It’s one thing not to hold any beliefs in immaterial things, and it’s another to believe they don’t exist. I don’t mind people being skeptical about immaterial things (or anything), and I don’t mind them taking an official stance on the non-existence of such things, but I challenge anyone to convince me of the latter. So go ahead - take the challenge.
Negative proof, yay 
. Okay, so you didn’t ask for proof, just convincing. If it can’t be proven either way, you just try it en see what works best for you. I suppose that’s the only thing that can convince you.
It is proven, just that some do not recognise truth.
The sorry state of modern philosophy.
‘The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Philosophy’ un livre d’excellence.
Okay, I’ve went to the trouble of reading a short summary, and the book doesn’t seem to indicate a proof or disproof of materialism. I might be the case that it’s better psychologically for man to have a more spiritual view of the world, but that’s still no proof. But i’ve not read it, maybe you can tell me what the proof is?
Are you sure there is a book?
I’m pretty certain I just made the title up five minutes ago…
With a title like that, there’s bound to be a book.
The title is yours free of charge.
, no, apparently google gave me “the spiritual crisis in modern man”. Why are you talking about “un livre” then?
Anyway, the questions still stands, what is the proof, maybe you can’t reproduce it here, but you can at least show me in the right direction.
Metaphor buddy.
Wiki would be a good place to start.
Your don’t make any effort to make yourself understood, don’t you.
“Un livre d’excellence” 
I speak french and I don’t get the reference. How many on an English board will get it, do you think?
Wiki doesn’t help either.
If you’re content with posting oneliners that sound deep, smart and only make sense to you, fine.
It has been useful to divide the world into categories; indeed, that has (almost?) always been part of the process of progress. In order to change something, people need to be able to make distinctions. However, not all of these distinctions are real – many of them are based off of old conceptions, assumptions, paradigms, and evidence which are no longer present. Despite that, we still cling to many of these old assumptions. Some of them are found in linguistic conceptions (broken heart, yellow-livered, etc) others make light of old foolishness (the moon is made of cheese, the man/rabbit in the moon, and so on). In terms of the divide between material/immaterial I think the divide was very useful but was created from ignorance. Ask an ancient what the mind was, where thoughts come from. They’d have an impossible time with it. Ask an ancient about life and what it is, where it comes from, they’d have an impossible time with it. So work-arounds were created. The psyche, the soul, refined qi, whatever you want to call it that allowed for these things to arise.
But as knowledge has increased, we’ve managed to find material correlates. In many cases we describe these old hangers-on as supervening on the material aspects we’ve discovered. So, for example, the mind supervenes on the brain and its operations. But what does that really mean? Generally it is a throw-away, a charitable disagreement. I don’t think of the mind and brain as being separate entities. If someone really wants to insist that they are, I can’t prove a negative. All I can do is point to evidence that suggests they are, in fact the same thing. So I can charitably disagree and say that the mind supervenes on the brain. It is a paternalistic cop-out, I think you are full of shit but I’ll use vague language to protect feelings.
Why embrace that cop-out? What is different about supervenience and identity?
Doubt you’e gonna get alot of help on this one simply because logical individuals are hesistant to spend the time it takes to write the 5 page essay it takes to regurgitate info that previously exists in books and then two more weeks elaborating their proofs only to have those in contention(materialists) enter denial mode (see my post in the thread “Transcendance Is Religious Bullshit” for clear highlight of said phenomenon in action) upon first wiff of defeat.
Fortunately though, you’ll at least get a few guys like Xunxun who just make shit up in short paragraphs.
I was actually under the impression that that was the whole point of I love Philosophy - excepting, of course, the bit where they had to make sense to the contributors - you could probably leave that out as well!
In fact the main aim should be three word present tense sentences with an “is” to give that lovely illusion of profound depth and certainty (and maybe stick am old contradiction in the middle!)
)
Some examples!
