Does materialism depend on atomism?

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Atomism is the theory that the fundamental units of reality are atoms. The word atom is derived from the Greek for 'indivisible' or 'uncuttable'. The idea that the world is composed of indivisible particles is called 'atomism'. It is an idea that goes back to several centuries BC in Greece and India.

In Greece, a best known advocate of atomism was Democritus, who thought that the world consists entirely of atoms and the void. His theories were depicted in a famous epic poem, De Rerum Natura, by the Roman poet Lucretius, which is still on the curriculum in many philisophy courses (and indeed I studied it at the University of Sydney).

Holbach, an influential scientific philosopher of the Enlightenment, famously said the 'the universe presents only matter and motion'. I have always assumed that when he said this, he thought that the matter in question was ultimately made of atoms; and I, for one, was always taught, and always believed, that 'everything was made of atoms'.

But I am now wondering if this is really so. I am not a scientist, but in my understanding of the issue, the idea of the 'atom' as 'an indivisible unit' is long deceased. The familiar 'planetary model' of the atom was devised by Rutherford in 1911 and depicted an entity comprising a very large proportion of empty space with relatively minute electrons flying around it. (I have heard it said that if the nucleus of an atom was the size of an orange, the electrons would be the size of rice grains describing an orbit the size of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral.)

As we all know, things became even less clear-cut with the discovery of the enigmatic nature of electrons and photons, quantum leaps and the indeterminacy principle. Of course any formal consideration of the real meaning of all this is now well and truly in the domain of mathematical phycisists. Plain English speakers are to some extent forever excluded from the inner sanctum insofar as an accurate depiction of these things can only be provided in mathematics.

Be that as it may, these are some questions that I keep asking, from a layman's viewpoint:

Can atoms really be understood as 'atoms' any more, since they have been well and truly split?
How does philosophical materialism - the outlook that the fundamental stuff of the universe is matter - deal with the fact that atoms as ultimate point-particles can't really be said to exist any more?
Can materialism exist without atomism?

In other words, is there really an ultimate thing, the type of thing that all other things are made out of? Or are things themselves more like patterns, energy waves, or some other kind of non-material phenomenon?

Some of the issues around this have been canvassed in a thread called 'The Mystical Copenhagen Intepretation'. But the purpose of these questions is to elicit some responses and insights on atomism and materialism and to understand some of the philosophical issues sorrounding these topics.

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@jeeprs,

I suspect that "thingness" is largely a result of our mental-models. I think we can only peep at "nature" through these human brains of ours. Should we not consider the limitations of this primary instrument of investigation? It does seem to me that a projection of solidity is likely errant, likely a prejudice derived from our experience of the macro-world.

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@jeeprs,

Hi

What we call atoms these days are not the atoms of atomist theory since they are not indivisible. The indivisible units of matter of atomist theory we no longer call atoms but elementary or fundamental particles.

Check out the Standard Model for the current thinking on what the fundamental constituents of nature is - this is the periodic table for our time, atomism in its current refinement.

I think one might be led to automaticaly assume in scientific materialism that the fundamental constituents be points. Certainly in atomism you would assume points - if an atom were extended you should be able to cut it in two, would be the thinking of the day. However, quantum theory changed the rules a little bit. If something is quantised then it may be both extended and indivisible: you cannot cut an electron into two halves of an electron because nature does not seem to allow a charge of 1/2 an electron.

I suppose the materialist opposite of atomism is some kind of plenum, so I'd say no: materialism doesn't depend on atomism... unless you want that materialism to work.

Bones

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@jeeprs,

Ultimate reality does not appear to be composed of "atoms, particles" at all.
Particles only seem to "appear" when measured or observed.
If materialism is a particulate theory of reality, then materialism is called into question by quantum "experience".

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@jeeprs,

well that's what I think too. But I would be interested to see what the results would be if you surveyed a random group of people in the developed world and asked them what was the most fundamental unit of reality.

I also seriously wonder whether protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles 'exist'. I use the scare quotes for a reason: of course they show up in the atom smashers and so on, according to the predictions, and behave as they are mathematically predicted to behave.

