(September 16, 2016 at 9:08 pm)bennyboy Wrote: 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.
