The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism

Count Timothy von Icarus

Summary:

Thesis 1: A key motivation for materialism is the elevation of the sensible (chiefly, what can be best validated by multiple senses) over the intelligible (what can be best understood). The "common sensibles" (shape, size, extension, rest, motion, and number) are viewed as "most real" because they can be validated by many senses, including sight and touch, which have priority in human experience.

Thesis 2: A move to the mathematization of being is a bit of a middle ground between the sensible and intelligible. It works by prioritizing the intelligible aspects of the most consistent/strongest elements of sense experience. This poses a problem though, in that mathematization still excludes most of intelligible reality, only allowing in those elements contained in the common sensibles.

Materialism:

Materialism is a very old idea. It is arguably the first "metaphysics" ever developed. However, from the very start it had problems explaining consciousness, psychophysical harmony, mathematics, reason, etc., which is why early materialists often had to introduce extra factors above and beyond the material elements, e.g. love and strife, Logos, Nous, etc.

The Hard Problem and the problem of psychophysical harmony are very old problems, it is just that they slipped out of view because materialism was unpopular for the better part of two millennia following attacks by Plato and Aristotle.

My question then would be: what makes materialism so appealing and intuitive? Why is the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,' intuitive?

My guess is that the answer lies, funny enough, in phenomenology. We find this sort of explanation appealing because of the way we experience the world through the senses. Our senses are subject to error, so we often use one sense to cross-check another. If we wonder if a flower is real or fake, we hold it to our nose. If we think a rock is fake, we lift it. People reach out to touch confusing optical illusions, etc.

Error is a very real risk we must contend with. We have a natural drive to avoid error. A major part of metaphysics has always been trying to avoid error and see through illusions. Hence, materialism is often framed as a question of "what truly exists?" "what is really real (as opposed to mental/illusory)?" or "what is fundamental?"

Materialism is intuitive because our "internal model" or understanding of the world as a three-dimensional space filled with extended bodies in motion is reinforced by several senses, not just one. Size, shape, texture, local motion, etc. come to us through sight, hearing, touch, the vestibular sense, etc. Intensity of odor even seems to reveal at least something of spacial location. Taste is experienced at different locations on the tongue.

Size, shape, number, motion, and rest were called the "common sensible" because they were accessible to many different senses. They can be verified by each sense as well, hence their claim to being "more real," or "primary qualities." Moreover, sight and touch relate to these "common sensibles," quite directly and these are man's most potent senses. "Seeing is believing." Touch is particularly potent and a greater conveyor a sense of "reality" because it is the sense that relates most immediately to danger, acquisition of resources, and the generative/sexual act (i.e., it requires immediate proximity to the objects of attraction or aversion).Touching is, most of all, believing. For example, Saint Thomas will not believe in the risen Christ until he touches his wounds.

Hence, the common sensibles of size, shape, quantity, etc. get considered "most real." We can see this in Galileo, Locke, etc. with the demotion of color to a "less real" (merely mental) "secondary quality," while shape and motion, etc. remain fully real "primary quantities." In scholastic terminology, we might say this is because color is only the formal object of sight, and can be confirmed and experienced by no other faculty.

Materialism builds on this intuition about sensibility and reality. What is "most real" is size, shape, extension, motion, etc. because these are what we can touch and what we can confirm with many senses. Moreover, if we adopt a mechanistic view, touch becomes particularly important because it conveys causal influence (although note that materialist systems have always had difficulties with occult forces that seem to act at a distance, such as gravity in the Newtonian model or electromagnetism in early models—quantum mechanics was hardly unique in posing a problem here).

Next, we get smallism, the idea that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts. Smallism and reductionism need not go with materialism, but they very often do. And this makes sense if one considers that in our experience of sensible things we see how they can be broken apart. Smallism also helps materialism explain how one thing becomes another despite everything being reducible to size, shape, extension, motion, etc. For instance, if a man can live off beans, he must somehow "come from beans." One intuitive way to explain this is to say that everything is made of different building blocks that get rearranged by motion (i.e. the elements or atoms). Hence, a bean can contain all that is needed for a man. It just needs to be rearranged.

