The heyday of materialism was the 19th century, when it seemed to be clear that in time the universe and everything in it would be explained by one thing, the material. Materialism was the world view that the only truly existing entity was matter. All other things (particularly thinking) could be explained by recourse to material explanation. Matter thought to be tiny hard balls of solidity or extension in three dimensions. The ontology of the world, i.e.: what exists? was answered by using just one word – matter.

This was the culmination of a couple of centuries of wrangling over the Cartesian mind/body problem. It was agreed that logically, only one thing can actually exist, matter won the argument over mind and philosophical materialism reigned supreme until the advent of quantum mechanics. Then materialism failed.

Quantum mechanics and subsequent physics cannot be explained with such a simplistic account of the world. A new ontology evolved which is now used as the fundamental basis for all that exists. The new ontology includes such ephemeral entities as fields, quantum particles and spacetime points. These are the new entities that physicists see as being the fundamentals of existence. For the casual observer there was no major paradigm shift. Matter could not explain everything but the new physical entities being described could. Overnight the average materialist became a physicalist and basically assumed that it was more or less the same. But a close attention to the detail and we can see that it is not.

Materialism was a clear and distinct philosophy. It defined what it believed and it was clear what it did not believe. We could say that materialism is actually a falsifiable theory and as such is a scientific theory. It believes that the fundamental stuff of the world is matter and if that is proven to be false then materialism is falsified. If more than matter is required to explain reality, then materialism is false. The clear definition of materialism was that there is one thing that exists and that one thing is matter. Nothing else exists. The ontology of materialism is thus clearly defined.

Physicalism does not have a fixed ontology in the way that materialism had. Physicists will quite happily rearrange their idea of what is needed to explain the fundamental principles of reality. They will take things out of their list and they will add things to their list. It is a work in progress. Should a physicist deide that a new entity needs adding to the list then it will be added. Should there be no need to keep something on the list, then it will be removed. Physicalism does not make any claims about what exists in the world and what does not. The list is continuously changing and being updated according to current knowledge.

Now if at some point in the course of future science physicists decide that we need to introduce the idea of angel and demon particles into the ontology of the universe, then they will. And just because the new ontology includes angels and demons, who is to say that such an inclusion refutes physicalism?

Physicalism then is no more than the claim that some future perfect science will one day be able to explain everything. But then this is true by definition; a future perfect science will explain everything that is why it is called perfect. And more importantly, physicalism does not refute the idea that mental phenomena are fundamental. Materialism denied the mental by definition, yet materialism is not enough to understand the world. Physicalism is a work in progress and without contradicting itself, could yet be forced to accommodate the mental as a fundamental entity of existence.

The philosophy of materialism then was the idea that mental phenomena do not exist in a fundamental way. The mental was a consequence of the material. Materialism does not work as an explanation of reality so it was replaced by physicalism. Yet physicalism does not perform the same crucial task that materialism once did; that of denying the fundamental existence of mind. Because physicalism is a work still in progress, it has no clear ontology, it is not a scientific or falsifiable theory in the way materialism once was. Physicalism is true, but it is true vacuously. Physicalism cannot be proven false no matter what we discover about our universe. In that sense it is no replacement for materialism and to present materialism, an abandoned theory, or physicalism, a vacuous theory, as support for any belief is to misrepresent the facts.

Materialism philosophy comes in too different brands. There is metaphysical materialism which is concerned with the nature of things that exist. There is also political materialism which is concerned with human behaviour and social organisation. This article is concerned only with the former type of philosophical materialism.

In recent decades there has been a massive growth in popular science books written by eminent scientists with the non-science specialist in mind. Some of the best known of these have been extremely careless in their philosophical presentations. Materialism is presented by some, as fact, when it is not fact. Indeed, it is false and has been discarded as a philosophical position by scientists approximately a hundred years ago.

The main proponent of a materialist philosophy in recent years has been Richard Dawkins. I can well understand him taking on the unscientific groups who seek to undermine rational understanding but to do so by presenting science wrapped in a materialist philosophy is to my mind a grave mistake. Quite simply materialism as a philosophy is dead and has been dead for a century.

I am all in favour of promoting science and the rational understanding of the world in which we live, but pretending that science and rationalism need to embrace materialist philosophy does not help. There are ways of viewing the world that do not entail a philosophical materialist interpretation and there are ways of understanding the world non-materially that do not contradict any known scientific facts.

