You seem to be articulating the principle of locality, which says that all interaction is mediated by local, i.e. immediate contact — SophistiCat
Reading your examples, I thought of another from the same stock: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, where he points to material factors, such as climate and biogeography, in order to explain large-scale trends in the development of civilization in different parts of the world — SophistiCat
However, I think that the contrast you are drawing is rather between more and less abstract levels of explanation. Abstraction removes detail, and detail is where your "materiality" is. The more abstract an explanation, the more immaterial it seems, as it were, its ontology consisting of made-up concepts like "genes" and "networks," instead of familiar, immediately perceptible "stuff." — SophistiCat
That aside, it leads very nicely into Whitehead's dictum that 'the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained'. — StreetlightX
Rather than these fleshier theories being a case of us getting wise to the materiality of the world, they are simply the result of more mature, more elaborate theorizing, which, while still being abstract (as all theories are, by definition), can afford to incorporate more detail.
As for the question of whether these abstract forms are immanent or transcendent, whether matter possesses its own powers or is animated from without, I am not even convinced that this is something worth asking. In any case, this rarefied metaphysical debate gains no purchase in empirical sciences. — SophistiCat
Rather than these fleshier theories being a case of us getting wise to the materiality of the world, they are simply the result of more mature, more elaborate theorizing, which, while still being abstract (as all theories are, by definition), can afford to incorporate more detail. — SophistiCat
While I'd like to think that yes, materialism does entail more mature, more elaborate theorizing than the various idealisms which it arrays itself against, I think you're vastly understating the influence and pervasiveness of the latter. If one accepts materialism in the sense outlined here, people like Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg become nothing other than arch-Idealists; searches for reductive 'theories of everything', where all the universe follows from a small handful of first principles, turn out to be idealist desiderata par excellence. To say that these debates have no purchase in the sciences is just to leave implicit and untheorized attitudes which pervade them through and through. It's naivety, and a willful and damaging one at that. — StreetlightX
However, I think that the contrast you are drawing is rather between more and less abstract levels of explanation. Abstraction removes detail, and detail is where your "materiality" is. The more abstract an explanation, the more immaterial it seems, as it were, its ontology consisting of made-up concepts like "genes" and "networks," instead of familiar, immediately perceptible "stuff." — SophistiCat
I doubt Cat would make the naive and boorish mistake of identifying abstraction with idealism - especially since he seems to reject the latter term as being of significance - but I'll let him speak for himself. — StreetlightX
Rather, he was pointing to the fact that "true" materialism would have as little abstraction as possible, as it would merely be the "stuff" at the basis of the discussion. — schopenhauer1
This would be very silly though. — StreetlightX
To understand matter as medium though, also requires a rethinking of the nature of mediality itself. Although 'mediums' are often understood as a kind of epiphenomenon, a kind of cloth by which the 'real thing' is wrapped up in (the TV as a medium for its content), media studies since McLuhan have long recognized that 'the medium is the message': media has its own substantiality and being, in a way that doesn't just transparently 'facilitate' the passage of things, but in a deep and important way, shapes and defines the very nature of what it is that is being communicated. In a word then, the materialist insists that the world is medial through and through: everything that is, has a density recalcitrant to all ideal(ized) first principles (arche) and immedial fantasies (God being among them).
To pervert Aristotle: the accidental is the essential (and the essential is the accidental). — StreetlightX
We do everything we can to get away from the material of the material ... Matter is matter is matter. Matter doesn't matter to matter. — schopenhauer1
This is just warmed over mysterian trash. Not worth engaging. — StreetlightX
I'm not the one who expects tautology to be taken seriously as a point of discourse. — StreetlightX
I spoke of neither emergence nor information - I didn't even use the former word, and the latter only appeared once in the OP in a not very central way. So I have very little time for your two-bit projections. — StreetlightX
It's not my job to address connections that you're making and not explicating. 'In the realm of information'; 'hint at a kind of theory of information' - this is imprecise blather, and it's nothing but thick irony to accuse me of 'avoiding the central issue' when you're literally making things up and projecting connotations whose significance to the OP you can only hint at with half-baked allusions to semantic connotations. Don't mistake your own analytic inadequacy for that of the OP. — StreetlightX
If you're OP wasn't even about information — schopenhauer1
In the philosophical of epistemology the order will have to be what do the people know?means of information transmission — StreetlightX
This is a good read Immanuel Kant also argued about space and time but his view was of geometricTo understand matter as medium though, also requires a rethinking of the nature of mediality itself. Although 'mediums' are often understood as a kind of epiphenomenon, a kind of cloth by which the 'real thing' — StreetlightX
This is what I meant when I said "matter behaves", as it is the start of all this fiat. Matter is matter is matter. — schopenhauer1
This is just warmed over mysterian trash. — StreetlightX
Actually schopenhauer1 is right here. StreetlightX assigns to matter the capacity to act, (behave), and this is what is contrary to the pure concept of matter as passive, and is a display of classical mysticism. — Metaphysician Undercover
Add some phenomenology to it, and it becomes respectable philosophy, except for the part where we try to say that matter as medium is all there is, that doesn't make sense. — frank
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