What is the basis for scientific materialism?

Have to agree and the number one reason is Consciousness. You know that weightless and massless wonder that's responsible not only for society but for all the wonders achieved by it.

Consciousness seems to negate materialism all by itself. Unless one can show what "material" it's made of.

If you want to see a hard materialist prevaricate bring up consciousness.

a reply to: neoholographic


Care to demonstrate that?

Show me the proof that the universe is materialistic as you say

Well the fact that matter at the macro level follows predictable patterns that we can measure and verify seems like proof to me. Now if you are talking about quantum physics that is another story, though it still seems to be all about pieces or matter and energy affecting each other.

originally posted by: nOraKat
a reply to: neoholographic

I am not a scientist but isn’t it the case that science (I.e. discoveries in quantum mechanics) has discovered that we do not live in a conventional material existence?

Yes. This is why local realism is dead.

Quantum physics: Death by experiment for local realism

A fundamental scientific assumption called local realism conflicts with certain predictions of quantum mechanics. Those predictions have now been verified, with none of the loopholes that have compromised earlier tests.

www.nature.com...

Quantum Mechanics tells us that information ranks supreme and what we call matter on a fundamental level has no objective existence. It can tunnel through barriers, be in superposition, be correlated with entangled pairs no matter the distance and more.

Subatomic particles should actually be called subatomic states. Particles bring to mind a particle of sand or a particle of salt. Just look at the many experiments that have been done like entanglement swapping or delayed choice and you know you're not dealing with anything material on a fundamental level.

I can entangle two particle pairs. Alice has two particles that are entangled and Bob has two particles that are entangled. Alice and Bob sent one particle to Victor and Victor's choice determines rather the two particles held by Bob and Alice will be entangled or separable even after Alice and Bob made a measurement!! It's like Victor's choice determines what happened in the past. It also points to the preservation of entanglement.

If I create an entangled particle pair and send one particle to detector 0 at say 1 PM and send the second entangled particle to a beam splitter that's set up to send some of the photons to detector 1 and some of the photons to detector 2. If the photon goes to detector 1 the photon at detector 0 will behave like a particle but if it goes to detector 2 the photon at detector 0 will behave like a wave EVEN IF THIS OCCURS AT 1:15 PM AFTER THE PHOTON AT DETECTOR D0 HAS BEEN DETECTED!!

This isn't materialism. This is information and what we call particles are like pixels on a space-time screen. How does the photon at detector 0 know whether it's entangled pair will be sent to detector 1 or 2? It has to know this because if it's entangled pair goes to detector 1 and it's a particle the measurements are correlated. If it goes to detector 2 and behaves like a wave, their measurements are correlated and this happens at detector 0 before the photon goes through the beam splitter to detector's 1 or 2!!!!! SIMPLY AMAZING!!

This isn't materialism.

Quantum decision affects results of measurements taken earlier in time
arstechnica.com...

Weird! Quantum Entanglement Can Reach into the Past
www.livescience.com...

Scientists show future events decide what happens in the past
www.digitaljournal.com...

Here's a paper that says the wave function is real but non physical

The wave-function is real but nonphysical: A view from counterfactual quantum cryptography

Counterfactual quantum cryptography (CQC) is used here as a tool to assess the status of the quantum state: Is it real/ontic (an objective state of Nature) or epistemic (a state of the observer's knowledge)? In contrast to recent approaches to wave function ontology, that are based on realist models of quantum theory, here we recast the question as a problem of communication between a sender (Bob), who uses interaction-free measurements, and a receiver (Alice), who observes an interference pattern in a Mach-Zehnder set-up. An advantage of our approach is that it allows us to define the concept of "physical", apart from "real". In instances of counterfactual quantum communication, reality is ascribed to the interaction-freely measured wave function (ψ) because Alice deterministically infers Bob's measurement. On the other hand, ψ does not correspond to the physical transmission of a particle because it produced no detection on Bob's apparatus. We therefore conclude that the wave function in this case (and by extension, generally) is real, but not physical. Characteristically for classical phenomena, the reality and physicality of objects are equivalent, whereas for quantum phenomena, the former is strictly weaker. As a concrete application of this idea, the nonphysical reality of the wavefunction is shown to be the basic nonclassical phenomenon that underlies the security of CQC.

arxiv.org...

There's NO EVIDENCE that an objective material universe exists!

a reply to: CB328

Well the fact that matter at the macro level follows predictable patterns that we can measure and verify seems like proof to me.