Truth is strength
Beauty in sleep
wisdom is profound
Death is illusion
Nothing is Everything
Change is all
I grow weary
Truth Moves
All is illusion
Depth is shallow
You could also jigger the order of the words in order to come up with sorta Yoda style remixes!
etc
etc
Mind you - all that being said - I’m not sure what play book “Un livre d’excellence” is out of!
kp
What sorts of “immaterial” things are you talking about? The usual mind/spirit/thought sorts of things? I think it’s not so much that materialists think they don’t exist as it is the thought that they are fully explainable in terms of material phenomena and therefore not necessarry to describe as immaterial.
Which is essentially to say + 1 on Xunzian’s response.
Thanks, Xun, for staying on topic.
You make same good points, but an immaterialist (dualist, epiphenomenalist, idealist, theist, spiritualist… you get the point) could easily hold onto his immaterialist beliefs in light of those points. Even I’m not persuaded that just because man might have invented certain metaphysical concepts (like soul, God, Plato’s Forms, etc.) - and these most likely are inventions - it doesn’t follow that no immaterial things exist. On the contrary, I’m inclined to believe that the universe is so vast and intricately complex - perhaps alien to an extent - that we have no right to generalize that which we are familiar with and understand (i.e. matter) to all things therein. Though I have no proof of it, I feel in my gut that there must be more to the universe than mere clunky, mechanical, unconscious matter and energy. Are we able to form proper concepts of this ‘more’? Not likely, but to me it seems vastly more unlikely that the universe would care to comform to that which we find easy to conceptualize.
Perhaps your last point:
is more persuasive, but it strikes me as an appeal to parsimony or intellectual economy (perhaps an attempt to switch the burden of proof?). I’m not conceding that materialism necessarily is more parsimonious, but even if it is, what proves to be more parsimonious says more about our understanding and conceptual modeling of the world rather than what, in fact, exists.
All kinds.
But wouldn’t it follow, then, that these so-called ‘immaterial’ things aren’t actually immaterial? Therefore, really immaterial things don’t exist?
Well things like mind, soul, etc would still EXIST, but they would ultimately exist in various material capacities, not necessarily as immaterial entities. If you would rather have immaterial things existing, then you could switch it up and say that all material things ultimately exist in various immaterial capacities and it would be the same basic explanatory effect. The point would be that all things are, for purposes of explanation, of the same fundamental kind. It’s really avoiding dualism that is the most practically important thing - otherwise we just stop looking for explanations, because these things are predetermined to be of a different substance (or whatever) than what science is capable of grappling with.
As has been said, there really is no proof either way - it’s a question of where do we go from here based on what we know and what the evidence suggests. If you want to describe things as immaterial for purely semantic purposes that’s fine, but for purposes of scientific explanation it really works best at this point to assume a physicalist approach.
Well, I think it has a do with a bit more than just semantics. There are important differences in how we conceive the material vs the immaterial. I’m all for the rejection of dualism, thereby classifying all things under one rubric, but I think there would still be a distinction to be made (much like we distinguish between ice, water, and steam even though the three are all essentially the same stuff and can be cinverted from one to another). We typically call ‘matter’ that which we can touch, see, or sense in some way. We also attribute (less formally) qualities like ‘hardness’, ‘heaviness’, ‘extent’, etc. to it. The immaterial would be that which we can’t sense (directly) and doesn’t bear any of the attributes typically associated with matter. It doesn’t mean that the two would be incommensurably different substances, nor that one cannot be converted to the other, but that they take such different forms that it becomes counterintuitive to classify them under the same category (or at least, that if we do, we are compelled to further subdivide that category).
Furthermore, it seems that over the years, our scientific understanding of the nature of matter has gone through such drastic change that some scientists of today are somewhat inclined to call matter the real myth. I was just given this quote from Max Planck in another thread today:
"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. "
- Max Planck
Now, I wouldn’t call matter a myth per se (nor necessarily that there is an intelligence behind it all), but it does seem to me that if we are to distinguish between matter and non-matter, at least conceptually, then the way we conceive of this primal stuff that surrounds us - this hard, clunky, sometimes cold, sometimes hot, sometimes dry, sometimes wet, substance - can verge drastically from the one camp to the other. So in my classification system, the materialist is the one who believes the right camp to be the former (the conventional notion of ‘matter’) whereas the immaterialist is the one who believes the right camp is the latter (something more akin to Planck’s notion, or well beyond it). Both may be monists, but they disagree on how to properly conceive of the one substance, and thus what this one substance utlimately is.
