Can someone explain to me what's wrong with materialism?

I should probably have mentioned this fourth one as well, the issue is that it's kind of partially distributed over the other ones, but I guess it should be a standalone too.
4. Problems with realism or objectivity or absoluteness -- e.g. in epistemology (whether knowledge/justification/rationality is objective/absolute), or in the theory of concepts & categories & kinds (whether they "carve nature at its joints" or are relative to cultures, individuals, languages, conceptual schemes, etc.), or in philosophy of science (whether scientific theories/models literally describe reality or are just tools or otherwise not truth-apt).
Did you just make this thread to get reading inspiration or do you want to discuss this stuff?

>Did you just make this thread to get reading inspiration or do you want to discuss this stuff?
Mostly reading inspiration but I'd like to discuss what you believe in if not materialism and why.

>2. Problems with defining the physical.
>3. Problems with justifying materialist ontology
Honestly, these seem like the two most significant obstacles. A materialist could get around these by choosing to instead define themselves as a naturalist, but that really just shifts the problem.

The will of God is the Will.
The Will is the will of God.

The Will is all existence.
The will of God is all existence.
God is all existence.

You need a simple ideology to grasp that.
Too simple for most people, really.

That is the most Veeky Forums homosexuality I've seen here in a long time.

I'm not a physicalist. I don't think #2 has a good solution, and I think #3 should be avoided by dropping empiricism. At that point, it starts to seem a lot less important to have this concept of the "physical" at the epicenter of your worldview. I stopped caring about attempts to reduce consciousness or values a while ago, but anyway I'm pretty sure "abstract" entities (like truth, possibility, essences, universals, etc.) are ontologically prior to space and time and hence to the physical. So I don't put much stock in solving #1 either. #4 is solvable, though, I'm a naive realist about epistemology, natural kinds, science, perception, etc.

Honestly in my experience the natural is even harder to define than the physical. But why do you think #2-3 are harder than #1 and #4?

1 is easy. We as humans obsess over things like consciousness because we're collectively narcissistic. Things like moral values are very easy to account for once you situate humans as a particular strain of ape. And accepting humans as a particular strain of intelligent ape destroys the hubris of assuming our concepts apply to the natural world "in actuality" rather than being some approximation of it.

>I'm pretty sure "abstract" entities (like truth, possibility, essences, universals, etc.) are ontologically prior to space and time and hence to the physical
Why do you think they are prior to space and time? The explanation that seems right to me is that those abstractions first evolved in the minds of intelligent animals like humans.

Yeah, that doesn't work though, because plenty of things were true and possible and had essences and properties etc. long before animals began to exist. As well, if you imagine stripping reality of time and space, there's still the possibility of time and space left. And therefore there's still what it would be for something to be time and space (i.e. the essences or natures of time and space). And therefore there's still the truth that time and space are possible and would be like this or that, etc.
Your suggestion points to my problem with calling them "abstract" though. There's tradition for a pretty mentalistic notion of the abstract, where something abstract is just something you get by an act of "abstraction," which in turn is just to consider something apart from some or most of its properties. I think that goes back to Locke. Truth, possibility, essence, etc. are not mental things; they're real and existed long before conscious animals evolved.

>Things like moral values are very easy to account for once you situate humans as a particular strain of ape.
This sounds like evolution-based moral skepticism or subjectivism, though. That's not reducing values to the physical, that's eliminating them.
>And accepting humans as a particular strain of intelligent ape destroys the hubris of assuming our concepts apply to the natural world "in actuality" rather than being some approximation of it.
This just sounds like accepting that #4 doesn't have a solution. How does materialism survive the extinction of objectivity, natural-kind divisions, absoluteness, etc.?

>Yeah, that doesn't work though, because plenty of things were true and possible and had essences and properties etc. long before animals began to exist.
You're saying that things humans would call "true" or "possible" or "properties" existed before humans could point them out but that doesn't mean the abstractions themselves existed before humans could point them out. It's like how humans actually existed before humans called themselves humans but that doesn't mean the abstraction of "human" existed before humans called themselves that.