Seems like proof and is proof are two different things .

a reply to: neoholographic

The problem is the lack of philosophy involved in science. Read Des cartes that will clue you into what you're asking about. The reality is that we can't know anything with absolute certainty except that we our Consciousness at least exist. If we can't agree on that there can be no agreement on anything you have to start from the foundation of what you actually know with certainty. Then you can determine what is likely and so forth.

Jaden

a reply to: neoholographic

The problem is the lack of philosophy involved in science. Read Des cartes that will clue you into what you're asking about. The reality is that we can't know anything with absolute certainty except that we our Consciousness at least exist. If we can't agree on that there can be no agreement on anything you have to start from the foundation of what you actually know with certainty. Then you can determine what is likely and so forth.

Jaden

a reply to: neoholographic

Autism?

a reply to: neoholographic

Ok so you don't like the conclusions scientists have come to about the universe based on observations made over thousands of years. Fair enough. So....do what other scientists do.....take whatever observations you have made, perform repeatable tests on your data and form a hypothesis based on your results.

Otherwise what else are you doing except making up a bunch of fantastical nonsense?

Science isn't a religion or somekind of belief system. It's a way of logically and methodically observing things around you. Nothing else. Science doesn't usually say anything's true...science is more about...well we're pretty sure it's this because we tried all this # and it's not right but we may be wrong.

a reply to: neoholographic

Interesting thread. Especially the parts about teleportation and entanglement swapping.

a reply to: neoholographic


The idea, ultimately, is whether or not the universe has structural laws - and you haven't even recognized or acknowledged any of this. You act as if an arbitrary image is being projected upon the "screen" of the universe by some arbitrary person.

The universe has produced trillions upon trillions upon trillions of 'things' - astronomically large as well as small.

Aren't you at all interested in how objects like us emerge?

Yes. The state of matter is probabilistic, but this issue has been solved with Qauntum Bayesianism - which says that already existing states bias the structuring of subatomic particles; to put this into the language of Stuart Kaufman, the "res potential" is being probabilistically directed by the "res extensa".

Because things are asynchronous - that is, not completely 'unified', but moving at different rates, producing different structural forms, in a 'universe of musical motion', where synchrony and symmetry exist within a large background of asymmetry and 'randomness', it is actually the influence of one (asymmetry) on the other (symmetry) which brings about matter in its various complex forms.

As to there is no evidence that no material universe exists? That is a manic - as in, unhealthy, excessive, over-determined, and something most people would consider to be an arrogant assertion which is counterweighed by boat loads of evidence from various sciences.

You can't think you're infallible i.e. cannot be wrong.

a reply to: Astrocyte

As to there is no evidence that no material universe exists? That is a manic - as in, unhealthy, excessive, over-determined, and something most people would consider to be an arrogant assertion which is counterweighed by boat loads of evidence from various sciences.

With Quantum physics t an act of observation causes wave collapse. At this point peoples shoud be able to understand that consciousness is a force in the universe. The question we all should be asking is how much of a force is it. It is possible for example that every other force could be an epiphenomena of consciousness. If this is case for scientific materialism.

You want to find the edge of the universe. Find the edge of your mind.

a reply to: dug88

Science isn't a religion or somekind of belief system. It's a way of logically and methodically observing things around you. Nothing else. Science

Yes science is a believe system. It makes presumptions. It stories that pretend to understand the infinite.

a reply to: Masterjaden

The problem is the lack of philosophy involved in science. Read Des cartes that will clue you into what you're asking about. The reality is that we can't know anything with absolute certainty except that we our Consciousness at least exist

See thats a funny thing. There is no scientific proof to show that your being is having a subjective experience. Science cannot prove you are consciousness. The one and only thing you know to be a reality cannot be proved by science. Understand the limitation of the tool.

a reply to: Astrocyte
A lot of neo's arguments about quantum this and that infers a lack of materialism remind me of the Schrödinger's cat paradox, which a lot of people misinterpret. The paradox isn't that the cat in the box is both alive and dead at the same time in a superposition of states, rather the whole thing was a demonstration of how ridiculous the idea is that a cat would be in a superposition of states like that.

So, the true meaning of Schrödinger's cat paradox is that there is a material cat and it's either dead or alive and there was a bit of mystery about how we get from the quantum world of particles, to that. This is an area where researchers have made some progress on the topic of decoherence, though it's still a topic of ongoing research.

