(September 22, 2015 at 5:30 pm)bennyboy Wrote: As I mentioned to Rhythm, the terminology used in materialism is rooted in billiard balls. If you have a formless field which cannot be represented unambiguously in 3D space, and which seems not to behave deterministically-- then this seems to me not to be a thing, but the idea of a thing.
There's also the issue of photons and time. . . photons seemingly having a broken reference point in which no time passes (for the photon). So now we have not only a field which does not exist in a specific space or volume, we also have one which both does and doesn't exist for a duration, when viewed from our reference and a hypothetical one.
When perspective so vastly changes the nature of a thing, or when a thing is expressible only in math but cannot be modeled even in theory, I'd again argue that the thing may not be a thing at all, but rather an idea.
If fields do not 'seem' to you to represent not represent matter but ideas, this maybe a failure of your imagination but not of materialism or QFT. I agree that the concept of a field is more nebulous than a particle description especically from a Newtonian standpoint. But strip materialism back to its bare metal and it proposes that the world is made of stuff. I see no reason why a world of fields is not stuff. Fields:
- are not formless (you continue to represent that view). Fields have values, eg value x, in spacetime vector y.
- equations govern them and their time evolution and these are deterministic
- really exist
Under QFT a photon is a quantised region of the EM force field, an electron is a quantised region of the Lepton matter field etc. The field explanation does not add mystery to a photon but help explain relativistic anamolies:
- Why do things slow down when we move faster? If space is made of fields then in a moving interaction things need to travel greater distances, much like a relay runner hands over the baton in motion needs a distance to effect the handover
- Why if I push a photon does it not travel faster. A photon does not interact with Higgs field meaning they travel at the limit of the ability of a their fields to oscillate (ie speed of light "c"). This comes out of field equations
- Why do things contract at higher speeds? If space is made of fields then in motion those fields contract, contracting space itself
I find this an interesting and compelling view of nature but it is way beyond my maths skills to comprehend beyond a superficial understanding. It is not the only view that is inetersting however. I am also interested in the view of nature offered by string theory, bohmian mechanics and many worlds. So I repeat I am not wedded to any one interpretation and remain agnostic on materialism as a result.
However, I am not agnostic on either realism and naturalism, both of which I hold to, ie Existence, exists. Suggesting nothing exists but the immaterial, which has no models, interpretations, maths nor definition, to me is incoherent. The only definition I have heard of the immaterial is that it is "not material", which assumes that material things exist in the first place. Therefore the sentence "only the immaterial exists" defeats itself. It is the same as saying "the only things that exist are not the things that can be shown to exist".
"I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence"...Doug McLeod.