>This sounds like evolution-based moral skepticism or subjectivism, though. That's not reducing values to the physical, that's eliminating them.
No, evolution merely removes a specific type of moral certainty from the equation. Any human is free to create other moral values and follow them, and convince other humans to follow them. Pragmatism is how moral philosophy "actually" propogates, after all.
>How does materialism survive the extinction of objectivity, natural-kind divisions, absoluteness, etc.?
Again, through the simple adoption of pragmatism. If a definition is not useful, discard it.

Nothing wrong with materialism.
Consumerism is what is ridiculous. No reason to slave yourself over money to buy a shoe or a slightly better cellphone.

Two things to say to that.
(A) Like I said, I don't agree that truth, possibility, and properties are "abstractions" in the sense I think you're using the word, i.e. in the sense that they are just products of our acts of abstraction. That would be extremely implausible, since obviously plenty of things were true, possible, and propertied long before we humans came around.
(B) I don't know what you mean when you say (i) that the things we call truths, possibilities, properties, or humans existed before we could point them out, but (ii) that the "abstractions" of those things didn't exist. If by (ii) you just mean they didn't exist as products of our acts of abstraction, then that is trivially true but doesn't diminish (i) at all. Point (i) considered by itself is just what I am saying: truth, possibility, properties, and humans existed before we considered them. I don't know what (ii) is supposed to add such that you disagree with me.

>Any human is free to create other moral values and follow them, and convince other humans to follow them.
Right, but this is moral anti-realism. If values are just created like that, they are fictions, or exist only subjectively or conventionally.
>>How does materialism survive the extinction of objectivity, natural-kind divisions, absoluteness, etc.?
>Again, through the simple adoption of pragmatism. If a definition is not useful, discard it.
What you're saying is that you're an anti-realist about materialism: it's only true-relative-to-pragmatic-concerns that materialism obtains, or that there is any such thing as a material object at all, or that the category of the material is even coherent.
This is exactly the kind of non-objectivism that materialists and physicalists balk at. They want a real absolute world of material realities whose facts obtain independently of what we think about them, or how it is useful for us to relate to them.

>I don't know what you mean when you say (i) that the things we call truths, possibilities, properties, or humans existed before we could point them out, but (ii) that the "abstractions" of those things didn't exist.
In the case of properties there were things that existed before humans which humans/other animals would eventually call properties. Like the Sun existed before humans thought of the property of hot. However, even though it existed before humans there was no such thing as hot as a property. The Sun existed but hot didn't. Even the name "Sun" didn't exist even though the object its referring to did. That's similar to hot. "Hot" as a concept didn't exist but that which humans eventually came to refer to as hot did.

>Point (i) considered by itself is just what I am saying: truth, possibility, properties, and humans existed before we considered them.
That's not what I'm saying. Stuff existed before humans and through evolution humans came to sense/perceive that stuff in their own way. Other animals do the same. But there's no reason to say that truth existed before physical things. It's just that humans perceive there to be true things about physical things. There wasn't truth there was just what was. There weren't objects there was just what was.

You're being vague when you say that truth was real before humans so what do you mean by real if not it existing as a concept in the minds of humans? You say it existed but in what form? You never explained that.

