@Hugh Mungis Cope

@Hugh Mungis materialism is important for society dont have christian belief. They simply have no meaning of life, budhism is just twisted fate of no ending, the middle east is keep changing their "belief", and the Jew still waiting for the Messiah (pretty weird)

@Hugh Mungis OK Tinfoil Hat.

linen, it's all just linen and coats linen, it's all just linen and coats linen, it's all just linen and coats....

lol lol

Thank you! And yup, gonna release that video in the coming weeks! I'll do a dialectics video first, and then hismat.

Nice

I would like to see a more accurate depiction of idealism as a whole. Only the most insane forms of solipsism take the position that everything blinks out of existence when you are not looking. There are forms of monistic idealism that imply that the world around us is mental in nature, and that those mental processes still carry on when you are not looking. The video seems to touch on metaphysics, but then diverges and talks about nature versus nurture. However, nothing about idealism requires favoring nature - nor does materialism inherently favor nurture. For example, idealism is compatible with the idea that an evolved human brain is required for us to have our uniquely human experience of separation from the rest of mind. The practical predictions that such a view would make about the correlations between brain states and conscious experience largely overlap with materialism and can favor either nature or nurture. The practical predictions of the two views only really diverge under special circumstances like altered states of mind, brain damage, and death. For example, if you take a mind-altering psychedelic that reduces your brain activity, most materialists would predict that this would result in less energetic and intense experiences, but idealism allows for the opposite. As the dissociative boundary between your mind and the rest of mind-at-large dissolves, you may have more intense mind-blowing experiences. Anyway, this has little relevance to the nature versus nurture argument. Materialism offers no advantage when it comes to science either. Observing, testing, and understanding the behaviors of the world around us can be done just as easily under the view that the world around us is mental in nature as it can under the view that the world is physical in nature.

@@anduinxbym6633 I agree with this, I think that at the science section he kind of mixed up idealism vs. materialism with rationalism vs. empiricism, which were both actually synthesized into German idealism, which also led to the forming of materialism through former Hegelians, if I'm not mistaken, one of whom was Marx.

​@@anduinxbym6633 You sure produced a wide range of examples! I tend toward evolutionary psychology, which at once gives a materialist basis for human nature but also some limitations that might be taken for immutability -- ascribed in this video to idealism. I hope that modern Marxists can accept that as social animal, the unit of selection in human evolution may well have been at the society level from the time we began to live in bands as our cousin apes do. Various personality traits and types now occur with specific incidences across human societies. There are hereditary followers, leaders, homosexuals, loners, freeloaders, psychopaths, geniuses. There are. But it's nothing to be alarmed about! The balance is correct for a cooperative society ruled by legitimate and democratic authority, with a basic political unit (voting block) of between 250 and 450 individuals. We are adapted for this. It is a gift. It is our birthright.

It really can be exhausting to learn new theory on your own time, especially since it often involves unraveling the propaganda and ideologies we've been force-fed our whole lives. I have to do it in chunks to keep it manageable. But it's definitely all worth it! Glad you enjoyed the video :)

The perception of being exploited is a feeling

Is that first part a Dave Rubin quote?

MichiruMichiMi So is being stung by a hornet...

​@@WorldGovernmentGeoInstitut But whether or not I hate the hornet for it, even demand their extermination, or instead think their stingers are really cool and everyone should be stung, or maybe feel indifferent about it and say it's part of nature, is subjective. To say that one of these interpretations is the "correct" one while the rest are "false consciousness" is fallacious bullshit.

Perhaps it could be used as some kind of social analysis after all indeed. But there's nothing of it (nor from a dichotomy of so-called idealism vs materialism) that could make it true in metaphysical terms at all. The best answer is just "we don't know." We may only describe societal structures and analyze them, but there's no need to get into consciousness territory and try to dig for the truth in metaphysical debates to do that. We can only see social phenomenons and perhaps analyze and critique them. A diagnostic can be made without digging into an "idealism vs materialism" debate that tries to dig deeper into "truth" but seems like a false proposition to me.

Bro… how do you type this shit out and not realse DM is pure idealism is beyond me. whats great about christianity is that is can also be applied to everything thing in life. - thats you! You realize that Physics can literally explain all the physical processes of reality but is still NOT universal because no ideas can be universal. Only Irrational beliefs can be universalized.

Its basically that materialism says then they talk about ideas wont affect materia cose ideas effected by materials condition that are already sets in world that was couses of diffrent ideas of diffrent peoples effecte by diffrent materials and so on so on. Or just starts to loosing my mind covering this topic who knows

Ideas don't even exist as some separate substance alongside the material. There is _just_ the material. What we call "ideas" are complex processes distributed throughout the social structure (not even entirely isolated to our physical brains).

le sanae

That's a fair point, and for what it's worth, I do agree with you that Marxists should be cautious with philosophy. Lenin was pretty staunchly "anti-philosophy" and wrote about it only in times when it became a political obstacle. To my best knowledge there isn't much effort on Marx's part either to engage in philosophical debate. Actually, I think Althusser's "Lenin and Philosophy" deals with Marxism and philosophy in a very intriguing way. If I understand Althusser correctly, he is suggesting that Marxism, and more specifically historical materialism, is actually a completely new "continent," separate from philosophy.

