No material exists in nature as we see it.
Many think that electrons, electromagnetic fields, quarks, gluons, etc. have a “life” under certain circumstances, which is completely against any laws of physics. Their so called “life” transcends physicalness and is immaterial in nature. It is wishfull thinking on the materialist to say that electromagnetism produces “life”.
Maybe the above does not prove anything, but maybe it brings one closer to the truth.
The question centers not on what exists and what does not, but on the meaning of “to exist”.
Well, I wouldn’t put it in such weird terms, but the idea that “physical” things are merely the way we see persistent immaterial patterns in a grid is very interesting. Ocean waves are material things, but they’re also just persistent patterns in a substrate. Clouds appear to be static things, but we’re really just taking static snapshots of what is essentially a process. It would be interesting to propose that the things that we see around us are not things made of things, but stable repetitive processes made up of more stable repetitive building blocks. Like life.
Again I find myself recommending Steve Grand’s “Creation”.
Right. Does a wave exist, when it is really only a relatively short-lived self-propagating perturbation in a substrate? And what if the substrate itself is of the same nature? Can a process said to exist at any point in time, when its very definition is in the way it changes between points in time?
edit: sorry for double-post, I was assuming the existence of a delete button
Do you exist? How do you know for sure anything exists without knowledge?
Knowledge creates the experience and experience strengthens the knowledge.
How do you know?
The assumption that knowledge proves existence (the cogito) is derived from the idea that patterns cannot exist without a substrate. Saying “if you see thoughts there must be a brain” is the same as “if you see a painting there must be paint and a canvas”. It’s an idea that has been instilled in you by experience.
Thought uses the mechanism of knowledge to perpetuate itself, to create a continuity and permanence for itself.
Can thought know anything as it is? Does it distort what is given according to its predilections?
Well, I think that reality is a hermeneutic process so of course the symbols which we reify as actuality will impact our existence. We can talk about whether the mind (however we want to conceive that) or the world (however we want to conceive that) is prior in the causal chain, which is the ‘cause’ and which the the ‘effect’, but such a view complicates things because it usually has to be traced back to some unknown ‘first cause’. Instead we can simply recognize ourselves as being in the process and say that both are causes and both are effects. In this manner the distinction between the mind and the world collapses just as surely as the distinction between thought and action.
Now, all this formulation does is argue against the agnostic position towards the immaterial. That seems to be the line you are advocating. It does nothing against the sincerely held belief in the immaterial. This argument can’t, for example, work against a Christian because they do act as though an immaterial world exists. Separate arguments need to be employed there.
So are you merely arguing that we should be agnostic about the immaterial (which seems to be the angle you are taking) or should be positively believe in some immaterial things which have duties and goods associated with them?
And we don’t want to do that. Nor do we need to.
Because all is one?
Ah, well that explains your meaning. The belief must make a difference to the believer’s actions. You also hit on a good point: that the details of the immaterialist belief in question need to be fleshed out before we can say whether or not such a belief has an impact on one’s behavior. I’m hard pressed to think of how a belief in the immaterial as such would have any impact on the believer’s actions (especially if the immaterial is thought to be unverifiable and ineffective on our lives), but if the ‘immaterial’ is just a broad label for a much for detailed belief system (such as Christianity, such as Platonism, such as idealism), then we can imagine all manner of different and significant behavioral reactions.
Maybe we can say that the impact on behavior that a belief in the immaterial as such has is indirect - that is, it has an impact but only through the manner in which it opens the door to other more detailed immaterialisms.
I am arguing this, but not that we should be agnostic about dualism. I’m content to put that one to rest, accepting that it makes little sense and there is good scientific evidence against it. The ‘immaterial’ I imagine is not a seperate substance from what the layman calls ‘matter’. The one can be converted to the other. Therefore, we can go with the approach you described above: muddying the distinction between mind and world, thought and action, cause and effect, etc. without abandoning one term or the other (‘material’ or ‘immaterial’). Instead, these terms come to denote two manifestations or forms of what ultimately is one substance.
Perhaps my reply to UGP earlier in this thread might shed some light on this idea:
Also, I don’t know if you’ve been following my dialogue with 3XG, but that would also clarify my meaning somewhat.
This might not convince many but it’ll maybe nudge us forward.
As immaterialist what we see is not a seperate thing from what we are. Knowledge that there is no division impacts on the illumed’s actions. They’ll live with different and significant behavioral reactions. My race, my country, my nation, my religion , my village, my tribe, myself are imagined entities.
Shall say the material things do not exist.Read in a book of micro-physics that the entire steel produced so far can be acommodated in half teaspoon if we remove the space between electron and the central nuclii of the atoms .Now this half tea spoon of mass is also energy.(E=mc2).Then what we is left is just energy in space.So what we perceive as cosmos is our perception and may be it is just an interactive hologram.Still it exists. In what? does it exist in something Which is neither space nor energy.Then in reality,the materials get generated in some non material.What is it,that is non material.
