Thomas_More
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A real, material, phenomenon, though.
Your Atomic Self: The Invisible Elements That Connect You to Everything Else in the Universe https://g.co/kgs/edCp6X
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.
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?
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.
Well, if you grasp “empty” air and see nothing in your hand, what you don’t see are nonetheless billions of atoms, so I don’t agree with that reductionist definition of matter.
But since scientists are not accessible as individuals to us of the great unwashed, we depend on their TV appearances, where only certain questions are asked, without us being able to ask what we necessarily want to.
Dark energy is where I draw my line of understanding. Scientists don’t understand it.
I always took energy to be a property of matter. So matter must be behind dark energy and the expansion of the universe, but we don’t know what.See?
The Feathered One.
A material being? Or not?