Problems for Materialism:

We have already mentioned the problems of occult forces and non-locality. Another problem here is that there is no prima facie reason to think smallism is true. Indeed, it seems that some parts are only definable in terms of the wholes of which they are a part. In terms of modern reductionism, it has a pretty poor empirical track record. Not that many phenomena have been successfully reduced. A century on, the basics of molecular structure has yet to be reduced for instance, and numerous other examples abound, with unifications (explaining disparate phenomena through a single principle) seemingly far more common than proper material reductions.

Another question is, should we trust sense intuition in this way? Many scientific theories would suggest not. Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality," a book with many problems, still manages to make at least this case fairly well.

The point here is that, once we understand why materialism is so intuitive, it is unclear if we should trust this intuition. In particular, much of what we know about how the senses work, and how they developed, might undermine how much faith we put in these intuitions.

Inversions:

What Plato, Aristotle, and most philosophy following them for the next 1,700 years represents is the elevation of the intelligible over the sensible, and the actuality of determinant form over material potency (the universal, intelligible form over changing, material particulars). They, and later thinkers like Hegel, have their own reasons for why the intelligible is "more real" (or so least, less illusory) then the sensible.

Of course, this isn't always framed as a dialectical opposition (often in medieval thought, it isn't). For example, for the great Byzantine thinker Saint Maximus the Confessor (in some ways a proto-Hegel) the sensible and intelligible reflect and reveal each other. The key image here is of the two wheels moving within one another in the Prophet Ezekiel's vision of the divine chariot. The intelligible is not subsistent either (a point going back to Aristotle). The sensible and intelligible are two sides of the same coin, it's just that the intelligible has metaphysical priority in being actual rather than material potential for actuality. For the Christian Neoplatonists, only in the fullness of the Logos do the sensible and intelligible find their ground.

Hence, materialism could be seen, in many respects, as the mirror image or inversion of the philosophies of intelligibility/quiddity (at least in a broad sense).

Mathematics:

Of course, mathematics plays a role too. Mathematics, for most of its history, meant the study of magnitude and multitude. Hence, it's easy to see why so many philosophers accepted that it was the study of the form of bodies as abstracted from matter, (a form given to us by the senses.) And indeed, we still teach geometry with drawings, sensible image, manipulibles, etc. Children are still taught arithmetic by counting beans, division by cutting up pies, etc.

At first glance, mathematics offers a sort of via media here. It takes the intuitions of materialism but then turns the focus to the intelligible content of the sensible experience of shape, size, extension, motion, etc.

One can see the appeal of this way of thinking in ontic structural realism, with physicists such as Max Tegmark and his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. We can also see how some people strive to remove the echo of the senses from this way of thinking, to make mathematics more abstract and thus, presumably, "more objective." For instance, LeGrange's 18th century mechanics textbook proudly announces that it uses no diagrams or drawings, only formulae. Yet do we have any reason to think the world is truly, objectively, more like a string of symbols than a diagram?

The bigger challenge with this pivot is that it seems to only abstract away a very few features of the sensible and intelligible world, namely, those of the common sensibles. Hence, the overcommitment to sense intuition still remains.

Afterall, how does one mathematically describe greed, pleasure, the color red, justice, goodness, or beauty? My point here would be that, while mathematization seems like a pivot back to the intelligible, it is in fact still slavishly bound to the sense intuition guiding materialism. Aside from appeals to terms like "informational strong emergence," which seems to be more an appeal to magic or another love/strife or Nous type "x factor" than anything else—there seems to be absolutely no way to get most of human experience back into the mathematized cosmos (even as mere epiphenomena). How does something compute so hard it begins to feel, for instance?

Leontiskos

Interesting and thoughtful OP. :up:

Hence, the common sensibles of size, shape, quantity, etc. get considered "most real." We can see this in Galileo, Locke, etc. with the demotion of color to a "less real" (merely mental) "secondary quality," while shape and motion, etc. remain fully real "primary quantities." — Count Timothy von Icarus

We can also see how some people strive to remove the echo of the senses from this way of thinking, to make mathematics more abstract and thus, presumably, "more objective." For instance, LeGrange's 18th century mechanics textbook proudly announces that it uses no diagrams or drawings, only formulae. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Apparently there are two modern emphases you are bringing out. One is an emphasis on common sensibles, and the other is an emphasis on mathematics and mathematicization. What's curious is that they seem opposed. The first tends towards materialism and the second tends towards Platonism, and yet both flow in a special way out of the modern period.