>There wasn't truth there was just what was. There weren't objects there was just what was.
Alright, I did suspect this was the kind of metaphysics you were tending towards. I'll just say these three things about it:
I. It is a very extreme, hyper-skeptical, and counter-intuitive theory of reality that you're adopting here in order to reject my argument that truth, possibility, essence, etc. existed prior to space and time. It's worth just pausing to wonder whether rejecting my argument is worth that price, or whether there might be a less extreme solution.
II. This theory of reality is also not really materialist. (Obviously the property of being material/physical/natural would go the same way as the rest of what you dealt with, especially since you also included objects.) In fact you're embracing the broad kind of anti-realism, anti-objectivity, and anti-absoluteness that I called problem #4 for materialism: III. Just a bit of a refutation for your theory as stated: Once you've said what you've said, it's not clear that you can even say that "there was just what was," since this employs the concept of "being" or "reality," including the concept of "was," which implies both the concepts of "time" and "change." And it's also not clear that you can say "there weren't objects," since that implies that everything that there was fell under the concept "non-object" (and also employs the concept "was not," i.e. negation, non-existence, falsity, etc.). Your metaphysics which says (basically) that no concepts applied before humans or animals thought of them entails that absolutely nothing can be said about that earlier time--not even that it was a time, or that it was earlier, or that it was, or that nothing can be said about it. This is an old problem for Kant's transcendental idealism, which your theory is essentially a variation of.

It undermines muh feels therefore it must be wrong and those people must be bad.

For the thousandth time, prove God has a will.

I don't agree with that at all. I'm just saying that humans weren't around to categorize or reflect on certain things about what was so there was just what was before and not any notion of truth or properties and so on.
I mean for you to say this:
>And it's also not clear that you can say "there weren't objects," since that implies that everything that there was fell under the concept "non-object"
doesn't make sense at all to me. It's not that what was was a non-object, it's that the concept of object didn't exist but what was would later be called an object by humans. I don't see how this embraces #4 on your list at all either, is counter intuitive at all, or is similar to kant's transcendental idealism.
>Your metaphysics which says (basically) that no concepts applied before humans or animals thought of them entails that absolutely nothing can be said about that earlier time--not even that it was a time, or that it was earlier, or that it was, or that nothing can be said about it.
>that absolutely nothing can be said about that earlier time
no I've already said that the stuff that humans would eventually name and reflect on were there at the time. So we can say that there was stuff that was hot at the time but the concept of hot was first thought up in life to help it survive. Maybe I'm not the best at articulating how I view this stuff but I don't see it as similar to kant's transcendental idealism at all

Huh, that's interesting. I was wondering whether to interpret you that way but decided against it. So when you said...
>the Sun existed before humans thought of the property of hot. However, even though it existed before humans there was no such thing as hot as a property.
... your issue wasn't that hot things weren't real prior to the classification of things as hot, it's that being hot was not a property? So being hot was real before humans thought of and named it, but it just wasn't a property? Then what was it?

Other than that, there are a few points where I'm just not sure you're following me.
>It's not that what was was a non-object, it's that the concept of object didn't exist but what was would later be called an object by humans.
I don't see how the fact that the concept or notion of "object"--i.e. the mental categorization--didn't exist prior to the evolution of minds tells against the idea that there were such things as objects and non-objects. If it does, then you are saying that whether something is an object depends on whether it is classified as such, and that is textbook anti-realism, so there you have my #4. Specifically it's anti-realism (anti-objectivism, anti-absoluteness) on the matter of categories, kinds, and concepts.

Your view as I understood it is very much transcendental-idealistic in that it holds to the existence of a reality-as-it-is-in-itself while simultaneously holding that all categories, properties, divisions, etc. among what exists in it depend on the way we apprehend it. That is in some sense the bare-bones version of transcendental idealism.

It's counter-intuitive because the natural way to think about things is that whether something exists or is an object or has a certain property is often completely independent of us.

>So being hot was real before humans thought of and named it, but it just wasn't a property? Then what was it?
The stuff that we came to call hot existed as part of what was. Some animals don't have the ability sense different temperatures and fewer have the ability to reflect on different temperatures. So what was it that existed before animals came to sense it and reflect on it? I think looking at heat from the perspective of physics how it understood in physics would be helpful, which is that its a form of energy transfer associated with motion. So this takes us into the physical, that which we came to call heat existed in the form of movement and animals eventually came to sense and reflect on that movement in a way that helped it survive which culminated in the abstraction of "heat" coming to existence.