Decoherence happens pretty easily in environments humans feel comfortable in, and it's something we don't want in quantum computers so they are often cooled to near absolute zero to prevent or reduce decoherence. This is part of the reason why our normal experience in our normal environment doesn't seem very quantum-like and makes it hard to swallow any claim that quantum this or that means materialism doesn't exist. That's like saying the cat is both alive and dead at the same time, which really makes the person saying it seem ignorant and completely missing the point that it's not.

a reply to: neoholographic

pretty sure the basis is that for the last million years, we could only look at matter and say "it seems to exist"

it wasnt until modern times we had the ability to peer into the atom and discover it was hollow 99% empty space.

so we have a millennia of dogma stuck in our culture that we will have to replace with new observations that we still arent able to fully explain.

originally posted by: purplemer
a reply to: dug88

Science isn't a religion or somekind of belief system. It's a way of logically and methodically observing things around you. Nothing else. Science

Yes science is a believe system. It makes presumptions. It stories that pretend to understand the infinite.

Hmmm nope....

en.m.wikipedia.org...

It's actually not....

 the scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses".[1] Experiments are a procedure designed to test hypotheses. Experiments are an important tool of the scientific method.[2][3] To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.[4]

People are naturally inquisitive, so they often come up with questions about things they see or hear, and they often develop ideas or hypotheses about why things are the way they are. The best hypotheses lead to predictions that can be tested in various ways. The most conclusive testing of hypotheses comes from reasoning based on carefully controlled experimental data. Depending on how well additional tests match the predictions, the original hypothesis may require refinement, alteration, expansion or even rejection. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported, a general theory may be developed.[5]

The thing is....people don't like to accept we don't know # all...so idiots decide science.tells you the way the world works....it doesn't....it never has...
It says a lot about how things don't work but not much about how it does. The news and people in general will read some report or journal article and decide that science says this....no scientist will say this...if you ever actually take the time to read an actual scientific journal article head to the results section and you should see something along the lines of...based on the data collected and our methodology we found that x hypothesis is supported...or not supported by the data...anything else is some news bull#. Any published journal article typically ends this way...the only part of the article where the people doing the study give their own interpretation of the results in in a specific conclusion section.This part will usually be found in the abstract...which is pretty much the only part of a journal article i've ever personally seen covered in any kind of news story.

An abstract ia typically 1-2 paragraphs no matter the size of the study...you really don't get a lot of information about what went on from this...I highly recommend searching out the actual article referenced in any news story because chances are the people writing about it only read the abstract or skimmed through the article and there's a good chance they put their own spin on it...I don't think i've ever seen a news article written about some study that has ever gotten it right...and while being trained as a biologist was specifically warned against the media as they fill everything with bull# pretty much no matter what you write or say.

a reply to: Astrocyte

More bloviating. You said:

As to there is no evidence that no material universe exists? That is a manic - as in, unhealthy, excessive, over-determined, and something most people would consider to be an arrogant assertion which is counterweighed by boat loads of evidence from various sciences.

LOL, you haven't provided a shred of evidence. Just long winded bloviating. Everything I say I support with articles, videos and published papers.

I have been debating some of these issues for years online and at Universities and I have yet to see a shred of evidence to support the notion that a 3D objective material reality exists. You said there's "BOATLOADS OF EVIDENCE FROM VARIOUS SCIENCES" but this is a VACUOUS statement because you haven't provided a shred of evidence just a bunch of hot air.

For instance, how can a reality exist of actual matter when the maximum entropy of a volume of space is proportional to it's 2D surface area and not it's volume?

Again, this is physics not bloviating. If you tried to pack matter into a volume of space, you would exceed it's maximum entropy and a table, computer or TV would collapse into a black hole. Here's an article from 2011 that explains this well.

This strange quality give black holes something that physicists call maximal entropy. Entropy describes the number of different ways you can rearrange the components of something—“a system”—and still have it look essentially the same. The pages of a novel, as Brian Greene points out, have very low entropy, because as soon as one page is out of place, you have a different book. The alphabet has low entropy, too: Move one letter and any four-year-old can tell something is wrong. A bucket of sand, on the other hand, has high entropy. Switch this grain for that grain and no one would ever know the difference. Black holes, which look the same no matter what you put in them or how you move it about, have the highest entropy of all.

Entropy is also a measure of the amount of information it would take to describe a system completely. The entropy of ordinary objects—people, sand buckets, containers of gas—is proportional to their volume. Double the volume of a helium balloon, for instance, and its entropy will increase by a factor of eight. But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein discovered that the entropy of a black hole obeys a different scaling rule. It is proportional not to the black hole’s three-dimensional volume but to its two-dimensional surface area, defined here as the area of the invisible boundary called the event horizon. Therefore, while the actual entropy of an ordinary object—say, a hamburger—scales with its volume, the maximum entropy that could theoretically be contained in the space occupied by the hamburger depends not on the volume of the hamburger but on the size of its surface area. Physics prevents the entropy of the hamburger from ever exceeding that maximum: If one somehow tried to pack so much entropy into the hamburger that it reached that limit, the hamburger would collapse into a black hole.

www.pbs.org...

