Materialism's greatest defeasor...

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is modern science.

Because modern science sees the world first and foremost as systems of mathematical equations.

And mathematical equations are not material things! They are ideas.

It is almost as though the world... were a world of ideas.

Comments

  1. Lord3:58 PM

    Materialism enters as not all ideas being right, not in logical consistency but as in physical correspondence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah6:24 PM

      Well...

      1) We certainly don't judge mathematical theories correct or not by looking for some physical correspondence.
      2) Usually we work on the maths, and only years later find it "corresponds" to something physical (or better, that we can use it to model something physical).
      3) The "correspondence" itself is not a physical thing! We must abstract *an idea* from a speeding bullet before we can say its motion corresponds with Newton's equations.
      I could go on...

      Delete
  2. rob12:52 PM

    While I agree there is a move within science (for example: Max Tegmark) to 'see the world first and foremost as systems of mathematical equations.' I would think that a more mainstream scientific view would be that the world can merely be described by a systems of mathematical equations. This view seems more consistent with materialism (though I don't really believe it would make a difference if the world being described is deemed 'ideal' rather 'material').

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah1:21 AM

      rob, I wasn't talking about what scientists think about the world. I was talking about the view of the world presupposed by modern science.

      Those are quite different things. Actual scientists may be completely ignorant of their presuppositions.

      Delete

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