I am not sure how to reconcile those two strands. If they are left unreconciled then the modern period appears schizophrenic, torn between an emphasis on common sensibles and an incompatible emphasis on mathematicization. Is there a ready way to reconcile the two? To reconcile thesis 1 and thesis 2? Or am I incorrect in thinking that they are opposed?

Count Timothy von Icarus

↪Leontiskos

My thoughts were that they are ultimately connected. Mathematics is, at least initially, based on abstracting the common sensibles from any underlying matter and other qualities, including from time. So you get a timeless, changeless "platonic," intelligible subject that is nonetheless based on what is common to the senses (i.e. the experience of magnitude and multitude through shape, number, extension, etc.).

So, I'd argue that mathematization is sort of a blending of the two. It is materialism pulled back up into the intelligible realm, or the intelligible truncated down to just what is abstracted from the common sensibles.

It's obviously also intuitive in much the same way, which is why it is almost as old (e.g., Pythaogreanism).

But, aside from the objection that this cuts out far too much, I think there is also a good argument to be made that a recognition of both magnitude and multitude is reliant on a measure (e.g. "one duck" must be known as such to know three ducks, or half a duck, etc.) and measure itself requires going beyond mathematics, to a recognition of unity and wholes (virtual, as opposed to dimension/bulk quantity, i.e. intensity of participation in form). That puts some recognition of whole, and so intelligible form, prior to dimensive quantity.

Second , mathematization struggles with existence. Even if one accepts that "what everything is" can be described by mathematics, this does not seem to explain "that it is." Hence, mathematization still tends to either tend back towards materialism (e.g. "these particular mathematical objects really exist just because, for no reason—which essentially puts potency before act or potency as actualizing itself) or towards extremely crowded and inflated multiverse ontologies. For instance, Tegmark cannot fathom how mathematics can explain existence (fair enough) so he had to suppose that every mathematical object exists (and that some just happen to have experiences).

I suppose empiricism leans towards the materialist side, rationalism towards the platonist side. Either way though, they have to somehow reduce the fullness of experience to a part of experience (quantity).

Fire Ologist

what makes materialism so appealing and intuitive? Why is the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,' intuitive? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Great question.

I want to say, because people don’t appreciate Aristotle.

Descartes may have theoretically doubted everything but his own understanding of his being, but practically speaking, he still went back to bed and used a candle to find the way.

they have to somehow reduce the fullness of experience to a part of experience (quantity). — Count Timothy von Icarus

If all is matter, we get some ancient issues you point out, but to distinguish something else besides matter (or with or in the matter) we get other ancient issues you point out.

Matter, it seems, remains where all inquiries begin. Even Parmenides needed motion and change as his foil.

Science, since the enlightenment has gotten better at mathematizing matter, so much so that we’ve flown to the moon and split the atom. This is enough experimentation with matter to bolster the naive intuition that matter undergirds everything.

And math is just not enough to subsist absent it’s matter.

But you are right:

recognition of both magnitude and multitude is reliant on a measure (e.g. "one duck" must be known as such to know three ducks, or half a duck, etc.) and measure itself requires going beyond mathematics, to a recognition of unity and wholes — Count Timothy von Icarus

If the scientist thinks he always and only is using matter to measure matter for his matter-based mental state called “science”, such scientist is only reducing the fullness of his work to a mere part of his work.

I think the materialist intuition is so appealing simply because it is easier to shrug off the invisible. We get to call the invisible nonsense and relegate Socrates’ musings to a parlor trick. It is just that simple.

When our eyes are open we are easily distracted from seeing the invisible things. And when our eyes are closed we obviously lose sight of the physical things. We need our eyes to be open to survive, so the physical things win the day.

But Aristotle gave us the best model - a starting point that is incomplete, but he was both the first true empiricist and the first true metaphysician qua logical scientist of being human.

The materialist intuition seems naive and incapable of discussing vast swaths of human experience.