If you tried to fill a volume of space with actual matter, it would exceed the maximum entropy allowed in that volume of space and collapse into a black hole.

These are things Scientist have been debating for years. People don't say these things just because. It goes on to say:

The inescapable conclusion is that all the information it takes to describe a three-dimensional object—a black hole, a hamburger, or a whole universe—can be expressed in two dimensions. This suggests to physicists that the deepest description of our universe and its parts—the ultimate theory of physics—must be crafted in two spatial dimensions, not three. Which brings us back to the hologram.

This has been strengthened over the years because General Relativity breaks down when it reaches quantum levels. Scientist discovered that there's a better correspondence between GR and QM when you remove gravity and just use information on a 2D surface area to describe the 3D universe we experience.

So this boatload of evidence doesn't exist. This is why your posts are devoid of any evidence just endless pontificating.

originally posted by: neoholographic
a reply to: Astrocyte

More bloviating. You said:

As to there is no evidence that no material universe exists? That is a manic - as in, unhealthy, excessive, over-determined, and something most people would consider to be an arrogant assertion which is counterweighed by boat loads of evidence from various sciences.

LOL, you haven't provided a shred of evidence. Just long winded bloviating. Everything I say I support with articles, videos and published papers.

I have been debating some of these issues for years online and at Universities and I have yet to see a shred of evidence to support the notion that a 3D objective material reality exists. You said there's "BOATLOADS OF EVIDENCE FROM VARIOUS SCIENCES" but this is a VACUOUS statement because you haven't provided a shred of evidence just a bunch of hot air.

For instance, how can a reality exist of actual matter when the maximum entropy of a volume of space is proportional to it's 2D surface area and not it's volume?

Again, this is physics not bloviating. If you tried to pack matter into a volume of space, you would exceed it's maximum entropy and a table, computer or TV would collapse into a black hole. Here's an article from 2011 that explains this well.

This strange quality give black holes something that physicists call maximal entropy. Entropy describes the number of different ways you can rearrange the components of something—“a system”—and still have it look essentially the same. The pages of a novel, as Brian Greene points out, have very low entropy, because as soon as one page is out of place, you have a different book. The alphabet has low entropy, too: Move one letter and any four-year-old can tell something is wrong. A bucket of sand, on the other hand, has high entropy. Switch this grain for that grain and no one would ever know the difference. Black holes, which look the same no matter what you put in them or how you move it about, have the highest entropy of all.

Entropy is also a measure of the amount of information it would take to describe a system completely. The entropy of ordinary objects—people, sand buckets, containers of gas—is proportional to their volume. Double the volume of a helium balloon, for instance, and its entropy will increase by a factor of eight. But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein discovered that the entropy of a black hole obeys a different scaling rule. It is proportional not to the black hole’s three-dimensional volume but to its two-dimensional surface area, defined here as the area of the invisible boundary called the event horizon. Therefore, while the actual entropy of an ordinary object—say, a hamburger—scales with its volume, the maximum entropy that could theoretically be contained in the space occupied by the hamburger depends not on the volume of the hamburger but on the size of its surface area. Physics prevents the entropy of the hamburger from ever exceeding that maximum: If one somehow tried to pack so much entropy into the hamburger that it reached that limit, the hamburger would collapse into a black hole.

www.pbs.org...

If you tried to fill a volume of space with actual matter, it would exceed the maximum entropy allowed in that volume of space and collapse into a black hole.

These are things Scientist have been debating for years. People don't say these things just because. It goes on to say:

The inescapable conclusion is that all the information it takes to describe a three-dimensional object—a black hole, a hamburger, or a whole universe—can be expressed in two dimensions. This suggests to physicists that the deepest description of our universe and its parts—the ultimate theory of physics—must be crafted in two spatial dimensions, not three. Which brings us back to the hologram.

This has been strengthened over the years because General Relativity breaks down when it reaches quantum levels. Scientist discovered that there's a better correspondence between GR and QM when you remove gravity and just use information on a 2D surface area to describe the 3D universe we experience.

So this boatload of evidence doesn't exist. This is why your posts are devoid of any evidence just endless pontificating.

So referring to the sections you bolded...what's the point you're trying to make?

I see a section on black holes having high entropy and being two dimensional, a section about packing energy into a hamburger and turning it into a black hole then a conclusion that only says that all the information needed used to describe the universe can be expressed in two dimensions...

