Good article. The language we use is important.

-Good Lord! What is happening in there?

A noumenon? At this spatial location, at this point in time, adhering to laws of cause and effect?

-Yes.

-…May I see it?

-No.

Or even if they can’t make billions they believe that we live in a meritocracy. So those who work hard will become wealthy and those who are wealthy have earned it.

Tangentially, I’ve had a few conversations with racists who use this idea in support of their racism.

Do you mean to imply that capitalism works and works without repression?

What do you define as violence? Property destruction? Denying insurance claims? This is a vacuous statement.

The right-wing does want to organize: in favor of white supremacy. If being white puts them higher on the hierarchy, then them can reap material gains while feeling superior. That superiority complex prevents them from anticipating the danger they are in; the division of the working class will be their own downfall when the fascism they enable comes back to extract wealth from the white supremacists.

If you only saw a bear in a circus, you would think its nature was to ride a unicycle.

It’s also intellectually dishonest to ignore examples of communal behavior, such as gift economies and communal farrming, as somehow not counting when we’re considering “human nature”. There are exceedingly many examples of selflessness even in this individualist hellhole we built for ourselves.

There is no left wing in America politics. There’s only right wing and farther right wing.

Americans think they know about Tienanmen Square 1989 while themselves living in a police state / surveillance state.

No one talks about the Philadelphia police bombing (yes, a literal bombing) of a Black residential neighborhood in 1985.

No one talks about the police brutality against peaceful anti-Vietnam war groups in the 1960s/70s. Veterans who were drafted to fight an immoral war of aggression overseas were then beaten by the police for protesting that war. In 1970, the Ohio national guard opened fire on college students protesting at Kent State.

Eric Garner, Tamir Rice (12 years old), Daniel Shaver, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Renee Good, Alex Pretti and far, far too many people have been murdered on camera. Millions around the world protested the routine extrajudicial killings of unarmed Americans. But police killings increased every year during the Biden administration and Trump continues to throw people in the back of unmarked vans.

Americans judge the PRC (and every socialist country) by their own retelling of its worst blunder in history; Americans judge the US by it’s latest controversy while forgetting everything else.

You’re a fan of the New York Post huh

Guilty here. Was a lifelong democrat before I read leftist theory. Now I can’t stop arguing politics online.

“Look, we shouldn’t transition from a monarchy to a democracy: the democracy would be corrupt as well!”

I’m going to reiterate my original claim because much of your comment misses the point. In the comment above I argued that quantum theory has interesting philosophical implications. It opens the door for us to consider an anti-materialist metaphysics based on scientific evidence. Your response has been to explain away the bizarre observations concerning the features of subatomic particles as compatible with materialism. And perhaps materalism does a better job at capturing certain aspects of reality. Perhaps the anti-materialist do a better job of accounting for epistemological uncertainty and probabilistic features. But my sense from your attempt to show that the evidence is compatible with materialism is that you don’t take the philosophical debate seriously.

It is always possible for two different groups of people, given the same predictive body of mathematics, to draw different metaphysical conclusions…This is blatantly obviously his personal metaphysical interpretation …

So when you assert materialism this is intellectual honesty, but when someone argues for an anti-materalist stance, based on observable evidence as strange as quantum entanglement (which you are quick to explain away) this is just personal metaphysics? How could you possibly evaluate the salience of his position without reading his arguments?? Occam’s razor doesn’t allow us to flippantly dismiss positions we deem unintuitive. Again, you’re familiar with the physics side but are incapable of considering alternate philosophical points of view.

The inner workings of reality don’t matter when…

I’ve already granted the justifiability of materialism on practical grounds. In other words, it is a useful assumption.

These problems are material…

This is begging the question against the anti-materialist.

We can critique “metaphysical-physicists” while still acknowledging philosophical implications. You seem familiar with the physics side of the discussion, but there is an entire philosophical literature comprised of sharp academics working at the intersection of metaphysics and empirical science. You may have good arguments for one camp within this discussion (e.g., sophisticated materialism) but to dismiss the philosophical implications outright prima facie indicates either a lack of familiarity with the philosophy of physics or perhaps a dismissal of metaphysics as a fruitful enterprise.

To be fair, my earlier comment was vague: the following example will make the case. The typical materialist argues that external objects are mind-independent, comprised of matter, and have determinate properties. Call this “strong objectivity”. In contrast, Bernard d’Espagnat, theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, argues against materialism on the grounds that standard quantum mechanics is only “weakly objective”. (See his book, “On Physics and Philosophy”.) Although our observations are intersubjectively valid, quantum mechanics is predictive rather than descriptive: it does not describe the world as consisting of mind-independent entities that have determinate properties before they are observed/measured. There is no fact of the matter concerning the state of the system before we measure it. Furthermore, Bell-type experiments, which are a part of the broader quantum theory, display quantum entanglement such that measuring one half of the experiment decides the outcome of the other. To be clear, Bernard does not promote skepticism about reality or its objectivity. But he argues convincingly that the evidence is inconsistent with materialism.

Whether you agree with Bernard is immaterial (pun intended). The larger point here is that reasonable people can disagree with materialism giving the probabilistic, relational, and epistemologically problematic nature of subatomic particles. These insights obviously conflict with our understanding of materialism! We cannot simply presume the truth of materialism because we find it more intuitive. At best, scientists can justify their assumption of materialism on practical grounds.

The presupposition of a mind-independent material world seems justified on practical grounds so long as we exclude subatomic particles. But the emergence of quantum physics has interesting philosophical implications.

This is an interesting blend of skepticism, existentialism, and atheism. But if you really thought that nothing is real you would probably act more boldly.

Get this solipsism out of my thread

The concepts “reality”, “objectivity”, “subjectivity”, “being”, “existence”, and “everything” are all subject to debate. There are too many questions here for this to have any meaning (to invoke another elusive concept)

1. Do all entities that have reality also exist? (Consider, for example, the unicorn in my dreams)
2. Do all entities that exist also have being? (Consider the natural numbers)
3. Is “everything” merely the set of entities that exist or does it also include the things that we can identify with language but do not exist? (Consider the logically contradictory “square circle”)
4. Are “objective” and “subjective” mutually exclusive? (For example, I am objectively feeling pain but pain is a subjective mental state; the stick in water objectively has the property of subjectively appearing bent in water)
5. Why should objectivity entail materialism? Why should subjectivity entail idealism?

Ofc this is all in good humor but it’s worth flagging these issues.