Too frequently science is presented as materialist to counter some irrational position when materialism itself is equally objectionable. Dawkins speaks of evolutionary theory as an idea that refutes God. It does not. There may be arguments against the theist God but evolutionary theory is not one of them. Dawkins also presents life and human existence as a purely random and accidental occurrence. This may well be a true representation of the universe, but it is by no means clear that we are here by mere randomness. There is certainly no scientific evidence to believe such a proposition and it is equally valid to assume that the universe must be here in the way it is and could not exist in any other way. This is a philosophical question that science has been unable to answer. There are many scientists who would argue the point if were not for the fear of being grouped amongst the irrational.

Philosophical materialism is not a scientific fact and presenting it as such does not help. Materialism philosophy needs to be exposed for the redundant philosophy that it is. If we wish to argue for a rational and scientific understanding of reality then dropping the already discredited theories is important. Rant over.

From a purely rational perspective it seems that we are forced to accept that there is only one thing that exists in the universe. What it is we should consider that thing to be is a very difficult problem to present a conclusion to. Materialism and monism are presented together as the roots of all explanation, but can materialism and monism stand up to scrutiny? In short, monism can but materialism cannot.

About a hundred years ago materialism was discarded as a philosophical theory, not that many scientists or philosophers seem too keen to point that fact out. The
philosophical materialism of the nineteenth century was replaced by the new idea of physicalism. They seem very similar and are expected to perform the same task in understanding the world we inhabit, but physicalism does not play the same role that materialism once did. I shall make a post to explain this more clearly later. For now we shall look at the shortcomings of materialism of itself.

Remember that materialism states that all that exists is matter, extended in three dimensions and all that exists can be explained by a reduction to that three dimensional matter. I shall discuss two different objections. The first takes a little consideration but the second, in my opinion, is a fatal blow to materialist philosophy.

The first objection asks you to consider a world in which explanation has reached the end. We have discovered the means by which matter and ideas are related and there are scientists who are capable of looking at different molecular structures and telling us which idea they represent. So imagine now that you are watching a film. A scientist has access to your brain and is able to monitor the molecular changes occurring in your brain. He can see your brain states changing and because he is a highly skilled and knowledgeable scientist he can work out which film you are watching and even whether you are enjoying the film or not.

The gap between matter and mind states, even on this intimate level is still too broad for us to claim that the gap has been closed. Even a scientist seeing such molecular detail is only seeing an arrangement of atoms and molecules. You watching the film on the other hand are experiencing a range of emotions and feelings which are nothing like the molecules that the scientist is observing. The experience and the physical arrangement of molecules are two completely different things. No amount of knowledge of molecular arrangement is ever going to make experience reducible to matter.

The second objection to a theory of materialism as monism is to consider our knowledge and what knowledge is. Imagine that there are two people with two conflicting ideas. The two ideas contradict each other so only one person or one idea can be true, the other must be false.

In a materialist philosophy we can state that each of these two ideas is reducible to a physical system of matter. Each idea represents a specific arrangement of molecules, one idea is true and the other is false. But what can it possibly mean to claim that a physical arrangement of molecules is false? An arrangement of molecules is a factual arrangement of molecules; it is a fact and cannot be false.

On a materialist conception of the world all ideas become reducible to molecular arrangements. Any molecular arrangement is a real part of the world and to call it false seems rather odd.

When discussing materialism and monism it is taken for granted that the two go together and are true. Monism is probably true and materialism is not. Materialism, as I have stated, has long since been discarded. Materialism was dropped by scientists because it could not fit the scientific facts. I shall deal with the shortcomings of its replacement theory, physicalism, in a later post.

The modern scientific notion of materialism was founded in the ideas of Descartes in the early years of the seventeenth century. Any discussion of philosophical materialism usually has Descartes materialism definition in mind. To recap, Descartes was distinguishing between two types of things which he assumed exists; mind and matter. Descartes concept of mind does not concern us here, but he spoke of ideas and sensations. His notion of what constituted matter was more clearly defined by Descartes, he suggested that matter had extension in three dimensions.

Now as science and knowledge developed this simple definition remained with some
qualification. Some spoke of hardness as well as extension, whilst later the idea of little balls became popular as an atomic theory evolved. The common factor in all of these suggestions was that matter was basic in the scheme of things and all other phenomena (which usually meant mind) were reducible to this one truly existing stuff: matter.

