What is matter nowadays?

Included under 3) ?

I feel like they're separate concepts, though ultimately I'd agree a solution to one is likely to at least give some hint about how the other might be solved.
 
I feel like they're separate concepts, though ultimately I'd agree a solution to one is likely to at least give some hint about how the other might be solved.

I think intentionality may fold all the way back to (1) as the manifest world seems to me suggestive of the output of a "will." I'm not really suggesting the will of a mind, or the will of an entity, I feel it's more like a kind of "bare" will, and perhaps this kind of will precedes all of form, mind, and "consciousness."
 
What I'm saying is, while I think it unlikely that a material object can generate consciousness, I don't claim to *know* for certain that such strange emergence is impossible...nature is a surprising thing. Therefore IF it is possible, there must be a process that creates and sustains consciousness. If we knew what it was, we would have at least a chance at sustaining it.
I think it unlikely too. But there is also the possibility that it is a conservative property such that it sustains itself, in various forms. There is even a theory that gives it a name--enformy.

Cheers,
Bill
 
Last edited:
I think intentionality may fold all the way back to (1) as the manifest world seems to me suggestive of the output of a "will." I'm not really suggesting the will of a mind, or the will of an entity, I feel it's more like a kind of "bare" will, and perhaps this kind of will precedes all of form, mind, and "consciousness."

Do you mean a final cause like the kind advocated by Aristotle & Aquinas? Feser has argued that the directedness of form+matter not only ensures consistency in causation (a mystery under modern materialism) by also provides the mind with intentionality as there's a similar "pointing" toward things in the world.

I haven't gotten that far into his treatment of Aquinas, but on the surface teleology in matter strikes me as something different from intentionality given the latter is not the same as one's intentions. There's no definitive plan to act in intentionality.
 
Do you mean a final cause like the kind advocated by Aristotle & Aquinas? Feser has argued that the directedness of form+matter not only ensures consistency in causation (a mystery under modern materialism) by also provides the mind with intentionality as there's a similar "pointing" toward things in the world.

I haven't gotten that far into his treatment of Aquinas, but on the surface teleology in matter strikes me as something different from intentionality given the latter is not the same as one's intentions. There's no definitive plan to act in intentionality.

I don't think there's much of an intentionality in matter, or through matter, beyond a bare urge to manifest. Once systems of manifestation have come into being, I think secondary systems of intentionality come into being in parallel. I don't think it's a fundamentally different "kind" of intentionality from the bare urge, but I think it is contextualized by the manifested system. So I might have the intentionality to paint a picture. But that is derived from my context as a system. I don't think the bare urge has those kind of "intents."
 
I don't think there's much of an intentionality in matter, or through matter, beyond a bare urge to manifest. Once systems of manifestation have come into being, I think secondary systems of intentionality come into being in parallel. I don't think it's a fundamentally different "kind" of intentionality from the bare urge, but I think it is contextualized by the manifested system. So I might have the intentionality to paint a picture. But that is derived from my context as a system. I don't think the bare urge has those kind of "intents."

But intentionality - the aboutness of our thoughts - is different from intentions. It seems urges would relate to the latter, but would have no explanatory power regarding the former?
 
But intentionality - the aboutness of our thoughts - is different from intentions. It seems urges would relate to the latter, but would have no explanatory power regarding the former?

I'm not sure I'm seeing a difference. To me, a thought reads as a particlar type of action, which again a "will" is needed to initiate. I suspect there is really only one will in nature, either contextualized or non-contextualized, if you follow.
 
Clearly nearly everyone here - myself included - has to approach this topic with an imperfect knowledge of physics. However, that is also true of most scientists, and the fundamental ideas of physics may themselves be wrong - so we all have to work with imperfect knowledge.

I also find it amusing that both sides in this debate seem to want to paint their opponents as believing in Newtonian billiard balls, without really spelling out how their views differ - so I will try not to fall into that trap myself!

I prefer to think in terms of ordinary QM - not quantum field theory - because I feel the former has been more extensively tested. I tend to agree with Alexander Unzicker (see his book, "The Higgs Fake") that modern physics has piled one weird idea on top of another and not really solved any fundamental mysteries. String theory seem the ultimate example - fully understood by very few people, and un-testable! QM itself is weird enough, but it really is well tested IMHO.

