an answer?

My answer is that whatever is or isn't "out there," the human experience of it is purely experiential/idealistic.  In other words, the study of physics is a category of idea-- about the nature of and relationship among objects.  It doesn't really require a position on the underlying nature of reality.  But I'm happy defining "physical" as "whatever physicists are studying today," as I know what rich fields lay in that direction.

This is where I think the "common sense" concept of materialism becomes very, very important.  It is our education as children (in which we learned in early childhood to think in a simplistic materialism) that we learn to believe that "science describes the material world."  That is, we learn to believe "this experience" is a material world, and learn to think in language that fits hand in glove with it, then we learn scientific ideas and believe they "describe the material world."  It is this society-wide materialist worldview foundation that has so much intellectual inertia.  Various types of materialists can argue all day long between their ivory towers, but below them lies a public who believe, implicitly, unthinkingly, and almost universally that they are "human beings," that they are "made of atoms," ad that they "think with their brains."

[Simon Moon]

I feel like I'm at a bit of an impasse now... so much so that I don't know whether I should downgrade myself from an atheist to an agnostic.

There is no such thing as "downgrading from atheist to agnostic". Both positions are not on the same line. Agnosticism is not some happy middle ground between theism and atheism.

Agnosticism concerns positions about knowledge, and what is unknown and/or unknowable. Atheism concerns belief, or lack thereof.

Yeah, I did it! I opened that can of worms...

I'm currently reading a book about consciousness and it's mainly a summary of existing positions, rather than a new theory being posited, and it contains a lot of philosophical questioning of those ideas, along with the author's own opinions. But it's really making me think on lines I've never really thought before. It describes the terminology so though I've always held my position strongly, I've never really known what it was called until now; 'functionalist epiphenomenalism'... vs zombic materialism and non-zombic materialism. So my view is that phenomenal consciousness is an impotent by-product of psychological consciousness (i.e. the physical) and that what binds them together, as it were, is this idea of functionalism... the system that is the brain. But it's just feeling harder and harder to hold that view, given that the system is defined/interpreted in some abstract way/space... there's no way to know where it begins and ends, whether it includes the environment as well as the brain etc... those sorts of questions that this book is bringing up and which Benny routinely brings up . In the past it's always been more than enough for me; the correlation between brain and mind and function and mind, but these philosophical questions are making me question whether correlation is enough... because this functionalist level or plane between them is something a lot more slippery. So I'm not a hugely happy bunny because it feels like my worldview has taken a severe beating. Just out of interest Rhythm or Jorm, do you identify with any of the above terms; functionalist epiphenomenalist, zombic materialist, or non-zombic materialist?

All interesting stuff. What's the name of the book? I love reading that kind of stuff.

But that leads to a question. What does science's current questions about consciousness, have to do with whether or not you accept the claim that a god or gods exist, is true or not?

[Edwardo Piet]

O wholly holy Flying Spaghetti Monster!

Please, please please vouchsafe to enlighten me with your wisdom regarding whichsoever be the most elegant way to cope with wretchedly stupid cunts.

Ramen.

[ApeNotKillApe]

This is where I think the "common sense" concept of materialism becomes very, very important.  It is our education as children (in which we learned in early childhood to think in a simplistic materialism) that we learn to believe that "science describes the material world."  That is, we learn to believe "this experience" is a material world, and learn to think in language that fits hand in glove with it, then we learn scientific ideas and believe they "describe the material world."  It is this society-wide materialist worldview foundation that has so much intellectual inertia.  Various types of materialists can argue all day long between their ivory towers, but below them lies a public who believe, implicitly, unthinkingly, and almost universally that they are "human beings," that they are "made of atoms," ad that they "think with their brains."

And which of those is inaccurate?

[Bunburryist]

I take issue with the ideas that reality is 'unknowable' with some Kantian fence between us and the noumenal. Just because you cannot know everything about something doesn't mean you cannot know a little bit about it. If sometime was truly unknowable then you couldn't know anything at all about it.

I think there's a difference between what seems unknowable to us now, and what will seem unknowable in the future.  Just think of all we "know" now that no one ever dreamed of in the past.  It sometimes seems - in our political world, at any rate - that "the future" doesn't extend more than 50 years or so, but just imagine 20,000 years from now!  That's assuming at lot, of course.

[Bunburryist]

You cannot, which is probably why you are not a true atheist.  Agnostic, maybe.

Reality is precisely what we experience through our senses, the same senses that can be verified by others when they experience the same thing within the vicinity.

After all, one person make an outrageous claim as another thousands of miles apart, but there is no way to verify that the experiences are connected.

Time matters as much as distance.

There is no veritable, nor historical, way for the bible to make itself known as fact.  The nonsensical themes non-withstanding, the logic is missing to the point of absolute disbelief.

We NEVER experience the same thing as other people.  No one experiences the red I experience.   (I'll put on my materialist hat now and say that, since everything I experience happens in MY material brain, and since everything they experience happens in THEIR material brains, we can't possibly, EVER experience the same thing.  I really wonder if materialists, on the whole, really understand their own "theory of the senses," carry it to its logical conclusion, and, most importantly, INCORPORATE IT INTO THEIR THINKING.)   No one ever experiences anything anyone else experiences.  I don't even know that the "space" in my experiences is something other "people" experience anything "in."