THE BASIS Of MATERIALISM has always claimed to be able to reduce reality to its smallest and most real unit, all composites being assumed to be temporary arrangements and, so their ultimate significance illusory. The atomists weren't only at work in the Greek and Latin speaking worlds, they were more widespread than that and it took a long time for their imagined smallest unit of what was really real to be known to be composed of smaller units and those units of smaller units, etc. The imaginary strings of the fading-in-popularity String Theory - which has yet to cohere into a uniform ideology (it's not a science until it makes predictions and confirms those in observation). I don't think they'll ever be able to peel the onion down to that level and I doubt, if they could, it would give an always and eternally complete answer as to what's really, really . . . . reallyreallyreallly real.
And it's not only that part of modern reductionism that is full of problems, quantum theory, though a real science, is hardly uniform in what it holds or claims.
I don't keep up with the latest of the latest but I wonder if they really have any idea what and how what they're discovering really is or how it works. This is related to my pointing out that science can't explain how either consciousness or, in fact, mathematical objects can interact with the physical objects that science was invented to investigate, explain and control. Since the movements and interaction of objects is the topic, does science really understand what forces and fields are and how they move objects? Does it understand what the energy that is theorized as the mover is or how it accumulates or dissipates into different areas, perhaps into different objects so as to cause them to move apart or come together? Where within a subatomic particle does this energy gather so as to initiate movement? Or if it's not contained within the object, why does the energy choose to move this or that subatomic particle or entity and not another one? Does an electron have some mechanism or regulation of the accumulation or effect of energy some internal structure that will explain how this happens. And, again, how is mathematics that to us appears so complex as to not be apparent until we've had many, many years of advanced schooling, interacting with a seeming perfection with these unconscious entities continually?
The immateriality of mathematical entities - calling them, numbers and operations and results "objects" is merely a physical metaphor - is made clear through their relevance to different physical phenomena and rational applicability in different areas. Why should counting discrete objects and counting accumulated measurements, the measurements of physical objects and the areas of time and speed work if the numbers and operations are tied to the physical natures of these different things? The truths of mathematics, about things we can only access through the most obvious of acts of imagination, would seem to transcend any physical substrate, so the basic claim of materialism would have to be wrong if science is to be taken seriously.
I don't think reductionism gets you closer to a finite truth than any other ideological program is going to. Mad, God drunken William Blake's mystical insight into the inadequacies of The Atoms of Democritus and Newton's particles of light as the last word (since then confirmed by science) is more impressive to me than the fussy, petulant insistence of a Sean Carroll or the absurd demand of Stephen Hawking that we just allow equations to have the powers of creator demiurges and that he gets to call that science, not a single observation or measurement of the natural world ever made. And, due to his credentials and PR, that's considered to be science as seen on TV and in the flicker pictures. It's sort of ironic that hate mail has led me to writing two pieces about the ultimate decadence of modernism in one morning.
I left the play left and modernism for the real left about fourteen years ago, I haven't missed the play left at all. And I'm far more radical now than I was then.
Update: Considering the fleeting status of any theory of cosmology as being durable in the culture of contemporary, credentialed thought, it's hilarious for materialist cosmologists to try to determine what has the status of eternal reality.
The idea that something that changes and disappears, or, rather, seems to disappear isn't as real as something that persists for however many billions of years current scientists believe a proton or electron might persist is pretty funny, especially among those who, on the basis of calculation and not observation come up with tales of the first fractions of a second or minutes after the Big Bang and what came into being then and, on the other end, the various dismal scenarios of either the heat death or the big bounce or whatever is coming. Clearly those would have to include not talked about realities that materialism and scientism can't include and atheism detests anyone believing makes more sense than the various things atheist cosmologists make up to avoid anyone believing that God makes more sense of it all.
When pressed as hard as I'm willing to take it, most atheists seem to angrily give up and resort to their more typical rhetorical devices of ridicule, trash-talkin' and appeals to the prejudices of their camp. But I don't buy that anymore.
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