QM replaces our normal view of reality by a set of equations that describe wave functions. Although this is a radical change, it still leaves us with a wave function evolving according to a set of equations (except that those wave functions can collapse in a seemingly absolutely random way). Not everyone realises that the wave function is a function of 3N coordinates (for a system of N particles), and that the coordinates of any pair of identical particles can be swapped - a process that swaps the sign of the wave function, but doesn't alter any probabilities deduced from it. This gives me the uncanny feeling that we don't so much have a bunch of particles called electrons, as we have just one idea of electronness!

Neither the inexorable working out of a set of equations, not total randomness, seems to me to be compatible with consciousness. I prefer to think of the full-fat version of consciousness, that includes full-fat free will (sometimes called 'libertarian' free will by those that like to split hairs between different types of free will). One good argument for my position, is Penrose's - that any such system of equations and random events can in principle be simulated on a computer. The concept of computer consciousness seems to me to be a paradox. I have written about this on several occasions on Skeptiko, so I don't want to repeat all that here.

That means that QM (or indeed QFT, or string theory) would not explain consciousness, it would only re-frame the mystery.

This leaves me with a suspicion that when a quantum system involves many particles, it may be that the probabilities of collapse of the wavefunction are not utterly random, but are somehow subject to our free will. In a sense this means that we ride matter and control it, rather as a rider controls a horse. This would, of course, represent an interaction outside of conventional QM.

None of this precludes a still deeper level of reality - Idealism - in which the properties of matter are ultimately a mental construct. However, as I have said before, I think that even if Idealism is ultimately true, it doesn't help to try and jump there in one go. Science would need to explore the properties of an approximately dualistic reality before it could explain that in one overarching way.

David
 
Last edited:
Do the wave functions evolve according to a set of equations? Or are the equations what we've come up with to model the wave functions?

Whether its Neuton's billiard balls or QM we sometimes forget that these are methods we've developed to describe properties we've observed and studied and figured out some patterns of what we've labelled matter. Do these elements we've identify come across as ideas because at the end of the day that's what they are? Imperfect modelled ideas that we've identified to describe what we've observed?

Is there any reason to suppose that these models should be considered to completely describe the entirety of the properties of this "stuff" we've labelled matter?

Is there any reason to suppose that these models could completely describe the entirety of the properties of this stuff we've labelled matter?
 
Do the wave functions evolve according to a set of equations? Or are the equations what we've come up with to model the wave functions?

Whether its Neuton's billiard balls or QM we sometimes forget that these are methods we've developed to describe properties we've observed and studied and figured out some patterns of what we've labelled matter. Do these elements we've identify come across as ideas because at the end of the day that's what they are? Imperfect modelled ideas that we've identified to describe what we've observed?

Is there any reason to suppose that these models should be considered to completely describe the entirety of the properties of this "stuff" we've labelled matter?

Is there any reason to suppose that these models could completely describe the entirety of the properties of this stuff we've labelled matter?
My personal opinion is that matter is well researched in today's Material Science labs. It has nothing to do with "folk materialism" or a search for ultimate causation.

The real discoveries are about balancing structure vs properties that are useful. Crystals, nano-materials, electronic properties are all wonderful areas of material science discoveries.

Material science and the actual influence and activity of ideas - are on different levels of abstraction. I view Panpsychism as a confused and forced concept. It is a natural place to look for the "grounding" of ideas. I just think it a wrong place to look.
 
Was posted on Kastrup's forum, and I think I put it in one of the Resources threads while back but can't find it right now.....anyway interesting read ->

A More Radical Critique of Materialism

As Van Fraassen sees them, both empiricism and materialism are characterized by their fascination for science (unlike spiritualism which relies on the prescientific ubiquitous fact of experience). But empiricism and materialism do not emphasize the same side of science. Empiricism takes the methods of a developing scientific research (including acceptance of future developments, and interpretational pluralism) as its highest value, whereas materialism is faithful to the contents of a dominant scientific discourse mature enough to present its own statements as truths. Empiricism incorporates a thorough critique of metaphysics, especially of analytic metaphysics as a mere shadow of logic, within its own identity. Materialism rather tends to resuscitate a certain metaphysical view by grounding it into the (real or alleged) ontological commitment of scientists. Empiricism remains open to the specificity of firstperson experience (and to contemplative enhancement of this experience) although, unlike spiritualism, it does not endow it with metaphysical significance. By contrast, many materialists are averse to ascribing any other status to experience than “subjective” appearance, or “private theater”, because, being caught in a metaphysical controversy, they fear that any concession could favor the opposite metaphysical position, to wit spiritualism.