>I don't see how the fact that the concept or notion of "object"--i.e. the mental categorization--didn't exist prior to the evolution of minds tells against the idea that there were such things as objects and non-objects.
I'm not saying that the concept of "object" not existing prior to the evolution of minds means that there were no objects or only non-objects. I'm saying that that which we came to call objects existed prior to the evolution of minds. That which we would eventually call objects were made up of what we would eventually call atoms. So it existed and was not dependent upon it being classified as such. It's like with heat above, energy transfer existed and animals were able to utilize that in a way that helped them survive. With objects the atoms themselves existed and animals were able to utilize those in such a way that allowed them to differentiate different atoms into individual objects in a way that helped them survive.

>I think looking at heat from the perspective of physics how it understood in physics would be helpful,
I think looking at heat from the perspective of how physics understands it would be helpful*

I'm looking for something to disagree with in your first paragraph and I'm not finding anything. It seems to me that we agree that the thing we call "being hot" existed before we called it anything--i.e. heat, or being hot, existed. And we agree that at some point the abstraction or mental classification of that thing arose in certain animals, and that it had a physical basis in motion or energy, and that animals recognized it conceptually due to the usefulness of doing so. Do we just disagree, then, about whether that thing--being hot, or heat--was a property prior to being apprehended or conceptualized? Because otherwise I don't know what the relevance is for my example of truth, possibility, etc. That example only depended on you agreeing that truth and possibility existed before we had the ideas of them.

Looking at your second paragraph, it's basically the same situation. Yes, the things we would come to call atoms--i.e. atoms--existed before we called them anything or classified them in any way. And at some point we gained the ability to differentiate things constituted by these atoms. This all seems to me completely congruent with the idea that the case is just the same for truth, possibility, properties, essences, etc.: the things we would come to call by those names existed before we classified anything, or even existed, and indeed (per my argument) they existed before space and time.

>Do we just disagree, then, about whether that thing--being hot, or heat--was a property prior to being apprehended or conceptualized?
Yes, I think so. Because I'm viewing properties as a whole as just one of the lenses that animals use to make sense of the world and to survive. Other lenses would be truth, possibility, essences, and so on. I'm not sure "lenses" is the proper word to use here, maybe filters would be better. Like animals were able to filter what was into these different lenses or filters which helped them survive. Just because animals were able to filter what was in that way doesn't mean that the filters themselves actually exist though. It just means that what we later came to filter into those lenses existed. So in the case of the Sun, animals filtered the movement of atoms into its own distinct lens of hot and this lens helped animals to survive but the lens itself was not there prior to animals filtering what was in that way.
>This all seems to me completely congruent with the idea that the case is just the same for truth, possibility, properties, essences, etc.: the things we would come to call by those names existed before we classified anything, or even existed, and indeed (per my argument) they existed before space and time.
I'm saying that "space" and "time" are another lens that animals have developed which helped them survive. This lens is yet again a filter that was applied to what we would eventually call space and time. However, animals can only develop these lenses given the existence of what was because the lenses can only be developed by filtering what was in this way. So I don't think this is congruent with the idea that "truth, possibility, properties, essences, etc" existed before space and time because those lenses can only be made given the existence of what was and a part of what was includes what we came to call space and time.

It's cultural marxism.

is there a label used to describe this kind of metaphysical belief? I want to read into stuff that rejects/supports this

According to Cayce, materialism is just one expression of the divine. The problem is we became attached to it and lost our ability to communicate with the Infinite, similar to a radio tuning into empty frequency.