Imagine discussing your brother, sitting next you in a chair, with a materialist philosopher and a biologist - you could spend an eternity counting his cells and atoms and all of their functions and motions and the organs and how they interact with each other and track electrical impulses and measure the shape of the face as it “smiles” and endorphins and serotonin level changes, and on and on, and never start the actual conversation about your brother. That is what materialism, like the hard problem, will always have to avoid discussing. (And ironically, you could just ask your brother to explain if he was not too insulted by all of the experiments.)

Wayfarer

My question then would be: what makes materialism so appealing and intuitive? Why is the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,' intuitive? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Situated historically, modern materialism arose as a consequence of, and part of, Rennaissance humanism, allied with intellectual movements such as the emerging nominalism and the proto-empiricism of Francis Bacon and other early modern scientists. So much of early modern science defined itself in opposition to 'the Schoolmen' and scholastic realism. Recall Hume's closing words in his Treatise: 'Take any book of scholastic philosophy....and burn it.' The emphasis became the physical world, the world knowable by the senses, to hell with metaphysics. And looking at the material consequences of those shifts, its proponents may well feel vindicated.

Hence, the common sensibles of size, shape, quantity, etc. get considered "most real." We can see this in Galileo, Locke, etc. with the demotion of color to a "less real" (merely mental) "secondary quality," while shape and motion, etc. remain fully real "primary quantities." In scholastic terminology, we might say this is because color is only the formal object of sight, and can be confirmed and experienced by no other faculty. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Absolutely central. The division of primary and secondary attributes, allied with Descartes' division of extended matter and incorporeal mind, lays the foundation of modernity proper.

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36

Next, we get smallism, the idea that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What we got was atomism, as originally propounded by the Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus. The etymology of 'atom' is 'uncuttable' or 'undivisible'. Atomism provided a means by which the One, which is similarly not composed of parts or division, was able to account for the manifold world of change and decay. The Atom was the eternal and imperishable, but now at the very heart of matter itself. This was the subject of the classical prose poem De Rerum Natura, Lucretius, which is still on curricula to this day (indeed subject of an undergraduate unit that I took.) Lucretius work was seized on by the Enlightenment philosophes - Baron D'Holbach 'all I see is bodies in motion'.

Leontiskos

My thoughts were that they are ultimately connected. Mathematics is, at least initially, based on abstracting the common sensibles from any underlying matter and other qualities, including from time. So you get a timeless, changeless "platonic," intelligible subject that is nonetheless based on what is common to the senses (i.e. the experience of magnitude and multitude through shape, number, extension, etc.).

So, I'd argue that mathematization is sort of a blending of the two. It is materialism pulled back up into the intelligible realm, or the intelligible truncated down to just what is abstracted from the common sensibles.

It's obviously also intuitive in much the same way, which is why it is almost as old (e.g., Pythaogreanism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That seems right to me. I am just trying to think of the wider picture within which to situate the OP. Mathematization could derive from an emphasis on the common sensibles, sure, but what else could it derive from? Mechanistic philosophy and the Baconian desire for control over nature, for one. Quantifiability and univocal, tidy reasoning schemes, for another. Along with this quantifiability is the neatness with which mathematics represents reasoning, which is apparently why many philosophers—from Plato to Descartes—were so fond of mathematics.

Also, your other point could be extrapolated out. It is the idea that where overdetermination exists, "testimony" is subject to confirmability. This happens with common senses, and it also happens with intersubjective consensus, repeated scientific testability, large sample sizes for the sake of induction, and probably many others. That desire for confirmability is surely present in many ways in our own age.

But, aside from the objection that this cuts out far too much, I think there is also a good argument to be made that a recognition of both magnitude and multitude is reliant on a measure (e.g. "one duck" must be known as such to know three ducks, or half a duck, etc.) and measure itself requires going beyond mathematics, to a recognition of unity and wholes (virtual, as opposed to dimension/bulk quantity, i.e. intensity of participation in form). That puts some recognition of whole, and so intelligible form, prior to dimensive quantity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes and this relates to the transcendental of "unum." Cf. <This post> and others within that thread.