Though the definition of materialism had grown out of the ideas of Descartes, he himself did not propose a materialist explanation of existence. Descartes had postulated a dualist account. Matter existed and mental phenomena existed. Neither was reducible to the other, both were mutually independent existing things which somewhat mysteriously managed to co-exist with a large degree of mutual cooperation. As they were considered to be separate they could never interact, yet minds and matter did seem to interact. Dualism became instantly questionable as soon as Descartes suggested it, and little has changed to make us think otherwise. On purely rational grounds it seems that dualist accounts of reality cannot be possible.

Problems of this nature tend to invite much discussion and suggestions for their resolution. Many ideas were put forward to explain reality and mans place in the universe. Spinoza proposed that minds and matter were two aspects of the one thing, the one thing being God. Over time I shall look at this more closely. Malbranche put forward the idea that there are two existing things, mind and matter and that it is God who is active in correlating the two. When you hit the note on a piano for example, God simultaneously creates the idea of a sound in your mind. God truly was everywhere at all times for Malbranche.

Other attempts at resolving issues of mind and matter tended to remove one or the other from the equation. Berkeley for example decided that only minds existed and that matter was no more than an idea in the minds of man. This is an economic universe. It is through having ideas of whiteness and solidity that when combined give us an idea of a white wall. There is no white wall, just an idea of a white wall which is a result of our combined senses and mental images. Those ideas and mental images are derived from God.

However the most prevalent idea was that the only existing entity is matter. Descartes definition that matter is extension in three dimensions and the added notions of hardness and solidity provided the basic philosophical underpinning of scientific study through most of the last 300 hundred years. The general consensus is that matter exists and all else that exists is as a result of complex arrangements of matter. Therefore mental phenomena, ideas and emotions, are no more than a result of groups of atoms in specific arrays.

For many this concept of the human mind is taken for granted. Our scientific accounts of reality begin with the big bang and suggest that over time the matter created from nothing in the first few moments of time have evolved into complex arrangements. The matter came first and all has arisen from that matter. Life evolved in a series of tiny steps until now. On the surface that is a compelling narrative, but we don’t have to dig too deeply to discover that such a simple explanation has many problems.

In this series of posts I shall attempt to elucidate those problems and show how the materialism definition is actually a false assumption of the nature of the universe. I shall further point out that materialism has been a discarded idea for about a century and that its replacement theory, that of physicalism is no contender for the explanation of life and the universe. That scientists and philosophers still present materialism as a fait accompli is both misleading and disingenuous.

Metaphysical monism is an ancient problem which still continues to this day, at least for some. A definition of monism can be framed quite succinctly; monism states that there is just one kind of thing that exists in the universe, everything is thus reducible to this one thing.

The earliest form of this problem was in ancient Greece. The Greeks had a scientific belief that the world was made up of earth, fire, air and water. What they attempted to understand was whether these four constituents of the universe were ultimate, or was there something more fundamental that underpinned or gave rise to them. They were asking, “Is the world made up of earth, fire, air and water or is the world made up of just one thing that can appear as earth, fire, air and water.”

From our modern post scientific perspective such a view can seem rather primitive. We know for example that the four primitive substances of the ancient Greeks are all reducible to molecules and atoms. We can continue the reduction to protons and neutrons and still further to quarks, or at least to quarks and electrons. The problem has been solved then, or at least the problem as the Greeks saw it has been solved. The debate concerning monism is still alive for some, though in a different format.

It was Descartes who postulated that the universe was made up of two different types of thing. He suggested that there are material things and mental things. The problem with a dualist account of the existence of things within the universe is this: How can two different entities with nothing in common interact? If they are distinct then they cannot share the same attributes and cannot therefore mix. If they cannot mix then one cannot be aware of the other. This is indeed a very serious problem for any dualistic account of nature.

Monism resolves the problem, in effect, by ignoring it. Monism claims that there is only one thing that exists in the universe and that thing is usually considered to be matter. There are other forms of monism but material monism is usually the default monism. By considering that only matter can exist, the monist is making the claim that all other phenomena are reducible to matter. Mind then, becomes nothing more than arrangements of matter with the mental being dependent on the material.

I shall be looking at the nature of monism and its consequences for our views of existence in more detail over the next series of posts.