Yes a non-material generates all.
the body, the thing called self,; but not like a hologram. More like a dream.
This is fairly simple…
Immaterial things have an immaterial existence, and material things have a material existence. As Faust so subtly presented above:
If you attempt to understand and delineate the existence of immaterial things through the parameters of a material existence; then no, immaterial things do not “exist”.
If considering existence solely from an immaterial perspective, then immaterial things certainly exist, and material things do not.
If by some stretch of our imagination, we decide to hold that there is more than one way to understand what “actually” exists, and the modes by which we denote that existence has several parameters, then it’s quite possible that both the material and immaterial can exist. Maybe it would serve us well to agree upon the parameters by which we define existence before we begin arguing about what actually exists.
I will propose one:
That which exist, impacts experience.
Of course, that pretty much lumps everything into existence, but it is “every"thing”" correct?
Basically, just because material objects are so densely presented to us does not give them primacy, nor the sole parameters by which to distinguish, what is considered to be existent.
Probability is out there. Superimposed waves of probability. My question then is ?What causes the collapse.
Quanta congeals into particles that the senses then register and submit to the brain. But wait! if matter appears from the quanta then the brain comes from there too. This condition is not what happens. Because according to this the quanta collapses to manifest a brain, which in turn then sees the other particles.
I say - this sea of quanta is a mind. An immovable field of perturbation that dreams. It dreams the brain and the hot cup of coffee. Meaning that there was never nothing really there.
I’ll agree with this on the condition that it be read as: if one insist that immaterial things bear the properties - and the essential properties at that - of material things, then no such immaterial thing exists, for that would be an incoherent term.
Well, a couple things come to mind in response:
What we mean by “impacting experience” could have several connotations. For example, a mood altering drug will impact experience (it will impact our emotional state at the very least). Does this mean that we will necessarily have sensed it in any way (i.e. through the sense)?
Are we absolutely sure that if something exists, it must impact experience? Take neutrinos for example; although it is true that, having scientifically detected them, we can technically say they have impacted human experience, what should be said regarding those a few millennia ago who had virtually no experience whatever of neutrinos or their experiencible effects? What should we say if neither mankind nor any intelligent life ever have detected neutrinos (in an alternate world). If it’s a matter of whether neutrinos can (i.e. in principle) affect experience, rather than do affect it, then I suppose they must count as material, but even then I question why the immaterial must affect experience in order to exist. This no doubt involves what we understand the immaterial to be - its nature and its essence - for in what way do we understand the immaterial to bear on the material? Are we saying it can interact with it? Is this interaction a one-way process? Can the two coexist without any interaction? Are we saying that the two must constitute two forms of the same substance or are they all together separate and dinstinct substances? These questions, and others, must be answered before any headway can be made on this line of inquiry.
Would that mean that this ‘universal mind’ has extraordinary free-will (far surpassing the power of our own)? For one of the most basic principles of the collapse of the wavefunction is its randomness (or, as some might insist, its indeterminism).
Nothing can be said to exist unless it has the property of affect (ref: Existence Meaningfully Defined).
Whether a human experiences the effect directly or not is irrelevant to an entities existence. Everything in the physical universe is necessarily linked eventually to all other things. Something physically exists if, and only if, it affects another physical entity. Existence IS “mutual affectance”.
Em… no. Probability is not “out there”. Probability is no more than a mental calculation. There is no physical existence associated with probability or possibility. They are calculations only.
The wave that “collapses” does so only after being recalculated. It is a graph, not a physical wave.
Well, I’m coming at this from a semantic/analytic point of view. I reflect on the meaning of the phrase “to exist” and I see nothing therein that entails ‘affect’. This isn’t to say that your point isn’t true - it may be - but if there were any such immaterial things out there that had absolutely no affect on material things (and were thus unsensible), how would we know? Speaking again in the semantic/analytic context, I can image something existing without affecting anything else. I can imagine it passing right through all other things, exerting no force (like charge or gravity), being completely imperceptible to the senses, and so on and so forth, leading me to conclude that “to exist” is meaningful without necessarily implying that it affect other things.
There are a great many quantum physicist who would dispute this. Although I can agree that there is no “thing” out there we can call ‘probability’, it does seem (according to a certain interpretation of QM) to be a feature or description of the manner in which physical things unfold in the course of their operations. According to this interpretation, things do this all on their own without the need for human beings to calculate their final states.
But where? is all this calculation taking place. The brain is not the calculator for it itself is a collapsed wave,
The calculations themselves are embedded within the nature of that which is existing. The brain is a calculator, as is everything else that can be said to exist. Everything collapses in relative reaction to each every other thing. It is a shared collapse and calculation, happening in this very moment. What we experience as causality, is an illusory result of the discriminatory or separating nature of consciousness. Everything is being collapsed as much as it is providing collapse.