As for why mainstream denominations decry it as evil, there is problem no singular answer, but it might come down to the Gnostics (which the Book of Ruth concerns). Gnosticism, what hippies and the like do, is just hedonism with a coat of paint, positing that you have to experience all materialism in order to ascend. Nothing has changed in that respect in 2000 years, except that back then they tried to say Jesus was the god of just the material world. It's easy to see how that is an attack on Christianity. Because it is. The early Gnostics were butthurt Pharisees who embraced Christianity half-way, being too egotistic to let go of all their misguided ideals.

*probably no singular answer

God created the universe. even if He created the universe for shits and giggles, that is His will. Assuming God exists of course, which can not be proven.

Nothing's wrong with it, so long as you're a materialist.

see:

Nothing. It just hurts people's feelings.

>I'm viewing properties as a whole as just one of the lenses that animals use to make sense of the world
>"space" and "time" are another lens that animals have developed
But the idea that these differentiations only apply to the world as experienced or apprehended and not to the world in itself independently of us is precisely the idea of transcendental idealism. Especially when you bring in space and time. That was exactly what was so notable in Kant's metaphysics.
The only way I could see you not being a transcendental idealist at this point is if you've been conflating e.g. the idea or concept or term "space" with space the actual thing itself.
Are you just saying that the idea/concept/term "space" is a lens through which to see the world and didn't exist before animals did, or are you saying that space itself is a lens through which to see the world and didn't exist before animals did?
If the former, then we don't disagree, but I also don't know what your counterpoint to my anti-materialist argument is.
If the latter, you're a transcendental idealist (and the same applies if you think there's really no difference between the former and the latter, i.e. that space itself just is the concept).

Yeah, it's a kind of metaphysical anti-realism. The locus classicus for this idea that space and time are just lenses through which we see the world is Kant's transcendental idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason (the "Transcendental Aesthetic" section specifically). Today the debates would probably be the ones surrounding realism vs anti-realism concerning conceptual schemes, natural kinds, categories, etc. The "object-oriented ontology" movement is a recent attempt to counter this Kantianism. Check out this SEP entry:
>plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-sem-challenge/
Especially the "conceptual relativity argument," §3.4.

>But the idea that these differentiations only apply to the world as experienced or apprehended and not to the world in itself independently of us is precisely the idea of transcendental idealism
I haven't read Kant so I'm not too familiar with what he says about this. However, even with my limited understanding of him I am seeing the parallels now that you point them out in that way. I guess what I've been referring to as "what was" would be similar to what he calls the noumenon, right? However my understanding of his usage of noumenon is that it is separate from the phenomenon, as in nothing about the phenomenon tells you about the noumenon. That doesn't seem to be in line with what I've been saying because I've been saying that "what was" is what was filtered by animals and gave rise to our lenses. Either I don't understand Kant well enough and we are in agreement, or this difference that I am pointing out shows that I am not a transcendental idealist.

>I guess what I've been referring to as "what was" would be similar to what he calls the noumenon, right?
That's how it seems to me, yeah.
>However my understanding of his usage of noumenon is that it is separate from the phenomenon, as in nothing about the phenomenon tells you about the noumenon. That doesn't seem to be in line with what I've been saying because I've been saying that "what was" is what was filtered by animals and gave rise to our lenses.
But if Kant had used your metaphor of "filtering," he would have said that the phenomenon is precisely the noumenon, filtered.
I think the difference you're pointing to is: Kant draws the conclusion that absolutely none of our concepts, differentiations, categories, etc. can be thought to apply to the world-in-itself (i.e. nothing can be said or known about it). I tried to push you to that same conclusion here: , because I think it follows from what you've already said. But you seem to want to resist it. I'm not exactly sure what that consists in or whether it can be made consistent. For example you want to say that some things, like the Sun, are hot independently of our categorizations, but that this does not consist in an object (the Sun) possessing a property (being hot), but is somehow just "what is." Nevertheless, in making that statement you do apply the concept of the Sun and the concept of being hot.
Anyway, I did say your view was "essentially a variation of" transcendental idealism and not just identical to Kant's doctrine.

