Is Materialism True?

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theCardinalbird

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Is there anything that we know exists, yet cannot be measured, seen, etc. (Not material)?

Change in Question: Is Materialism True? Is everything Material?
 
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theCardinalbird said:
Couldn’t a materialist argue that love is just a product of chemicals that act in a certain way?
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If they want but how do they measure the chemical reaction, can they describe what the reaction looks like, etc?

Love can’t be measured because it is subjective. I might totally love something my wife does because I think it is cute and it has meaning to me, but you might think it is offensive. Basically are rulers aren’t taking the same measurements.

God Bless
 
theCardinalbird said:
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MT1926:
Love, Love, Love (needed 10 characters)
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Couldn’t a materialist argue that love is just a product of chemicals that act in a certain way?
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Freedom, results of will and action, are too complex to be reduced to neurochemical causality. Mens agitat molem. That argument could be made but couldn’t be proven.
 
Philosophical materialism as a school (or set of schools) is more than just denying entities like angels. It denies the reality of qualitative aspects of material things altogether: values, teleology (even of material things), and so on. Of course any type of dualism (again, even of material things), and that of abstract objects as well. Sometimes even various mental states. This can be contrasted not just with, say, cartesian dualism or hylemorphic dualism, but schools like functionalism or process dualism or any number of other things, many of which may outright deny things like angels. A lot of continental philosophy isn’t materialist, either.
 
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Not that you are an Aristotlean, but what you posted, just there in itself, sounds like something an Aristotlean could say.
 
Trevize said:
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Wesrock:
Not that you are an Aristotlean, but what you posted, just there in itself, sounds like something an Aristotlean could say.
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I would not know that. But I can comment on some things in your next post.

I wonder what you mean by the “reality of qualitative aspects of material things” - especially since you might mean that concepts have an objective, mind-independent existence. If you mean that these concepts you mention: “value” or “aim (telos)” exist independently of some mentally active (thinking) beings - who have a value system, then I will disagree. If you say that these ideas exist as “immaterial concepts”, which are as real as any other concepts (like distance, near, far, heat, cold, easy, difficult, light, heavy and zillions of others) then we can agree.

(By the way… 😉 I do not deny the existence of “angels” - the word means “messengers” - and there are lots of them).
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For the Aristotlean, the qualitative aspects are mind-independent, but not as if they exist in a realm of forms. Aristotle rejected Plato’s theory of forms. Rather, there are just things that are (in a mind-independent way) qualitatively and really true of material things.

I’m just saying this as a topic of interest. Not debating.
 
Immaterialism is the default position, the burden of proof is on the materialists to prove that matter exists. Materialism is not false, because I can’t prove a negative, there is simply nothing to support it. Everything is not material, everything is immaterial, is my position.
 
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Pain and other sensations are proof of a subjective experience and reality, not proof of matter
 
Even materialists don’t really believe in Materialism. Its very existence as a philosophical point of view is self-refuting, as the existence of reason is dependent on immaterial conditions. The very fact that it is possible to persuade someone with words is a refutation of the Materialist premise.
 
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