I think this is a “Russell’s Teapot” argument. The fact that you cannot prove that something doesn’t exist, is not evidence that it does exist. If you claim that immaterial things exist, then the onus is upon you to show evidence of that. If you ask me to convince you that fairies don’t live at the bottom of your garden, the only reasonable response is to ask you to prove that they do.
this is precisely why you seem so baffled by materialism, because you have a narrow and idealized/fictional/highly oversimplified understanding of what materialism constitutes. this “mechanistic” view of yours, as “cluncky” or “deterministic” movement, is a common misunderstanding of materialism, and is certainly fallacious at face value… it is refuted by pretty much all of science and observation/thinking itself… i truly suggest you read some Deleuze & Guattari to clear up the confusion.
materialism (i will call “energyism” for clarification) is just the idea that if something exists, it is the product of natural forces and the interactions (relations) between those forces. such forces are energetic, i.e. fields of potential kinetic/chemical/elemental/physical energy; a field of potential energy is the range of influence that a quantum (or otherwise grouping of quanta) (not the Quantum/Quanta of Physics, just in the sense of the smallest or most self-contained unit of energy) force has upon other forces, in that when another force enters its range of influence it will be affected by the field itself.
all matter, physical or otherwise, that we observe in the universe is energy; this is undisputed. we have never observed anything which could be called “nonenergy”— everything that we observe, from matter to light to space itself, is definable and quantifiable and understandable in terms of energies interacting with other energies. this is the sense of materialism (energyism) that i am talking about.
its the basic idea that there is ONE reality and ONE fundamental energy, out of necessity (because to imply otherwise is A) a contradiction, and B) superfluous: A holds because two fundamental forces, in order to inderact with one another, must share a common principle or exchange of force(s), necessitating a further unifying/mediating force between them. B holds because positing one fundamental force can account for everything in the universe). that is the nature of materialism (energyism): there is only one reality with near-infinite dimensions/areas/frames of reference/levels, but ultimately they are all relatable to one another through the common fundamental force which is generatrive of all these aggregate force-groupings in the first place. everything that exists is the expression/manifestations of changes/motions of this fundamental energy (reality itself) differentiating itself, moving, changing via its own laws (whatever they may be, undoubtedly somewhat mathematical and somewhat improbabilistic)— as i said in a different thread, the smallest units of reality exist across time, not in one “instant”, and are amorphous and indeterminable in the sense that they exist across varying points and potentials. this amorphous fundamental level of reality is determinant of all else that we see; all “forms” or perceptions are subjective interpretations of the aggregates of these forces from a VERY far-removed perspective.
the universe is dynamic; nothing stays the same— all “motionlessness” is an effect of A) existing within the same frame of reference, and B) failing to look beyond superficial levels. once we account for the fact that there is always a frame of reference through which any object or energy can be seen to be in motion, and also for the fact that when we look below superficial surface levels of matter/energy that appears “solid” or “stable” we find a flowing sea of particle energy which is always in motion (absolute zero is theoreticaly impossible, and also even if achieved, would still not constitute motionlessness according to Physics).
im not sure what you mean by immaterialist or dualist, but i tend to throw every description of reality that is not materialist/energyist as ive explained above into one category of “other” with the label “metaphysical”, only in the sense that it is anti- or non-“physical”, i.e. non-materialist, non-energyist… such theories claim multiple fundamental levels of reality, or irreconcilable levels/aspects of reality fundamentally opposed to each other, or different types of energies/existents which are irreducible or nonrelatable. i reject all of those theories, as indicated above, as both contradictory and superfluous.
so, operating under my definition of materialism/energyism here, perhaps you can comment on what you would consider “convincing” of this description, what you perceive as flaws in it, or how/why you need to be convinced or given proof for this view, considering that all alternatives to my view here can not only be eliminated via Occham’s Razor, but also can be shown to contradict their own premises, as well as being unsubstantiated by either modern scientific evidence or modern Quantum Physical theories (both of which, however, are quite in agreement with my description of materialism/energyism).