I have never seen quantum fields. All I see is space.
For example, excitations ripple across electro-magnetic fields.
Have you seen it? How does it look like? What shape, colour, size and weight is it?
I can see the color portion of the e/m spectrum; our instruments can detect the remainder.
All the quantum fields match our model of harmonic oscillators on a Fourier transform into sine waves as producing unit rungs of quanta for elementary ‘particles’ which are not true particles since they are directly field quanta.
So, no space, no time, no particles, and no human observers required.
For quantum gravity, to reconcile space-time and the quantum realm, quantizing quantum gravity doesn’t mean quantizing space-time, for there are no physical entities corresponding to space and time; so, we only need to quantize the gravitational field.
What bends from the gravitational field, then, is not space-time, but fields like the electro/magnetic field that holds all matter together.
The weight of the quantum fields is the ultimate lightness of being.
You were seeing the display of the instrument. They are not the e/m spectrum.
Yes, we don’t see noumena, but only the phenomena of the brain’s representation.
Anyway, QFT (Quantum Field Theory) is the most successful theory in the history of science.
Yes, agreed.
But they talk about things which are beyond human experience and reason, which is not in line with philosophy.
That’s fine, but perhaps overly complicated. A good discussion of a type of materialist metaphysics which is quite coherent is Galen Strawson’s “Real Materialism”. It’s very good imo.
You can defend that view and reject panpsychism too. At the end of day, barring eliminitavism, most of these things are verbal disputes. The actual substance of the conversations, labels aside, converges on many of these “isms”.
So, at the end of the day, you don’t see the object you think you were seeing. You were seeing the display of the instrument, and thought that is the e/m field. Correct?
Yes. It’s enough that our instruments can detect it.
Machine detection is not human perception. The point is that you weren’t seeing what you thought seeing.
We are not really accustomed to thinking of the future as something that exists, or of free will as something immaterial. Most people understand nothingness as the absence of material, not as some immaterial thing. These ideas are not especially common to begin with.
Regarding time and causality, the materialist philosopher Friedrich Engels argued against the notion that everything that exists is simply “matter.” Instead, he described reality as “matter in motion.” In other words, materialism should be understood as matter, referring to ontology, along with its dynamics, referring to nomology. Matter implies space, since it always has location, and motion implies time, since its properties change. Space and time are not separate entities that exist outside matter in motion, but rather properties of matter and its activity.
He also rejected causality as something fundamental, treating it instead as contextual. What counts as cause or effect depends on how a system is described, rather than being an intrinsic feature of the system itself.
I do not think that reducing time to change really removes its dimensional character. A dimension is a degree of freedom, meaning a property of a system that can vary. When we treat time as a dimension, we are ultimately describing ratios between how properties of different systems change relative to one another under particular conditions.
For example, consider a clock whose hands tick and a person who is walking. There is a ratio between the number of steps taken and the number of ticks. Mathematically, these ratios can always be represented on a graph, where time appears as a dimension. Treating time as relative does not seem to eliminate that dimensional structure.
Likewise, treating time as nothing more than what clocks measure does not resolve the question of whether time is absolute or relative. Even identical clocks made of the same materials can tick differently under different conditions. The same clock can behave differently depending on its circumstances.
So the issue of absolute time is better framed as whether there is any reason to privilege one set of conditions over another. The question becomes whether there is something uniquely significant about one set of ratios, such as a clock in a particular context, compared to that same clock in a different context, or whether all contexts are fundamentally equivalent.
I also agree that materialism does not imply Laplacian determinism. The physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev, influenced by Engels, held that motion is just as fundamental as matter. If that is true, then it should be impossible to eliminate motion entirely. Even if all apparent causes are removed, there could still be detectable motion without an identifiable cause.
In Laplacian determinism, everything develops through chains of cause and effect. If the universe has a finite past, then such a view seems to require an initial uncaused cause, what Aristotle described as an “unmoved mover.” This appears to conflict with the foundations of Laplacian determinism itself. Engels and Blokhintsev did not see this as a paradox, since they did not assume that motion needs a cause in the first place.
My criticism of the “subjectivism” mentioned later is that it tends to rely on indirect realist assumptions. It begins by asserting, often without convincing justification, that reality cannot be directly perceived. Instead, perception is treated as a kind of nonphysical veil that prevents access to true reality.
Philosophers like David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel use this as a starting point for the so called hard problem of consciousness. I do not see the hard problem as an issue for materialists specifically, but rather as a problem for indirect realism in general. I agree with idealists that the problem is unsolvable, but I interpret that as a reductio showing that indirect realism itself is flawed and needs to be reconsidered.
The book Toward a Contextual Realism and The Philosophy of Living Experience both provide strong critiques of indirect realist arguments, which often fall into three types.
First, there is a conflation between observation and understanding, or between experience and interpretation. Misinterpreting what one sees does not imply that reality was not perceived.
Second, there is a conflation between a limited perspective and a false one. The fact that perception is partial does not imply that it is entirely disconnected from reality.
Third, there is a conflation between influences on perception and the invalidation of perception. If a perception is shaped by material conditions, that does not make it false. That conclusion would only follow if the influence were immaterial.
There is also confusion between different meanings of “indirect.”
Counterfactual indirectness refers to cases where something is inferred from evidence by arguing that the evidence suggests it could be perceived if circumstances were different, even if it is not directly perceived in the moment. For example, a detective reconstructs a crime based on observed clues and what would have been seen under certain conditions.
Apparatus indirectness refers to cases where tools are used to observe something. The observation is still direct, but it is mediated by an instrument, where the reading of the instrument is observable.
Transcendental indirectness refers to claims about entities that can never be directly observed under any circumstances, nor accessed through any instrument, but are inferred solely from their effects on observable things.
From a direct realist standpoint, transcendental indirect claims are especially difficult to justify. However, they are often conflated with the other two kinds, leading to the mistaken idea that rejecting transcendental indirectness requires rejecting all forms of indirect knowledge. In reality, only the third category poses a problem.
The shift from “materialism” to “physicalism” was partly motivated by the desire to legitimize such transcendental indirect claims, especially with the increasing popularity of indirect realism. It was also partly driven by the development of field mathematics, as physicists wanted to encouraged treating fields as real entities with their own ontology, even though they lack directly observable properties and are known only through their effects on matter, akin to the hand of God, something unseen which manipulates that which we do see and thus “explains” its behavior.
If one instead adopts a traditional materialist view of matter in motion, it makes more sense to treat fields as part of nomology rather than ontology. Mathematics functions as a language for describing how matter behaves, capturing its motion, rather than establishing the independent existence of mathematical entities. The same applies to the wavefunction. It belongs to the domain of nomology, not ontology.
One should not conflate the mathematics of fields with the ontology of fields. The utility of the mathematics of fields to describe the motion of matter does not automatically suggest that there is an ontological counterpart that exists in the real world to the fields. Physicalists have a tendency to believe every mathematical object necessarily has an ontic counterpart and then conflate rejection of the ontic counterpart as if you are denying the accuracy of the mathematics, which does not logically follow.
Once I thought I saw a faraway signpost on fire but as I closed in I realized it was just some ribbons tied on to the signpost.
What about Informational Realism, the view that the world is the totality of informational objects dynamically interacting with each other? IR argues that reality is constituted by mind-independent informational structures rather than physical substance.
I have never understood pure informational philosophies, because it seems pretty self-evident to me that information requires a medium to express itself. I don’t even know what “pure information” is. But, I have not explored them too deeply.
Seems like it would have to underlie the mathematical quantum fields, but who knows.