Second , mathematization struggles with existence. Even if one accepts that "what everything is" can be described by mathematics, this does not seem to explain "that it is." Hence, mathematization still tends to either tend back towards materialism (e.g. "these particular mathematical objects really exist just because, for no reason—which essentially puts potency before act or potency as actualizing itself) or towards extremely crowded and inflated multiverse ontologies. For instance, Tegmark cannot fathom how mathematics can explain existence (fair enough) so he had to suppose that every mathematical object exists (and that some just happen to have experiences). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, good points.

I suppose empiricism leans towards the materialist side, rationalism towards the platonist side. Either way though, they have to somehow reduce the fullness of experience to a part of experience (quantity). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and Lloyd Gerson would also juxtapose nominalism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism with materialism. I am wondering if that constellation of materialist notions is bound up with the primacy of the pragmatic over the speculative. To prefer the pragmatic to the speculative is perhaps to inevitably reduce the fulness of experience to a part of experience. It may be that speculative reason is the only thing that can truly resist that reductionism. In his book on Illiberalism Peter Simpson seems to think that a society which honors truth will resist such problems.

T Clark

Another great OP. I think you are probably the most erudite poster on the forum.

My question then would be: what makes materialism so appealing and intuitive? Why is the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,' intuitive? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I was an engineer and I've always had a strong interest in science. I started out from materialism but have developed a more nuanced philosophy from there. I think the simple answer to your question is that materialism is not intuitive at all except to a specific limited group of people in particular locations and time periods. Perhaps it is the least intuitive metaphysical position.

Materialism is intuitive because our "internal model" or understanding of the world as a three-dimensional space filled with extended bodies in motion is reinforced by several senses, not just one. Size, shape, texture, local motion, etc. come to us through sight, hearing, touch, the vestibular sense, etc. Intensity of odor even seems to reveal at least something of spacial location. Taste is experienced at different locations on the tongue. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This sounds like the kind of discussion that started taking place in the late 1500s and early 1600s - Kepler, Copernicus, Descartes, and, as you note, Galileo. As I understand it, they were new and radical ideas then - again, not intuitive at all. I am aware that it was also discussed, as you note, by philosophers in ancient Greece.

Another problem here is that there is no prima facie reason to think smallism is true. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Another simple answer - it's not true, it's metaphysics.

The point here is that, once we understand why materialism is so intuitive, it is unclear if we should trust this intuition. In particular, much of what we know about how the senses work, and how they developed, might undermine how much faith we put in these intuitions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The uncertainty of all knowledge is a well-plowed field in philosophy. I guess I would be considered a pragmatist. As I see it, uncertainty is an issue that has to be addressed in any philosophical system that claims to be of value.

Yet do we have any reason to think the world is truly, objectively, more like a string of symbols than a diagram? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps you might consider this naive or shallow, but I ask whether we have any reason to think the world is truly anything in particular. Again, it's metaphysics - a way of thinking, a perspective - not immutable truth.

Aside from appeals to terms like "informational strong emergence," which seems to be more an appeal to magic or another love/strife or Nous type "x factor" than anything else... — Count Timothy von Icarus

I strongly disagree with dismissive statement about emergence. Let's not take that up here.

...there seems to be absolutely no way to get most of human experience back into the mathematized cosmos (even as mere epiphenomena). How does something compute so hard it begins to feel, for instance? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Isn't this just the hard problem, which you and others have discussed in this thread? I don't find it a very compelling argument. Again, I'd rather not take that up here.

Taking your discussion as a whole, the first thing that came to mind was the definition of what is real and what is not - another issue the forum has discussed many (many) times. It seems clear to me that what is considered real is not a matter of fact. We can define reality as anything we want depending on our preferred metaphysical stance. The position I find most congenial is one that recognizes that "reality" isn't really anything at all unless it's connected to our everyday human lives at macroscopic scale. I think my perspective looks a bit like yours and doesn't necessarily contradict it, but comes at it from a different direction.

It seems to me - no, I can't provide specific evidence or references - the first, or at least the most fundamental - reality is food, tools, homes, and people. Everything else we encounter can be seen as developing out of and connected with those basic elements. How can something be considered real if it doesn't affect our human lives? I think that's materialism of a sort and I think it represents a humanizing force in our thinking rather than an alienating one.

