Short essay on dualism, idealism, & materialism as concerns Q: What is a table?

[Mudhammam]

Mudhammam, I have a couple questions about how you view things as we normally consider them.  For example, in the case of a wave of water, what's a "wave," really?  Is it an illusion?  Is it a kind of pre-set form which expresses itself through a medium like water?  Is it just a name for something water does in our experience?

Given that we know the properties we see in a table don't exist on the most fundamental level of physics (nothing is actually "hard" at the QM level, nothing is "flat" under a microscope, and it seems to be the way humans view things that make those concepts meaningful), would you describe the modern scientific view of reality as materialist, idealist, dualist, or something else?

Well, I need a lot of help on the physics but in layman terms it seems to all boil down to a plenum of "gravitational forces" acting on bodies variously constituted... Leibniz, of course writing three hundred years ago and ignorant of our "modern" scientific understanding, described the world as follows:

In the world of composites, the world of matter, everything is full, which means that all matter is interlinked.  If there were empty space, a body might move in it without affecting any other body; but that is not how things stand.  In a plenum [= ‘world that is full’], any movement must have an effect on distant bodies, the greater the distance the smaller the effect, but always some effect. Here is why. Each body is affected by the bodies that touch it, and feels some effects of everything that happens to them; but also through them it also feels the effects of all the bodies that touch them, and so on, so that such communication extends indefinitely. As a result, each body feels the effects of everything that happens in the universe, so that he who sees everything could read off from each body what is happening everywhere; and, indeed, because he could see in its present state what is distant both in space and in time, he could read also what has happened and what will happen. . . . 

You might also find this other passage useful, wherein he is speaking about his "law of continuity":

Many of our own present perceptions slip by unconsidered and even unnoticed, but if someone alerts us to them right after they have occurred, e.g. making us take note of some noise that we’ve just heard, then we remember it and are aware of having had some sense of it. Thus, we weren’t aware of these perceptions when they occurred, and we became aware of them only because we were alerted to them a little perhaps a very little—later. To give a clearer idea of these tiny perceptions that we can’t pick out from the crowd, I like the example of the roaring noise of the sea that acts on us when we are standing on the shore. To hear this noise as we do, we have to hear its parts, that is the noise of each wave, although each of these little noises makes itself known only when combined confusedly with all the others, and wouldn’t be noticed if the wavelet that made it happened all by itself. We must be affected slightly by the motion of this one wavelet, and have some perception of each of these noises, however faint they may be. If each of them had no effect on us, the surf as a whole—a hundred thousand wavelets—would have no effect either, because a hundred thousand nothings can’t make something!

Although he is there speaking about perception, you might apply something similar to the behaviors of each individual H20 molecule and how they operate together in conditions that to our everyday experiences appear as and are described as "waves."  But again, I couldn't tell you what it is that is going on in terms of the science.  I don't think it is illusory but it seems likely to be an effect of "pre-set forms" (i.e. laws of nature) that define the parameters of material interactions, encountered in our experience to a very limited extent, though we are capable of broadening our understanding through induction.

To answer your second question, I'm willing to bet that most scientists are materialists... but until consciousness is understood, nobody can say for sure one way or another, and those other viewpoints will remain relevant.