But I am beginning to think that to qualify for existence, a thing has to have an identity. To have an identity, it has to be different to any other thing. I am also wondering whether anything can be said to exist that is not composed of parts, and a beginning and end in time. The problem is, according to this defition, gravity and energy don't exist.

Still thinking......

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;111424 wrote:

But I am beginning to think that to qualify for existence, a thing has to have an identity. To have an identity, it has to be different to any other thing. I am also wondering whether anything can be said to exist that is not composed of parts, and a beginning and end in time. The problem is, according to this defition, gravity and energy don't exist.
Still thinking......

Keep right on thinking, Jeeprs, that is what you are good at.
Well, I will tell you.
I do not think things exist except in their relationships to other things. I do not think time and space exist except as a relationship. There is no meaning to empty space-time like the conception in Newtonian mechanics. Nature is more a completely interrealted whole (monism, oneness, totality).

I actually think primary reality is "becoming" not "being" and consists of the changing relationships between what we call "things" but which actually are "events or moments of experience". Moments of experience occur so rapidly one after another that the appearance is "continous or continuum" but all of reality is quantitized "droplets or occasions of experience". Space time itself is discrete and quantitized just like quantum "particles".

I do not think just humans experience but all of reality is composed of "experience" (nonsensory). Quantum "particles" are not particulate at all but are more properly considered "quantum events" which exhibit some properties we label "particulate".

It is pretty strange stuff out there, vibrating strings, undulating membranes, 11 dimensions, quantitized probablity waveforms. What we directly perceive with our senses and our instruments (a form of representative reality) does not begin to capture the totality of "reality" itself.

I just do not think there is any scientific, experiential or philosophical justification for materialism or hard determinism at all. I also do not think that what we "perceive" with our senses or with our instrumentation captures all of "reality" in any way. Our view is partial and incomplete leaving a lot of room for the truth of mysticism and or spiritual and monistic views of reality which are in no way irrational or illogical.

But that is just my minority view:surrender:

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@prothero,

prothero;111438 wrote:

I just do not think there is any scientific, experiential or philosophical justification for materialism or hard determinism at all. I also do not think that what we "perceive" with our senses or with our instrumentation captures all of "reality" in any way. Our view is partial and incomplete leaving a lot of room for the truth of mysticism and or spiritual and monistic views of reality which are in no way irrational or illogical.

Well said. Are you familiar with Blake in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell? What a great critic of "Enlightenment" (Western) shallowness he was. The Romantic movement in general was a necessary corrective to the dust-dry pseudo-Deism of "universal" reason.

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@jeeprs,

Another interesting thing is that the medievals all understood the distinction between 'corporeal' beings (you and I, any object or animal you care to mention) and 'incorporeal' essences, substances, or beings, which existed (if that is the word) on other planes (such as angelic and heavenly beings, 'devas' and God).

Perhaps atomism really is an attempt to locate the essence of matter in something incorporeal. Why? Because an atom is not compound, not created, and had no beginning and end in time. Atoms are eternal and indivisible. So what does that sound like? I think this understanding is very close to the origin of atomism and also materialism, because they really are born out of an attempt to 'locate the imperishable'. And perhaps this is why science has taken on such a quasi-religious attitude to life.

The Buddhists, among others, argued against atomism from the outset, on the basis that if an atom was a point, it had no dimension. If it had any dimension, it would be divisible. But if it had no dimension, it could not come into contact with anything. (Of course, Buddhists had another conception of the atom also, namely a moment of experience, called a 'dhamma' or 'kalapa' - but this is much more phenomenalist than materialist. It is a 'constituent of being' rather than a constituent of objects.)

But anyway, the search for the 'ultimate constituent of matter' goes on. But I think the gig is up for atomism, and indeed materialism, as it was conceived by all its classical exponents, and most of the current ones are, philosophically anyway, mainly concerned now with 'what works' rather than 'what is real' in any ultimate sense.

Anyway, shall await news from the Big Machine with interest.

