Penrose is a physicist that has worked on the great mysteries like cosmology and consciousness. For Penrose, he reluctantly calls himself a materialist because he admits he doesn’t know what matter really is even tho he ostensibly is a materialist in practice.

What do you make of this?

In light of the recent “religion” decree on lemmy, how does Penrose’s reluctance interact with notions of religon? If there is a non-physical world that interacts with the physical world, then is the non-physical world somehow immaterial? Or could it be material? Can the material be subdivided into “alternative materials” with seperate functions, similar to how structural forces give rise to attitudes, and attitudes give direction to maintain or change structures? Sometimes ideas become so entrenched that they become structural and affect matter beyond what happens in the brain. Similarly, material forces that are not present still affect us (and then those affects re affect us as we contextualize things), for example the actions of our ancestors or the past itself. Furthermore, with any amount of predictive ability, the looming, foreseen future affects the present even though it has not materialized.

Oftentimes we may be off put by a seperation between material and spiritual or non physical, but what if they are still basically the same thing and the distinction is a red herring.

  • @HaSch
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    1 year ago

    I think Penrose’s reluctance to say he believes in materialism is that for him it is an occupational necessity to challenge the commonly accepted beliefs about physics. Theoretical physicists like him have to be prepared to discard their ideas about materialism at any moment and look elsewhere in order to discover the necessary mathematics and conceptualise exactly what kind of objects they are dealing with. Of course they must have a strong grasp of the current state of science, but they also may need to take mental leaps and make conjectures, because merely deriving your results from what is previously known and believed can only take you so far in finding out new things about the universe.

  • @PolandIsAStateOfMindM
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    1 year ago

    For some reason i thought this guy died a long time ago. Anyway he’s like 10 times smarter than me at least so i won’t pretend to understand him. Experimental physics is weird science, some things they suspect are proven, some are not and some remains for very long in a limbo, even if math is sound. Therefore such careful agnosticism is understandable. Unfortunately, it often develops into the God in cracks (afaik did not for him), which do sometimes occur in most unlikely places. Also mention that scientists often tends to be crap philosophers.

    consciousness

    I would be very careful there. I’m far from even hobbyism, but some things there are pretty outrageous, as expected from a scientific discipline in its infancy.

    If there is a non-physical world that interacts with the physical world, then is the non-physical world somehow immaterial?

    I don’t think material/immaterial is even very important distinction, after all we all remember the issues with air or light. Or ideas, which too have material reason in brain activity.

    Similarly, material forces that are not present still affect us (and then those affects re affect us as we contextualize things), for example the actions of our ancestors or the past itself. Furthermore, with any amount of predictive ability, the looming, foreseen future affects the present even though it has not materialized.

    Well yeah, that’s why have dialectical materialism to make sense in that.

    Oftentimes we may be off put by a seperation between material and spiritual or non physical, but what if they are still basically the same thing and the distinction is a red herring.

    Personally i think everything that exist is susceptible to materialist analysis (or might be in the future with better tools), therefore something like supernatural simply do not exist at all, even if one day people suddenly start to manifest magical powers or if angels descent from heaven, those too will be the part of material world.

  • @cfgaussian
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    1 year ago

    Everything that is observable is by definition part of the natural or “material” world. This is why the concept of the so-called “supernatural”, meaning that which is “beyond” the natural or outside of the observable reality that we can measure, study and understand, is really sort of meaningless. If a phenomenon can be observed and studied then it ceases to be part of the “immaterial”. The “spiritual” or the “supernatural” have the essential defining characteristic of being un-measurable and in a scientific sense un-observable.

    Thus it becomes evident that these terms are all really just synonyms for “imaginary” or “non-existent”. In that sense it is impossible for something real to be “non-physical” because we can always expand our understanding of physics and the universe to incorporate new discoveries.

    A little aside here: the “material” or physical should not be confused as referring only to matter. There are plenty of things in the universe that are not matter but are just as real and as material as anything else. Matter refers only to things that have mass. Phenomena such as light/electromagnetism, nuclear forces, gravity, etc. are not counted in the matter category but they are nonetheless physical. And anyway, the distinction between matter and non-matter has become blurred since the discovery of relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy, one being convertible into the other and vice versa.

    And once we acknowledge that everything else that happens in the world follows from the most basic fundamental level of physics (because when you strip away all of the complexity that is all that is left), then it follows that every other phenomenon, no matter how complex or how many levels of abstraction removed it is from that most fundamental physical level, is necessarily also part of the same material world.

