On 'Materialize' and Materialism

 

It is interesting that 'materialize' is often used in ordinary English as an intransitive verb to mean: come to be real.  "Rain clouds materialized on the horizon." "The Hezbollah counterattack never materialized." A thing or state of affairs is real if and only if it exists independently of (finite) mind. To be real is to exist outside the mind and outside its causes. The last two sentences may need some tweaking and some commentary, but let's move on to the question of the relation of materiality and existence.  Is the following true?

1) Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff x is a material thing.

(1) formulates a version of materialism: everything that exists is a material thing, and everything that is material exists. If true, (1) necessarily true. We surely don't want to say that (1) just happens to be true. The type of necessity? Not analytic and not narrowly logical. And of course not nomological: (1) is not a law of nature given that the laws of nature are logically contingent.  (1), if true, formulates a law of metaphysics. So I'll say it is metaphysically necessary. 

Are there counterexamples to (1)? Are there existing things that are not material? Are there material things that do not exist?

Wanted are nice clean  counterexamples that are not as questionable as (1) itself. I want to refute (1) if I can. Bear in mind that 'refute' is a verb of success. So angels won't do. How about numbers? Numbers are more credible than angels; numbers presumably exist; numbers are so-called 'abstract' objects outside of space and time and thus not material.  Hartry Field and other nominalists, however, will argue with some plausibility that numbers and other abstracta either do not exist or that there is no good reason to posit them.  Field wrote a book entitled Science Without Numbers.  (And of course he was not proposing that one could do physics without mathematics.) 

What is left by way of counterexamples to (1) if we exclude spiritual substances (God, gods, angels, demons, unembodied and disembodied souls) and so-called abstract objects (numbers, mathematical sets, Fregean-Bolzanian propositions, Chisholmian-Plantingian states of affairs, etc.)? 

Well, consider my present occurrent visual awareness of my lamp.  (Better yet: you consider your present occurrent awareness of anything .) This awareness of the lamp (genitivus obiectivus) is not the lamp; it exists, and it cannot be material in nature. The awareness is not a state of my body or brain, even if correlated with some such state. If it were a state of my body or brain, it would be material which is precisely what it cannot be. Why not? Because the awareness is an intentional or object-directed state and no material/physical state can exhibit intentionality.

This is as clean a counterexample as I can muster.  The awareness of material things is not itself a material thing. Less clean, but still a contender, is the subject of (genitivus subiectivus) the object-directed state , the mind, ego, self that is in the state.  If there is a self along the lines of a Cartesian res cogitans that is aware of a lamp when BV is aware of his lamp, then that self exists but is not material.

Have these considerations refuted (1)?  You tell me. What I will say is that they make the rejection of (1) reasonable.

The other class of putative counterexamples to (1) are items that are material but do not exist.  Unicorns and flying horses come to mind. Suppose that there are four categories of entity  item:  (i) immaterial minds, (ii) occurrent and dispositional states of minds, whether intentional or non-intentional; (iii) so-called 'abstract' objects; (iv) material things.  Where do such Meinongian nonentities as unicorns belong?  Obviously they belong in the fourth category.  They are material things even though they don't exist!

Has this second set of considerations refuted (1)? You tell me. 

Comments

[trudy vandermolen]

I don’t know if these exist outside the mind, but what about:

virtue (as seen in some action)

war (or peace)

ideas (maybe written out but still not “material."

[Joe Odegaard]

Yes, I say that there are existing things that are not material. Design a building (or any new thing) and you will encounter such things. I have designed things for many decades. Even before I put a design down or paper, I am aware of at least some aspect of the design in a non-material way. I can't get something on paper if I have nothing in my mind at all. There is something that exists before I draw it. And then you can materially build from the drawings. but it all goes back to some place of immaterial, yet real existence. Personally, I don't think that this place is "in my brain" or "part of my brain," either. I can't prove that, though.

[Dmitri]

What about facts? E.g. the fact that 7 is a prime number? Same for proofs, inferences etc -- nothing material in them, but denying their existence on account of immateriality is worse than weird.
What about shadows and holes -- these funny entities are a huge and well known problem for (1).

[BV]

Dmitri,

I am looking for decisive counterexamples to (1), CEs that refute (1) beyond any possibility of dispute by intelligent people.

If facts are abstract objects, they do not satisfy that very stringent (and possibly unsatisfiable) requirement. Ditto if a proof is an array of propositions. An inference is a mental process and it may work.

Shadows are located, they are subject to change of shape, and they move. So they have to be in space and time in some sense, and so they have to be material in some sense.

But these are good examples that stimulate thought. Thanks for the response.

Something about holes, absences, privations, etc. later. Keep your powder dry.

[Joe Odegaard]

If something is not in space, it is not in time either, because Spacetime is all one thing.

[Dominik Kowalski]

How about structure? The best empirical science we have, particularly in biology where its most evident, is holistic in nature. Parts forming a whole (e.g. organs forming the immune system, muscle and nerve cells forming a blood pumping heart, atoms forming an organism) that exhibit properties
and functions that can't sensibly be attributed to any of its parts, thus making them more than just a mere aggregate.

Is the structure itself material? No doubt it has a spatiotemporal extension, being part of the organism in question. But it adds something more to it. And if the "something more" isn't identifiable with any part of the object in question, then it must be something beyond it. So if the bestowed function or behavior is not identifiable with the matter making the object up, then that what accounts for it must be immaterial (though, importantly, not in the Cartesian sense).

[Elliott]

>>Are there counterexamples to (1)? Are there existing things that are not material?<<

What about moral rights and moral obligations? Arguably, they exist. And they are not material things.

Yet, moral rights might not count as a decisive example. Bentham (Anarchical Fallacies) famously denied the existence of natural rights. But he seemed to grant the existence of legal rights, and these are not material things. Nor are legal obligations.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/jeremy-bentham-on-rights-as-a-creation-of-the-state-alone-1831

[trudy vandermolen]

What about wind? It is made up of air, but is not, strictly speaking, air; rather, a force that moves air.

[Will Clausen]

James Ross has an argument for the immateriality of thought which draws inspiration from Kripke's interpretation of the rule following paradox. On Ross's view nothing physical can determinately realize formal operations because there are always alternative "incompossible" functions that the physical facts are consistent with. Ross thinks that this applies to mathematical functions like addition, but also thinks it applies to logical operations like modus ponens. I'm not sure if that would satisfy the nominalist but it is worth considering.