On 9/25/2013 2:57 PM, LizR wrote:
On 26 September 2013 08:23, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
There seems to be a lot self-congratulatory bashing of reductive
materialism on this
list without noticing that it has provided all the knowledge of advanced
science,
while metaphysical Platonism has provided speculation.
I don't know about any self-congratulation, but I do know that "reductive materialism"
hasn't provided all this knowledge of advanced science. What has done so is
/reductionism. Materialism /is a theory about what the fundamental nature of the
universe is. /Reductionism /is a theory about how the fundamental components, whatever
they may be, relate to each other. It's only reductionism that has been wildly
successful. Materialism remains a metaphysical speculation, often riding on the
coat-tails of reductionism, but in fact it been looking less and less likely since early
in the 20th century. This happens (mainly) when you look closely at quantum theory (or
even, in my case, not so closely). When you see supposedly material objects behaving
like little pieces of information, the whole edifice of "matter" starts to look a bit
shaky (for example all electrons are identical except for a few properties - position,
momentum, spin axis, anything else?) Ditto for space and time, where we find a fixed
information contents in black holes, indeed they often look like large fundamental
"particles" - and the Beckenstein bound, the Holographic principle, and so on.
That's why I said the 'materialism' of 'reductive materialism' doesn't really mean much
except that it's not 'idealism'.
Brent
The idea that the universe is made of maths and/or information has been looking more
likely for about the last century. (Or, as one might call it at a pinch, "reductive
Platonism" :)
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