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@jeeprs,

Someone hinted on the idea of nothing.If you have a particle and its separated by a space to something else then whats in between? If nothing is an impossibility then that space in between these minute particles must be filled with something. OR is energy everywhere and only becomes visible at a point we would call something. It would explain many of the strange occurrences that are reported in QM. Overlapping fields of energy could create more mass and elements could be described as certain frequencies of energy. We cant see energy only when it appears as matter. When we try to look and it disappears, its because we are looking at energy. It could also explain why certain particles appear to be in two places at the same time. Am I just being silly?

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@jeeprs,

Not at all. The original idea of Democritus was 'atoms and the void', which was convenient. because it was a kind of binary value. Either a space was occupied, or it wasn't. Where it was occupied, nothing else could be, but where it wasn't, nothing was. But in my understanding, the idea of 'nothing' doesn't hold up any more. The interstellar vacuum is seething with energy. So it is not really nothing. It is possible (hold on to your hats here) that nothing doesn't exist. Because fields kind of interpenertrate everything. There is nowhere there is no field. (Anybody with physics training please feel free to correct me).

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@jeeprs,

Did Newtonian mechanics depend on atomism? Yes. Atomism was one of the first things that had to go, before the Quantum model could take its place.

Atomism is only one type of materialism. Thales theory that everything is made of water is a materialist theory that is not atomistic.

So it is about defining the nature of matter. QP redefined 'matter' to account for the wave-particle duality. If it is still matter then QP is still materialistic.

In everyday parlance, 'matter' is one of those words that hasn't yet caught up with its own meaning. I suppose quantum physicists who have learned to always think of matter in the new way remember the layman's naive definition of matter in much the same way as one would think of an etymological or historical meaning of a word that now means something quite different.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;111475 wrote:

Not at all. The original idea of Democritus was 'atoms and the void', which was convenient. because it was a kind of binary value. Either a space was occupied, or it wasn't. Where it was occupied, nothing else could be, but where it wasn't, nothing was. But in my understanding, the idea of 'nothing' doesn't hold up any more. The interstellar vacuum is seething with energy. So it is not really nothing. It is possible (hold on to your hats here) that nothing doesn't exist. Because fields kind of interpenertrate everything. There is nowhere there is no field. (Anybody with physics training please feel free to correct me).

So if its filled with something then it has to be as significant as the matter it separates. My feeling is that it is the same only that the overlapping frequencies of energy create matter where they cross. When you have two or more ripples in a pond you see activity, where they merge. More ripples more value to the matter.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;111475 wrote:

Not at all. The original idea of Democritus was 'atoms and the void', which was convenient. because it was a kind of binary value. Either a space was occupied, or it wasn't. Where it was occupied, nothing else could be, but where it wasn't, nothing was. But in my understanding, the idea of 'nothing' doesn't hold up any more. The interstellar vacuum is seething with energy. So it is not really nothing. It is possible (hold on to your hats here) that nothing doesn't exist. Because fields kind of interpenertrate everything. There is nowhere there is no field. (Anybody with physics training please feel free to correct me).

That's the idea. Fields tend to decay toward zero with increasing distance from their sources, but never reach it.

More fundamentally, the uncertainty principle (which applies everywhere if all matter and energy is, as per quantum theory, describable by waves) demands a non-zero uncertainty in energy, which in turn demands a non-zero energy. If a particular volume of space has no energy, it would have no uncertainty. The associated uncertainty in time would then be infinite, effectively meaning the amount of time necessary to resolve the zero energy would be infinite.

This is the primary reason why we believe all of space is teeming with 'vacuum energy'.

Bones

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@xris,

xris;111483 wrote:

So if its filled with something then it has to be as significant as the matter it separates. My feeling is that it is the same only that the overlapping frequencies of energy create matter where they cross. When you have two or more ripples in a pond you see activity, where they merge. More ripples more value to the matter.

