Types of materialism
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Air is a form of gas, and gas is matter and it occupies space, compressed gas becomes liquid, we do not see air because all its components are totally separated.
A few years ago I did an Open University course on Physics and on one of the summer schools we had a lecture from a scientist who had been part of a Nobel Prize winning team. She talked about fundamental particles, light, time and space, quantum mechanics, etc. I kind of understood some parts of what she was talking about, but that only lasted about 5 minutes and by the time I got out of the lecture room I had lost the thread.
However I remember that she did talk about the possibility that there might be something that is a constituent of a quark, although most scientists are sceptical about this and think that a quark is indivisible.
She said that her guess would be that actually matter did not actually exist and that all of it was possible to go back further into the formation of matter it would end at just energy. She did give some reasoning for that, but it was a bit like an acid trip, so along with the rest of us I nodded sagely and rubbed my chin inscrutably.
But what we do know is that atoms, the building blocks of matter, cannot be erased from existence. We can split them, resulting in a nuclear explosion, but they come together again.
Upon the demise of our solar system, they will be absorbed by the sun, but new explosions will then release these and other atoms into space ad infinitum.
The big bang must also have been an effect, with antecedents.
I think you are missing the point, as DJP has been trying to explain. Atoms are not “the building blocks of matter”. They are concepts and terms used by scientists to describe a part of the universe that they are studying and explaining. To add to the confusion so is “matter” in some contexts.
Arguments about the best way to describe what is observed are not the same as arguments about the nature of “reality” and “existence” (or “matter” in a different sense). Most scientists are not interested in such “philosophical” arguments and in practice don’t need to be, even if this could help them understand what they are doing (ie, describing reality not discovering it).
On the other hand, we here love such philosophical arguments. Anybody can take part in them without needing to be a physicist or practical scientist or even understand the arguments amongst them. How can any of us presume to judge whether or not “dark matter” or “quarks” or whatever are an adequate or useful description/explanation of what scientists have observed?
I don’t like the word but what we are talking about is “meta-physics” rather than physics.
Of course “atom”, like every word, is a word – but we use the word to refer to something that is real, in fact of which we, and everything around us, is made of.
We don’t know what matter is, but we use the word, again, to define what we perceive as reality.
We now know what an atom looks like, so it is real.
Or are we idealists now?
This is not metaphysics. But if you deny that reality consists of something real that we call matter, and that this something (matter) is made up of atoms (also real), then what the heck is happening to your avowed materialism?
Thomas More wrote: “…what the heck is happening to your avowed materialism?”
I’ve been trying to get the SPGB to discuss this problem/issue for about a decade now, but to no avail.
The simple answer is that Marx was not a ‘materialist’, and condemned this 18th century ideology of bourgeois science, and predicted that ‘materialists’ would always deny democratic control to the revolutionary proletariat (the vast majority of humanity), and would always retain the power to produce our world for an elite (of scientists, priests, party).
Marx was, to use the phraseology of the 19th century, an ‘idealist-materialist’, who argued that ‘theory and practice’ was required for the socio-historical production of our world, which we could collectively therefore change.
Physics, just like any other human productive activity, would have to be collectively and democratically determined, within any future communist society.
‘Materialists’ deny that this will be a political characteristic of socialism.
TM, you want to discuss “types of materialism” and we are getting nearer to identifying the two main types.
One says that the universe is made up of discrete, separate things that exist on their own and is “built up” of them. (You call these “atoms” but it is not clear why you don’t call them “sub-atomic particles”.)
The other says that the universe is the only thing that exists and as a whole and is broken down by the human mind into parts that are named (for instance, “atoms”) but don’t exist independently in that they are inseparable and interconnected parts of a single whole.
The first is generally called “mechanical materialism”; the second “dialectical materialism”.
Incidentally, I wasn’t calling your view “meta-physics”. It applies to both views in that they are theories of what “reality” is rather than a study of particular parts of it. But as I said I don’t like the word because of its association with pre-scientific philosophers who speculated about the world.
Humility in the face of the cosmos, as any good scientist would agree, is to be recommended.
I don’t understand astro-physics, and I’ll therefore trust the writings of deGrasse-Tyson, Carl Sagan, Brian Cox, etc.
My introduction to materialism was very basic. My dad told me
1) Matter is all there is, and
2) It is eternal, without beginning or end, and can’t be destroyed, only changed.I know more is being discovered all the time, though.
I read a lot in my twenties, but my reading was more philosophical than scientific. For my dad and me Carl Sagan’s COSMOS was a beloved masterpiece. Both of us devoured Sagan’s books.
I, with my historical bent, read Voltaire, La Mettrie and Shelley’s Notes on Queen Mab. My dad also recommended Lucretius.
My terms of reference are antiquated, certainly, and I cannot get my head around Einstein and astro-physics, that’s for sure.
I read what I can understand, and it was a quality of Sagan’s that he made things accessible to us amateurs.
Yes, we humans use words to try and comprehend things around us. We use the word “matter” to describe substance both visible and invisible. We take the Greek word “atomos” and apply it still, with “sub-atomic particles”, to what we see forming matter under powerful microscope technology. The Greeks and Indians of yore could only surmise the existence of these real, objective phenomena they couldn’t see with the naked eye.
It’s also true that not one thing exists in isolation from all things, from the cosmos as a whole, including us.
Buddhism (not the popular cult, but the learning centred upon the great Nalanda university) stressed this universality of existence further, by denying the separate existence of a self – something we humans still can’t accept, clinging as we do to “individuality” and “me.”Humility, when contemplating the little blue dot where we live.
The opposite of humility, however, when fighting for socialism.
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