T Clark

Apparently there are two modern emphases you are bringing out. One is an emphasis on common sensibles, and the other is an emphasis on mathematics and mathematicization. What's curious is that they seem opposed. — Leontiskos

I'll go out on a limb here based on my limited reading of the history of science in the 1600s. Looking at reality as made of of things with physical properties was a new idea in that period. Physical properties are only observable by our senses. Mathematics depends on measurable properties. Otherwise it wouldn't have anything to operate on.

Leontiskos

I'll go out on a limb here based on my limited reading of the history of science in the 1600s. Looking at reality as made of of things with physical properties was a new idea in that period. Physical properties are only observable by our senses. Mathematics depends on measurable properties. Otherwise it wouldn't have anything to operate on. — T Clark

But is mathematics observable by our senses?

Count Timothy pointed to those who think that mathematics is what is ultimately real, and where the senses and mathematics conflict, we should trust mathematics. At that point there is certainly an opposition between sense knowledge and mathematics, but perhaps that extreme point is merely an aberration?

T Clark

Imagine discussing your brother, sitting next you in a chair, with a materialist philosopher and a biologist - you could spend an eternity counting his cells and atoms and all of their functions and motions and the organs and how they interact with each other and track electrical impulses and measure the shape of the face as it “smiles” and endorphins and serotonin level changes, and on and on, and never start the actual conversation about your brother. That is what materialism, like the hard problem, will always have to avoid discussing. (And ironically, you could just ask your brother to explain if he was not too insulted by all of the experiments.) — Fire Ologist

The issues we are discussing are metaphysical. In "An Essay on Metaphysics" R.G. Colling wrote

Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking... — R.G. Collingwood

What I take from that is we use different points of view depending on what we are talking about. We use different ones when we are talking about electrons than when we are talking about our brothers.

T Clark

Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36

This is my understanding also, probably because we got them from the same source. I think this is a good answer to @Leontiskos question about whether an emphasis on properties and one on mathematics contradict each other.

T Clark

↪Wayfarer

I responded to this in my previous post, on which I neglected to include a link.

T Clark

But is mathematics observable by our senses? — Leontiskos

No, but properties are and properties, measurements, are required for mathematics.

Leontiskos

I think this is a good answer to Leontiskos question about whether an emphasis on properties and one on mathematics contradict each other. — T Clark

Let me highlight a few things from that quote:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36

This is much to my point. To systematically exclude sound and smell is to abandon a motive of "common sensibles." If one were motivated by common sensibles there would be no reason to systematically exclude two of the senses. For Galileo and Descartes the point is not epistemic; it instead pertains to quantitative description and the fact that quantitative analysis is eminently rationally manipulable and transparent. It is that some qualities are deemed objective and others subjective, and the senses that pertain to the "subjective" pertain to secondary qualities.

We can see this in Galileo, Locke, etc. with the demotion of color to a "less real" (merely mental) "secondary quality," while shape and motion, etc. remain fully real "primary quantities." — Count Timothy von Icarus

...so it is more than just color that is less real. It is also sound and smell, which are directly correlated to two of the senses.

Fire Ologist

we use different points of view depending on what we are talking about. We use different ones when we are talking about electrons than when we are talking about our brothers. — T Clark

But if “everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,’” what does my brother really add to a scientific discussion of things? What point of view isn’t reduced to its matter? What does point of view matter, apart from its material cause?

So discussions of nature or essence or my brother are all in my mind, which is really neurons and balls of stuff.

“It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.”
— Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36

That is basically the same point. Subtract my actual brother when discussing my brother, which is really a discussion of atoms and physics.

NOS4A2

↪Count Timothy von Icarus

Nice post again, Count. You’re an enjoyable read.

The "common sensibles" (shape, size, extension, rest, motion, and number) are viewed as "most real" because they can be validated by many senses, including sight and touch, which have priority in human experience.

At the outset I am inclined to believe that these “sensibles”, too, are not sensible, but the abstractions of a sensible object: “properties”. The referents here invariably reside in the mind. But like you said, this sort of materialism is doomed to waiver between the insensible and the sensible insofar as it is about the measurements of objects considered, in abstracto, where we begin to examine the measurements more so than we do the object.