For some reason this reminds me of the big bang theory. The theory where the big bang is the result of colliding M-branes (M-theory).
Of course M-theory takes a lot of abuse (mystery, murky, muddeled, magic, mystical) and lots of other suggestions for the M.
Both matter and energy are fluctuations in the membrane of M-theory or something like that.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;111152 wrote:

Can atoms really be understood as 'atoms' any more, since they have been well and truly split?

How does philosophical materialism - the outlook that the fundamental stuff of the universe is matter - deal with the fact that atoms as ultimate point-particles can't really be said to exist any more?

Can materialism exist without atomism?

In other words, is there really an ultimate thing, the type of thing that all other things are made out of? Or are things themselves more like patterns, energy waves, or some other kind of non-material phenomenon?

the purpose of these questions is to elicit some responses and insights on atomism and materialism and to understand some of the philosophical issues sorrounding these topics.

Hello People! :a-ok:

The problem, as I see it, is with our natural tendency to conceptualize a static and objective reality. We see objects and relations in a fixed background everywhere, even when the background is unstable and the objects are a creation of our perception.

Then there is the issue of simplification. We seek explanation that must be simple, unified, and universal. We then claim that the explanation represents knowledge of the world.

Materialism not only reduces the world to explanation in terms of atomic structures, but it also claims that nothing beyond it exists. Idealism does the same for mental substance, whatever that might be.

Is there any*thing* fundamental? Must there be? Why should there be? Reality objectively varies depending on the point of view of observation: place, time, methods, instruments, embeddedness. It is what it is.

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@bluemist phil,

bluemist;116433 wrote:

Hello People! :a-ok:

Is there any*thing* fundamental? Must there be? Why should there be? Reality objectively varies depending on the point of view of observation: place, time, methods, instruments, embeddedness. It is what it is.

Hi Bluemist - welcome:bigsmile:

But the whole point of philosophy as it started out was to find the true substance, or basis, of reality. If you say 'it is what it is' then you've more or less abandoned the task of philosophy at the outset, haven't you? Science, too, has made great strides by being able to understand the basis of the reality we see - for example, that planets orbit the sun, that species evolve by natural selection, that the speed of light is the same for all observers.

The question I was asking is that now that we know atoms are mainly empty space, and sub-atomic particles are in some sense 'virtual', how does the idea of classical materialism stand up? Classical materialism - and many people are materialist in their outlook - holds that reality is the stuff we can see all around us, and it all can be understood in terms of atomic structures.

But can it?

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@jeeprs,

Thank you for your reply, jeeprs :flowers:

jeeprs;116463 wrote:

~ "Is there any*thing* fundamental? Must there be? Why should there be? Reality objectively varies depending on the point of view of observation: place, time, methods, instruments, embeddedness. It is what it is." ~

But the whole point of philosophy as it started out was to find the true substance, or basis, of reality. If you say 'it is what it is' then you've more or less abandoned the task of philosophy at the outset, haven't you?

Not quite. But I am distinguishing ontological existence, as it is without our presence, without our consciousness, without our biological capabilities and limitations, from our phenomenal realities, that we might better know. To me, there is ontological existence, and epistemic reality. Scientific interpretation gives us clues to imagine what raw existence might be like, and what it cannot be.

Personal and scientific observations create, describe, and measure reality as it then appears to be. Reality has many scientifically objective forms. Depending on theories and measuring instruments, the Sun might be a fuzzy teardrop-shaped plasma cloud perhaps a light-year across with a gravitational concentration where we ordinarily see it to be. Or it might be a fusion reacting shell gravitationally crushed by the surrounding hydrogen fuel. Or it might be the cool dust shell that emits our visible sunlight.

But back to your question. Classical materialism was concerned with the nature of imagined fundamental substances - fire, air, water, earth, and atoms. Modern materialism still thinks in terms of atomic matter that makes up objects. This prejudice to always see objects is where the materialist's problem lies. Is a thought an object? Is the universe?

When physics found that all is made of energetic quantized fields, it became apparent that there is no solid substance. What can be imagined as particles are just twists in the fabric of spacetime. Like concentric ripples in a pond, but organized by interactions.

