Materialism and Idealism

 Sartre considered his philosophical method to be a continuation of traditional French rationalism began by Descartes. Reason with the mind and thought to consider being including subjective epistemology.

Bishop Berkeley had a different approach in inventing the philosophy of ideaism that later was changed in popular use to idealism. In his ‘Three Dialogues’ he demonstrated that all of the world could be an idea or reality created by God and a human perceiver of existence could be nothing more than a mind in a jar sort of configuration. That is the extension of the body and senses could be simply presented by God to a mind. It was a very advanced theory that would work well with some paradigms of modern science, virtual reality, holographic Universe, Level 4 Tegmarkian Universe or matrix sorts of things for illustrative purposes.

Berkeley definitely did not regard the human perceiver as creating his own reality to perceive. That idea is more of a derivative from 20th century quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger wave function collapse idea applied dubiously yet logically- even it is is partly incorrect as if it were the cat in a quantum box dead and alive simultaneously in a super-positioned state that isn’t determined until observed. Of course people recently have claimed to have ‘solved’ that paradox too; it is of great social value to be one who solves things, even if the solution lasts for just long enough to get recognition and prestige.

Materialism as a term philosophy probably works these days only in an economic prioritization kind of way rather than philosophically. One can say for example, that one believes matter is the reality, and that is also known today as physicalism. The term is somewhat self-defining. Matter is convertible to energy and at the core people can’t really identity what energy is- an amount of work or something like that. Gluons are force carrying particles- bosuns. And what is force made of? It is a description and could almost be better explained with a chemistry criterion of recombining elements. Mass however is what matter is and at some point there is a tie for all of those sub-atomic particles into field and particles smaller than the Plank length, yet particles all seem to acquire mass from fields as sorts of temporal quantum knots in harp strings analogously. It seems like a paradox that fields cannot be less than the Plank length in range, and if there were some that are the angels dancing on the plank length taking shape all the standard model zoo of particle physics may be their fault.

Anyway materialism tends to dissolve into quantum ideas about how many angels or gluons can dance on a pinhead- not Beavus or Butthead, and so the idea that people create there own reality by perceiving it can be regarded as a half-truth, but only a half-truth, if they think about it (and the ideas scatter in a super-positioning experiment into a non-deterministic state a priori). Materialism is a kind of idealism of approximation. Quantum reality does seem to be a concatenation of approximations and quantization that is also convertible into a theory known as materialism somewhat incorrectly in my opinion.