Matter has a specific meaning in physics but for this purpose I’d define matter as anything that exists in the world and behaves according to the rules of physics.
We can do science to determine how matter behaves and we can determine it keeps behaving that way whether any conscious being is interacting with it. That’s why I think matter is more of a foundation of reality than experience. Experience can come and go but matter keeps doing its thing.
Certainly we must rely on experience to learn anything about matter so from an epistemological point of view it is the foundation of knowledge but I do think we can discover a deeper foundation for reality through science.
Certainly we must rely on experience to learn anything about matter so from an epistemological point of view it is the foundation of knowledge but I do think we can discover a deeper foundation for reality through science.
There’s the crux of it. Problem is that science is the product of the human mind. Experience isn’t just the foundation of knowledge, it has to be the foundation of everything because to say anything about anything, nonsense or science, you need experience first. This includes any idea about what matter is or isn’t. We must first have an experience, and then we conceptualize it in some way - and then we try to desperately conceptualize it in a way that makes sense in the context of our previous conceptualizations. Because ironically, while some people insist on matter being prior, without realizing it they often make the human mind equally prior (“thoughts ARE the thing itself”). Bring them the map-territory problem and they get it, but it’s often hard to get them to apply the same idea onto their own mind.
To be sure, science is a great and reliable way to make predictions. However, ultimate reality will always be grander than anything the mind can capture, and as such, science will never be able to distill it either. That said, one hopes, eventually science will meet this realization (and indeed some scientists have). To put it very shortly, as long as one insists on a logical continuum, one can keep asking “and what’s beyond that” as logic necessarily requires a continuum of values to function. Foundation on which logic operates though, must be beyond what can be captured with logic.
Matter has a specific meaning in physics but for this purpose I’d define matter as anything that exists in the world and behaves according to the rules of physics.
We can do science to determine how matter behaves and we can determine it keeps behaving that way whether any conscious being is interacting with it. That’s why I think matter is more of a foundation of reality than experience. Experience can come and go but matter keeps doing its thing.
Certainly we must rely on experience to learn anything about matter so from an epistemological point of view it is the foundation of knowledge but I do think we can discover a deeper foundation for reality through science.
There’s the crux of it. Problem is that science is the product of the human mind. Experience isn’t just the foundation of knowledge, it has to be the foundation of everything because to say anything about anything, nonsense or science, you need experience first. This includes any idea about what matter is or isn’t. We must first have an experience, and then we conceptualize it in some way - and then we try to desperately conceptualize it in a way that makes sense in the context of our previous conceptualizations. Because ironically, while some people insist on matter being prior, without realizing it they often make the human mind equally prior (“thoughts ARE the thing itself”). Bring them the map-territory problem and they get it, but it’s often hard to get them to apply the same idea onto their own mind.
To be sure, science is a great and reliable way to make predictions. However, ultimate reality will always be grander than anything the mind can capture, and as such, science will never be able to distill it either. That said, one hopes, eventually science will meet this realization (and indeed some scientists have). To put it very shortly, as long as one insists on a logical continuum, one can keep asking “and what’s beyond that” as logic necessarily requires a continuum of values to function. Foundation on which logic operates though, must be beyond what can be captured with logic.