Materialism

A world view regarded as an implication of the discoveries in science, materialism attributed to matter the status as the underlying constituent of nature, matter as material particles subject to fundamental forces, their interactions determining the shape, size, and motion of all objects in the natural world.

Originating with the ancient Greek atomists and flourishing for three centuries since time of Isaac Newton, materialism excluded any explanations of reality that could not be reduced to the physics of the time.

Materialism denied supernaturalism, in that it denied that independent spiritual or divine powers ever account for events, and held that natural forces always explain events, even in instances where lack of knowledge precluded explanation (Joad 2005). It affirmed determinism, in that it asserted that all events of the world result from preceding ones, and that knowledge of the state of the world at any given time can in principle predict the state of the world at a future time. It was a philosophy of mechanism and determinism in respect of workings of the natural world.

Philosopher Jessica Wilson emphasizes that materialism is no longer a viable philosophy (Wilson 2006):

Materialism, roughly formulated, is the thesis that all broadly scientific entities are nothing over and above material entities, where the latter are characterized as being extended, impenetrable, conserved, such as to (only) deterministically interact, and so on. The material entities ultimately supposed to serve as an ontological basis for all else are those existing at relatively low orders of constitutional complexity – entities that are, as I’ll put it, ‘‘relatively fundamental’’. But contemporary physics has reported that the relatively fundamental entities have few, if any, of the characteristics of the material; and thus materialism has been rendered a has-been (Wilson 2006)

Physicists and science popularizers agree, proclaiming "Materialism is dead" (Davies and Gribbin 1992, 2007):

An extension of the quantum theory, known as quantum field theory…paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. In this theory, little distinction remains between material substance and apparently empty space, which itself seethes with ephemeral quantum activity. The culmination of these ideas is the so-called superstring theory, which seeks to unite space, time and matter, and to build all of them from the vibrations of submicroscopic loops of invisible string inhabiting a ten-dimensional imaginary universe.

...scientists are increasingly thinking of the physical Universe less as a collection of cogs in a machine and more as an information-processing system. Gone are the clodlike lumps of matter, to be replaced instead by "bits" of information. This is the shape of the emerging universe paradigm—a complex system in which mind, intelligence and information are more important than the hardware.

References

• Davies PCW, Gribbin JR. (2007) The Matter Myth: Dramatic Discoveries That Challenge Our Understanding of Physical Reality. Simon & Schuster: New York. ISBN 9780743290913 (pbk). Preview book online at Google Books here.
  • Excerpt: Quantum physics undermines materialism because it reveals that matter has far less "substance" than we might believe….matter as such has been demoted from its central role, to be replaced by concepts such as organization, complexity and information.

• Joad CEM. (1936, 1950) Guide to Philosphy. London: V. Gollancz, ltd. | Google Books preview 1950 ed.

• Wilson J. (2006) On Characterizing the Physical. Philosophical Studies 131:61-99.

---