    Take for instance something as seemingly immaterial as memories. It would seem that they are something very ephemeral and un-physical, but really, because we know that our brains are physical objects that follow the laws of physics just like anything else, then it follows that memories too are just some arrangement of atoms and molecules and electrical charges in the neural network of our brain (though we should avoid comparing the human brain to something like a computer because that is a vulgar oversimplification).

    Now go one level of abstraction higher and consider the very nebulous concept of “culture” - when you boil it down to its most rudimentary even that is just an emergent phenomenon of the interaction of many brains with each other and the world around them, of people with memories and personalities shaped by their upbringing and their environment, by the actions of those who came before and the actions they took and the traces they left on the world (books, inscriptions, recordings, works of art, architecture, etc.) and on the minds of the people they came into contact with.

    All that exists is ultimately reducible to the interactions of electrons, photons, nuclei and other particles and forces on the smallest level of reality, but in no way does this cheapen or downplay the amazing richness and complexity and depth of the phenomena that occur at the human scale, nor can those phenomena be understood or predicted merely by understanding how subatomic physics works because they involve such uncountably enormous numbers of particles and interactions that there will never be a computer powerful enough to simulate them (and we will also never be able to have perfect and complete information about the position and state of every particle in a system of any meaningful size).

    Thus we need to construct higher level, more abstract frameworks, theories and models to explain and understand them, things like the social sciences and psychology and so on…and of course Marxism. And at the root of all of these is always observable reality. Scientific theories are constructed based on observation and validated by their ability to make correct predictions. A theory whose validity cannot be tested against reality is worthless. The “supernatural” is one of those worthless theories. To paraphrase what French mathematician Simon Laplace said to Napoleon: God is a redundant hypothesis.

  • ☭ 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗘𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 ☭A
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    1 year ago

    Materialism doesn’t mean we always have to adhere to the current understanding of matter – it’s improved massively since Marx was alive, for example. There will likely always be one thing we can’t understand (the “something out of nothing” problem), but scientists continue developing theories for everything “after” that. If there is a “non-physical world”, that’s just a distinction based on our current understanding of physics; if we can study it, it will no longer be “non-physical”

    Sometimes ideas become so entrenched that they become structural and affect matter beyond what happens in the brain.

    Not sure what you mean by this. An idea emerges from consciousness, and consciousness is a result of material interactions (even if we can’t fully explain it with our current knowledge)

    (btw, I had to change the language from Undetermined to English to post this)

    • @PolandIsAStateOfMindM
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      1 year ago

      Materialism doesn’t mean we always have to adhere to the current understanding of matter – it’s improved massively since Marx was alive, for example.

      Lenin wrote the same thing in “Materialism and Empiriocriticism”.

      Fun fact: idealists making fun of Engels and his Dialectics of Nature as full of obsolete bunkum are making superb selfown.

      (btw, I had to change the language from Undetermined to English to post this)

      I turned it back, should be ok now.

  • QueerCommie
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    1 year ago

    As an agnostic materialist, I doubt there is any “immaterial” forces. Anything that exists exists in the material world. However on the very edge of my perception of plausibility is the deist view that there is a god that set up the rules for the world (ie how matter, energy, gravity, etc work) and it just left the simulation to run for it to watch, and humanity is just an accident. Maybe that being, whatever it is is the “immaterial force” that you speak of. Given the inconsistency that theists claim of “god’s” intervention (Miracles), I do not think it’s possible for any supernatural acts to have occurred by this supposed creator, or at least if it’s done anything, it has no morality. Further, with Buddhism which is also near plausible, the main immaterial things are samsara and karma. Supposedly, what we do in this life affects our future lives. However, I feel this contradicts with materialism and other things Buddhists claim. With the former, everyone’s current ills are because they were bad before. But in socialism suffering and alienation will decrease and this will not be from Individuals moral actions. With the latter Buddhists claim there to be no objective morality from the universe, yet they claim there to be supernatural consequences for actions based on their morality. Maybe, theyre right and there is some force within material reality that today we would consider beyond earth, but will someday be discovered as part of how the universe works by science, idk. I find contradiction too in that they claim there to be no self, no soul, yet there is some essence that continues into another life. (For context, most of what I know of Buddhism is from Ajahn Brahm, maybe others have answers to my objections.) Idk if this is kind of thing I’m supposed to say in your materialist community, but feck it. Sorry for wall of text.

  • @v12riceburner
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    11 year ago

    The reason why not all scientists are materialists is because materialism (and science in general) is built on shaky philosophical foundations namely problem of induction and mind body problem. In practice most scientists are pragmatists (and also not philosophers) so they ignore these foundational problems and carry on with business as usual (as materialists) but make no claim about these things either way. We should probably do the same.