>For example you want to say that some things, like the Sun, are hot independently of our categorizations, but that this does not consist in an object (the Sun) possessing a property (being hot), but is somehow just "what is."
Well it's not that the Sun is hot or is an object independent of our categorizations, it's that it existed unfiltered prior to us filtering it. You touched on that when you said "the phenomenon is precisely the noumenon, filtered" when you said what kant would have said if he used my metaphor. So that which we filtered into the object of the Sun and the property of it being hot existed unfiltered as the noumenon. Also it still exists unfiltered in that way but animals like humans which experience the world through our filters do not experience that noumenon.

I'm not sure if trying to illustrate this by giving an analogy would help but I'll give one anyway. If you opened a black and white picture (the noumenon) in photoshop and added colors to the picture (filtering the noumenon and turning it into a phenomenon) the colors only exist in the phenomenon but the noumenon was itself filtered to give rise to those colors. Additionally, the unfiltered picture still exists outside of photoshop (so the noumenon is still there despite a phenomenon having been filtered from it).

Alright, your first paragraph basically removes all my doubt that you're a transcendental idealist.
I get where you're coming from with your photoshop analogy, but I think it might not be totally apt, since the B&W picture still has certain shapes and shades etc. prior to filtering, and these are also orderings or differentiations. But of course "all analogies break down."
There is an ancient sort of precursor to transcendental idealism, do you know the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander? Like Kant (unlike Berkeley and Hume) he thought there did exist something beyond appearances, but that this was the "apeiron," which means the "indefinite" or "unbounded" -- basically just a "something that is" but with no definite character or delineated properties. All divisions, categories, types, oppositions, etc. were things that arose subsequently, in how things appear to us, but did not exist in the ultimate reality. Your metaphysics reminds me of that. I keep thinking you basically want to say that reality in itself is the apeiron.

>That's called scientific realism retard
It really fucking isn't you double retard. Scientific realism is ontologically agnostic regarding materialism/idealism.

I think you hit the nail on the head with this post. I haven't heard of Anaximander before but that apeiron does sound quite like what I've been trying to describe. I'll look more into that because it's nice to finally have something out there to sort of label my position with and orient myself before I start looking for reasons why people think that position is wrong. I know you've already mentioned some problems with this view but I'd appreciate if you could point me to something I could read which goes over its faults in depth. Also earlier you said you were a naive realist. I'm interested in reading stuff supporting that view too, so I'd appreciate reading for that as well.

I don't have a single source to go in depth with this. It's a huge topic that touches many areas in philosophy.
With the apeiron or noumenon specifically, the debates are pretty old and arcane so not very accessible.
But see what I said about your position here including the link: You should be able to google or youtube "metaphysical anti-realism" on its own or in relation to "natural kinds", "concepts"/"conceptual schemes", "categories", etc. Also just realism vs idealism (vs transcendental idealism).

"Naive realism" is a term mostly used in philosophy of perception and epistemology. It's opposed to indirect realism, which says that we don't experience the world in itself.
I called myself a "naive realist" in a very broad sense, meaning I just accept that all our normal categories really apply in the world as it is in itself, which is also the world we directly experience, and includes things like truth, properties, possibilities, etc.
So that's realism in the debate over conceptual schemes & kinds & categories (see above), plus direct realism about experience (google or youtube "direct realism vs indirect realism" or something; Kane B's intro video on it is pretty good, and Galen Strawson and John Searle have lectures on youtube arguing for direct realism; or read on IEP: iep.utm.edu/perc-obj/), plus realism about abstract entities or universals (also googleable or youtubeable, or see IEP or SEP: iep.utm.edu/universa/, plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/).

Thanks.

It makes it difficult to explain properties, and relations, and also the subjectivity of human experience is not a simple thing to explain away.

this is facebook-tier, kill yourself

the nagging thought there is no connection between your consciousness and the cold hard laws of the natural world