Wayfarer

↪Leontiskos

↪T Clark

Why has physics become paradigmatic for science, generally? Isn’t it because of the universal scope and unerring accuracy of its predictions and calculations? If you can imaginatively cast your mind back a few hundred years, how intoxicating the discoveries of the Laws of Motion, and then the heliocentric solar system, must have seemed! So many things fell into place, so much begins to make sense where previously there was a patchwork of ancient philosophies and myths. It promised to encompass everything known, and all written in the language of mathematics and algebraic geometry, with its objective clarity and certainty. Or so it seemed, at least until 1927.

T Clark

Or so it seemed, at least until 1927. — Wayfarer

Don’t be opaque.

Wayfarer

↪T Clark

I thought you would pick it up, but I’m referring to the famous Fifth Solvay Conference, 1927, which introduced quantum physics to the world, and undermined the pristine certainty of classical physics as a truly universal science.

RogueAI

Materialism is intuitive because our "internal model" or understanding of the world as a three-dimensional space filled with extended bodies in motion is reinforced by several senses, not just one. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, it WAS intuitive. QM is extremely counter-intuitive. Matter used to be little particles that stuff was made of. Now it's excitations in quantum fields. WTF is that?

"are people excitations of a quntum field?

ChatGPT said:
Yes—people, like everything else made of matter and energy, are ultimately excitations of quantum fields."

boundless

↪Count Timothy von Icarus

Geat OP, I'll however comment only on mathematics.

I think that the use of mathematics in physics actually undermines the materialist project. It is based on the assumption that there is an intelligible structure in material reality which is to be discovered. And this 'structure' is not perceived by the senses but it is grasped by the intellect.
Some materialists, I believe, reject the assumption but this, IMO, leads to quite undesiderable consequences. For instance, if there is no real intelligible structure in material reality, is scientific knowledge really knowledge? One might insist that it would be so because predictions would be still valid. But, again, is the ability to predict and make applications really knowledge? Would we say, for instance, that ancient geocentric astronomers had 'knowledge' when they made correct predictions? Furthermore, if there is no intelligible structure how could predictions even be possible, especially as precise as those of science?

So, it seems that there is an intelligible structure of the 'material (or physical) reality'. If this is the case, however, it seems to me that such a structure would not be material. It lacks the characteristics of what can be thought as material and it is neither detectable by the senses nor by scientific instruments. It can be grasped through sensory and instrumental data but it cannot be detected. This is also the same as saying that meaning is something essential to material reality, as meaning is graspable by the intellect. Anyway, all of this implies IMO that materialism must either (1) allow that there is some irreducible non-material reality or aspects of reality or (2) reject altogether the existence of an intelligible structure. If one adopts (1), there is no reason to think that there aren't other 'nonmaterial' aspects of reality, irreducible to the material. If one accepts (2), however, I don't see any way to escape a radical skepticism, a transcendental idealism and so on. If there is no intelligibility, how can we claim to know?

Bodhy

↪Count Timothy von Icarus

Mathematicism wouldn't even lead you to materialism, IMO - because what is the intrinsic connection between mathematicism and matter? Mathematics is a science of structure and relation, but not of the intrinsic essence.

Mathematicism leads you to ontic structural realism, the modern day analog of Pythagoreanism. There are actual proponents of that view, like James Ladyman and his Everything Must Go, and I think certain other positions commit to structural realism at least implicitly, like Bayesian Brain theories.

"Matter" is indeed an extrapolation of sense - the felt 'otherness' of resistance as we experience it, and even then, matter was necessarily bound up with form and formal causation before we artificially considered it as a solipsistic sort of corpuscular, particular existence.

T Clark

I thought you would pick it up, but I’m referring to the famous Fifth Solvay Conference, 1927, which introduced quantum physics to the world, and undermined the pristine certainty of classical physics as a truly universal science. — Wayfarer

I thought it might be that, but I wasn’t sure.

As for your post, it’s not clear to me that the discontinuity between the classical and quantum worlds is as profound as you, and I assume most others, think it is. That would only be true if physics represents a more fundamental reality than phenomena at larger scales. I don’t see things that way.