Let us now assume that materialism is indeed a stance, that it relies on the ever-changing characterization of matter by science, rather than on a precise definition of matter. The problem is that, in this case, the materialist “ solutions ” to several conundrums of philosophy are seriously challenged, not because they are provably wrong, but because one cannot even formulate them univocally.

Van Fraassen is not strong enough in his denunciation of what I perceive as an ontological conservatism of the bulk of materialist thought. True, advanced materialist philosophers of physics such as Michael Lockwood (see section 4) usually do not feel that their position is threatened by articles such as P. Davies’s (“Particles do not exist”) or H.D. Zeh’s (“There are no quantum jumps nor are there particles !”). After all, these papers reactivate a devastating criticism against particle-like representations already formulated by E. Schrödinger long ago in the framework of Standard Quantum Mechanics. This did not discourage advanced materialist philosophers of physics in the past (even when they took the former arguments at face value), but rather prompted them to wonder how to conceive the nature of matter in a way that would be in line with the physics of their time. A good example is G. Bachelard, who fully aknowledged the extreme strain exerted by quantum physics on the concept of corpuscle, and strongly criticized the ideology of “things”, but still declared during the mid-1930s that microphysics should be construed from a materialist standpoint. Matter concepts are made meaningful in the context of modern physics, according to him, if they are taken as describing sudden stochastic transformations of energy, rather than corpuscles. However, many champions of materialism are averse to such advanced readings of Quantum Physics, and they tend to resist them by using any expedient at their disposal. This is especially true of materialist philosophers outside the philosophy of physics community, such as D. Lewis. Lewis thus rejects from the outset those criticisms against his idea of “humean supervenience” (e.g. supervenience of global properties on a distribution of local properties) that are inspired by quantum physics, especially by quantum nonseparability. His feeling is that quantum physics is too exotic, and that its interpretations are too controversial, to be taken seriously in philosophy. Classical physics is therefore taken by him as the only firm basis for such philosophical discussions. Looking backwards here again appears to be a crucial component of the materialist stance.
 
Was posted on Kastrup's forum, and I think I put it in one of the Resources threads while back but can't find it right now.....anyway interesting read ->

A More Radical Critique of Materialism

Quo Vadis, Materialism? Nowhere, It Seems…

...The concern I’m faced with, in these young students, is that, in their philosophical reading from ancient times onward and their penchant for popular scientific literature, they are detecting that there is no necessary connection between scientific theories and practices, on the one hand, and a materialistic worldview, on the other. I’m torn on the matter of expressing my thoughts when they are struggling with ideas, because they are vulnerable, perhaps even liable, to commit anargumentum ad verecundiam, as if I know what I’m talking about.

A short response is satisfactory for now, I think, and for good reason. The reason is this: having discussed the concept of what “matter” is with philosophers and scientists over hundreds of hours, it is clear to me that none of them know what they mean by word. Actually, I know what they want to mean, rather, but the problem is that, once brought to light that what they wish the concept to be can’t actually be reified in any meaningful way, there is endless ad hoc substitutions, vague ersatz definition supplements, and sometimes accusations that, “oh! You are just philosophizing [and annoying me by revealing my definitive cognitive dissonance and egregious lack of clarity of thought]!” Scientists, especially physicists, like to give water-tube toy definitions of matter, once they struggle after just a couple of seconds. (You know, those rubber, gel-filled toys in which you squeeze one side, and the gel squirts to the other end.) The water-tube toy “definition” is that matter is a different form of energy. There is a bit of irony in that, as I’ll end with some closing remarks on the Logical Positivists/Logical Empiricists and W.v.O. Quine –the latter being a product of the former in ways. The upshot from those remarks will be clear.

The big problem with materialism, aside from the fact that nobody seems to know what they mean by “matter,” is that there was a commonsense usage which did little to transform from ancient times...
 
Back
Top