Just because you can express something in two dimensions doesn't make it two dimensional...

It's funny, you've spent this whole thread blasting science, yet you quote physicists....sorry you quote the media's interpretation of the work of physicists....

Why is it the people who scream the loudest about science being a religion are inevitably the ones that treat if as such...

At this point we kinda don't know what the #'s going on. You're right theories humanity has been working with for a few decades are incomplete or wrong. These new theories coming out are trying to fix errors in previous theories or replace it with new ones....that doesn't mean they're right....it doesn't mean the old ones are as wrong as we think now...and it doesn't mean we're even close to the right track....humans have changed our model of the universe over the centuries as our measuring equipment became more refined and theories have been built over theories.

In the end we'll never know what the universe is. It's never going to happen ever...we'll never stop trying to figure it out...but we'll never get it.

Hi all,

I'm no expert in this, but I find it very interesting. There are some videos that I've found to explain in detail why consciousness is fundamental. There are a lot of scientists who claim this as well (more on that later).

This is one of them:



Furthermore there is a researcher who is really good at explaining this in easy to understand terms (for laypeople like myself)

His name is Bernardo Kastrup. Here's one of his latest articles: Thinking Outside the Quantum Box

The problem is that quantum theory contradicts our intuitive understanding of what “real” means. According to the theory, if two real particles A and B are prepared in a special way, what Alice sees when she observes particle A depends on how Bob concurrently observes particle B, even if the particles—as well as Alice and Bob—are separated by an arbitrary distance. This “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein called it, contradicts either local causation or the very notion that particles A and B are “real,” in the sense of existing independently of observation. As it turns out, certain statistical properties of the observations, which have been experimentally confirmed, indicate the latter: that the particles do not exist independently of observation. And since observation ultimately consists of what is apprehended on the mental screen of perception, the implication may be that “the Universe is entirely mental,” as put by Richard Conn Henry in his 2005 Nature essay.

Here he goes more in detail (pdf file):

Making Sense of the Mental Universe


EDIT: Adding another one of his articles:

Should Quantum Anomalies Make Us Rethink Reality?
Inexplicable lab results may be telling us we’re on the cusp of a new scientific paradigm

Every generation tends to believe that its views on the nature of reality are either true or quite close to the truth. We are no exception to this: although we know that the ideas of earlier generations were each time supplanted by those of a later one, we still believe that this time we got it right. Our ancestors were naïve and superstitious, but we are objective—or so we tell ourselves. We know that matter/energy, outside and independent of mind, is the fundamental stuff of nature, everything else being derived from it—or do we?

In fact, studies have shown that there is an intimate relationship between the world we perceive and the conceptual categories encoded in the language we speak. We don’t perceive a purely objective world out there, but one subliminally pre-partitioned and pre-interpreted according to culture-bound categories. For instance, “color words in a given language shape human perception of color.” A brain imaging study suggests that language processing areas are directly involved even in the simplest discriminations of basic colors. Moreover, this kind of “categorical perception is a phenomenon that has been reported not only for color, but for other perceptual continua, such as phonemes, musical tones and facial expressions.” In an important sense, we see what our unexamined cultural categories teach us to see, which may help explain why every generation is so confident in their own worldview.

So to salvage the current paradigm there is an important sense in which one has to reject the predictions of QM regarding entanglement. Yet, since Alain Aspect’s seminal experiments in 1981–82, these predictions have been repeatedly confirmed, with potential experimental loopholes closed one by one. 1998 was a particularly fruitful year, with two remarkable experiments performed in Switzerland and Austria. In 2011 and 2015, new experiments again challenged non-contextuality. Commenting on this, physicist Anton Zeilinger has been quoted as saying that “there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure [that is, observe] about a system has [an independent] reality.” Finally, Dutch researchers successfully performed a test closing all remaining potential loopholes, which was considered by Nature the “toughest test yet.”

The only alternative left for those holding on to the current paradigm is to postulate some form of non-locality: nature must have—or so they speculate—observation-independent hidden properties, entirely missed by QM, which are “smeared out” across spacetime. It is this allegedly omnipresent, invisible but objective background that supposedly orchestrates entanglement from “behind the scenes.”

It turns out, however, that some predictions of QM are incompatible with non-contextuality even for a large and important class of non-local theories. Experimental results reported in 2007 and 2010 have confirmed these predictions. To reconcile these results with the current paradigm would require a profoundly counterintuitive redefinition of what we call “objectivity.” And since contemporary culture has come to associate objectivity with reality itself, the science press felt compelled to report on this by pronouncing, “Quantum physics says goodbye to reality.”