Quantum properties ensure that macroscopic objects cannot be permanent but must be constantly changing, only with a long lifespan compared to us. Objects move, decay, evaporate. All is change, Heracleitos lives, Parmenides is dead. Sort of. We can still take pictures and look at things as they used to appear.

But then why isn't materialism dead? The same reason that realism still lives 400 years after Galileo. It is practical. It is useful to simplify our mode of thinking about the world as it appears in its various guises. We can still model the changing world as if it were a series of still pictures with great success. We don't usually need to be aware of the properties of motion, of relativity of events and history, of observer effects, of electromagnetic fields, or of spacetime. Most of the time the Earth looks quite flat.

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@jeeprs,

Thanks - now I see what you mean. I don't know about Parmenides being dead, have just been lent Popper's World of Parmenides and also Peter Kingsley's 'Reality' and will see what they have to say. I have a strong suspicion that Parmenides is still current though. (I did an undergrad essay on Heraclitus and Parmenides, but can't remember much of what was in it....)

As regards 'what is really there' from 'what we are able to perceive', I am coming around to the view that it is a distinction we can't make. The Madhyamika (Buddhist) view is that 'things have no inherent existence', which does not mean that they are illusory or non-existent (which is nihilism) but neither does it mean that they are truly real, but rather that they are compound and 'designated' as this-or-that reality - relatively real, you might say, depending on how they are viewed. This supports a lot of what your post says. (This school of Buddhism grew out of a critique of the earlier Buddhist 'atomism', which was subtly different to Greek atomism, in that it was concerned with the 'momentary basis of existence' rather than 'objects'. In any case, it gave rise to the philosophy of emptiness, sunyata.)

Your response, though, is very much written from the awareness that has arisen with the 'deconstruction' of atomic realities, and actually I think we are 'post-materialist' now - don't see any choice. I think classical materialism as it was understood 100 years ago is long dead. Now materialism is more like a program of trying to unify everything through physical science - as in E O Wilson's Consilience. But it is more an ideological position, more an anti-religion than science as such.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;116569 wrote:

As regards 'what is really there' from 'what we are able to perceive', I am coming around to the view that it is a distinction we can't make. The Madhyamika (Buddhist) view is that 'things have no inherent existence', which does not mean that they are illusory or non-existent (which is nihilism) but neither does it mean that they are truly real, but rather that they are compound and 'designated' as this-or-that reality - relatively real, you might say, depending on how they are viewed.

Just as Western philosophy can be said to be an elaboration of Parmenidean reduction, much modern science since Galileo, especially the mathematical sciences can be said to be an elaboration of Heracleitan reduction. Parmenides imagined a timeless cosmos where everything is one. In my metaphor from the previous post, Parmenides means the pond. The water is one. After the waves pass all is left undisturbed in its original state. Heracleitos talks of the passing wave instead. It changes constantly. We observe only the waves.

Science studies only appearances. The waves. Based on measurements, it leaps to countless fruitless generalizations about what the pond may be like for the waves to be as they appear. The best generalization at any one time is agreed upon by scientific consensus as the leading theory, or even as law. The law is just a mathematical formula with mathematical implications that describes the probability of the observable behavior of waves. It does not say what the pond actually is, but it does set limits on what it cannot be. The law leaves plenty of room for speculative philosophical interprepation for what the pond may be.

'things have no inherent existence' ... they are compound and 'designated' as this-or-that reality - relatively real, you might say, depending on how they are viewed.

Is that table really a stool? And that pillow a divan? It depends on who looks and how and when. Objects in nature are solely the product of the four or five natural forces. What we call objects are what we conventionally regard as objects. While there is a correlation, the two sets are certainly do not directly correspond, as realism would require.

In the controlled conditions of the laboratory, it does not matter whether atoms do or don't exist, as long as it is useful to think that they do. Materialists often confuse this pragmatic scientific stance that is useful in reductionist science with the bigger picture of the cosmos. Existence subsumes their narrow attitude as well as many other reductions, each of which sees just an aspect of the whole.

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Does materialism depend on atomism?

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