What are your thoughts on materialism?is it an illusion?, page 1

If the material world is an illusion, it is a well-organized illusion...organized by our brain and perception.

Think of a stone...one small enough to hold in your hand, grasshopper. (couldn't resist)

Close your eyes and visualize this stone...is it light gray? Does it have striations, like layers? What is it's shape? Is it smooth like it rolled endlessly on a seashore or washed in a fast creek? What is its weight?

As you consider all these descriptive qualities of the stone, you are, in fact, creating the stone in your mind. The mental image, not based in reality, is constructed through your perception by the memories you have experienced by handling stones in the material world. It is a ghost of a stone, existing only in your mind, but hold onto that idea of the mind-made stone.

Now, if you were to pick up a stone in the material world, you would be able to tell what it looks and feels like without using your mind, right? All of the features of the stone existed prior to you viewing it, (or, so it would seem).

So, what is the difference between the two...in reality?

from The Theory of Knowledge Louis J Pojman;

Part VII A Priori Knowledge W V Quine:

As an empiracist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediates- not by definition in terms of exerience, but simply as posits compareable, epistomologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homers gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

{bolding mine}

Laymans explanation? The stone you hold in your hand differs only from the stone in your mind because it is convenient for you to think so. To question the reality of the stone in your hand is too difficult for us to manage. And, vice versa, the stone in your mind cannot be real because you do not wish it to be real.
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edit to remove '('

[edit on 28-2-2006 by masqua]