Leontiskos

So many things fell into place, so much begins to make sense where previously there was a patchwork of ancient philosophies and myths. — Wayfarer

Yet in fact Galileo's theory was empirically inferior to the geocentric model, which is why it was not adopted by the scientific community. It was Kepler's elliptical orbits that made heliocentrism plausible. Galileo wanted circular orbits due to their perfection and elegance, and this error was in fact based in Galileo's more ancient approach to the Heavens.

So the story is more complicated. The geocentric model was in many ways much more mathematically sophisticated than the heliocentric model. The desideratum initially had more to do with elegance than predictive power. Before the findings of Tycho Brahe's superior telescopes were compiled, the predictive power question was moot. The myths that have grown up around Galileo are legion.

T Clark

I thought you would pick it up, but I’m referring to the famous Fifth Solvay Conference, 1927, which introduced quantum physics to the world, and undermined the pristine certainty of classical physics as a truly universal science. — Wayfarer

I responded:

That would only be true if physics represents a more fundamental reality than phenomena at larger scales. — T Clark

I want to change that - That might only be true if physics represents a more fundamental reality than phenomena at larger scales.

T Clark

To systematically exclude sound and smell is to abandon a motive of "common sensibles." If one were motivated by common sensibles there would be no reason to systematically exclude two of the senses. — Leontiskos

Seems to me they were excluded for a practical reason - sounds and smells don't generate easily measurable properties. Beyond that, I guess it probably also represents a metaphysical principle. I think all science, and human thought in general, has a bias toward sight over other senses, i.e. it is considered more fundamental.

T Clark

But if “everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,’” what does my brother really add to a scientific discussion of things? What point of view isn’t reduced to its matter? What does point of view matter, apart from its material cause? — Fire Ologist

I'll go back to my quote from Collingwood:

Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking... — R.G. Collingwood

One metaphysical position does not, can not, address all of reality. We need to use different ones in different situations. With electrons we talk about mass and velocity. With our brothers we talk about history and personality.

Fire Ologist

One metaphysical position does not, can not, address all of reality. We need to use different ones in different situations. — T Clark

I don’t know if I agree with that.

I am making the grossly imprecise observation that if materialism was correct, if someone followed this intuition, “my brother” could not refer to anything other than atoms, and similarly, any references to “history” and “personality” would be references to my own mental abuses of words, unspeakable and incommunicable, until translated back into atoms perhaps.

I’m not a materialist. My brother is real. His atoms will never explain, or be useful to demonstrate, his sense of humor.

Tom Storm

reality is food, tools, homes, and people. Everything else we encounter can be seen as developing out of and connected with those basic elements. How can something be considered real if it doesn't affect our human lives? I think that's materialism of a sort and I think it represents a humanizing force in our thinking rather than an alienating one. — T Clark

One metaphysical position does not, can not, address all of reality. We need to use different ones in different situations. With electrons we talk about mass and velocity. With our brothers we talk about history and personality. — T Clark

I like what you say here. I believe it was the philosopher Simon Blackburn who said that even the idealist philosophy professor adopts realism the moment they leave home in the morning.

I'm not sure anyone on this site actually defends materialism as a full-blown worldview, though they may draw from some of its strands and influences. What seems more prevalent today is a commitment to methodological naturalism - the stance that scientific inquiry should proceed without invoking supernatural explanations - rather than metaphysical naturalism, which asserts that only natural, physical entities and processes exist. The former reflects a pragmatic stance, informed by an awareness of the limits of what can be known, the latter is a stronger ontological claim, one that is itself subject to philosophical scrutiny.

Srap Tasmaner

The former reflects a pragmatic stance, informed by an awareness of the limits of what can be known — Tom Storm

Agreed, but I would have thought "the limits of what we know how to investigate". At least that's how I think of naturalism; it's a program for further investigation that can actually be carried out. It may not get you everything that could be known -- how could anyone know that? -- but at least it's a definable plan for encroaching on the unknown.

Tom Storm

I would have thought "the limits of what we know how to investigate". — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's an improvement. I'm not attached to my wording. I quite like this as an approach and it seems to avoid scientism.

The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism

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