I also think that it is unjustified to say that Marxism is somehow overstepping itself when it tacks philosophy head-on. While it is true that Lenin did not indulge in the philosophy underpinning Dialectical Materialism, many Marxists did--notably Mao. While he was not necessarily the best at doing so, and certainly wasn't the only, he deeply engaged with Philosophy of Science through his understanding of Dialectical Materialism, giving a brief but sophisticated commentary on the Idealism/Materialism split in the history of philosophy in his works "On Practice" and "On Contradiction". I see you alluded to Kuhn's notion of scientific revolutions, however, it should be noted that this 'relatively' pessimistic outlook on the progress of science is not the standard either--in fact, I believe at this point in the philosophy of science, one would be just as justified to say that a Kuhnian perspective which flirts with an anti-realist or post-modern (I say post-modern because of its historically discontinuous conception of the history of science) is at the very least no MORE justified a perspective in the conversation of the philosophy of science than is a Dialectical Materialism perspective: indeed, then, (and maybe I'm overstepping here somewhat for rhetoric effect) perhaps anti-realist/post-modern Kuhnians and New Humians sorts, not Marxists, are better off leaving the philosophy of science untampered.

@@themarxistproject Lenin read Hegel though and was actually very interested in his attack against Kant’s subjectivism and the “Absolute Idea” chapter from Science of Logic. Althusser wrote about this. I feel like Hegel is often neglected by Marxists today even though there is a lot to gain from reading him through a materialist lens (through a proletarian class view-point). I’m paraphrasing Althusser so I’d suggest you read his work on this.

Justin, I see your point. I have only one wordy question to you. If this "materialist vs idealist divide is useful when criticizing political thoughts that are not built on historical material conditions" why can't it (the divide) be applied to everything? if some thing manifests itself in the observable objective reality (in Matter) - it exists.The person who says otherwise is an idealist (pluralist, solipsist ) of some kind. it's quite universal. I'm not an atheist, I don't "BELIEVE" that there's no god. God just doesn't manifest himself in the objective reality. He isn't a physical being, not real. BUT, god is material only in the sense of being a part of social matter - he exists in people's heads,books, shrines, churches - things made by humans. and you can "divide" any category. philosophers can be characterized by this category. there's nothing immaterial in that sense. Matter is everything that exists. it's easy as that. Being a coherent materialist it would be stupid (idealist) of me to deny god or any other thing if it's scientifically proven. for example, a being moves a mountain with a chant\prayer and it's experimentally verifiable. Materialists wouldn't be able to deny the actual change in matter. Believing has nothing to do with it. I guess, you get my point. we don't argue that the philosophy is completed with marxism, but it's totally fallacious worldview you say that "the earth is flat" or "market economy is wholesome for the majority of population" whereas the matter itself contradicts the statement, people just fail to see, to look at(due to pre-installed ideology or obscurity) , or deny the objective truth. hence materialism vs idealism.

Joe Dispenza is a snake oil salesmen.

Quackery and pseudo-science detected.

Hedonism, individualism, egoism are the greatest truths of human existence. But yes, it is harmful when we consider it as a society apart from the individual.

@@umut967 God is the greatest truth of human existence.

@@umut967 idealist nonsense

@@johannjohannes8265 human existence is physical god is imaginary lmao, how can some make such comment under a Materialist video

@@studentshdhhdhd1849 God transcends existence, how can you make such an unqualified comment

How are our feelings material ?

@@justaguywithaturban6773 because they exist😆

@@user-td3ut4tg3v But that doesn’t make them material

@@justaguywithaturban6773 if no material what are they? Non-material? Is that a thing? all those words are invented to confuse people, marking them believe there is difference when in fact they are not

@@user-td3ut4tg3v They're made out of something which you’re currently not able to comprehend if you depend on modern science, but I’m trying my best to explain in modern science language and I’ll call them immaterial. Emotions are spiritual and the language of spirit realm cannot be translated in human man made language. But the nearest thing to describe, the spirit "language" can be felt.

Objective idealism is sophistry. It claims there can be an "absolute point of view" that is somehow more special than any other point of view and exists outside of it. Michel Bitbol already ripped this to shreds. It is not possible to even conceive of some sort of point of view outside of any perspective. A third-person perspective is not some sort of "absolute" perspective, it is still a perspective from the point of view of that third person. Objective idealism tries to posit some sort of special objective point of view within some "divine mind," but it only leads to an infinite regress, because it is a point of view from a subject which itself could only exist from another point of view. Nothing can be point-of-view independent.

I did, and I really enjoyed it! I also loved your discussion of diamat and hismat. I'm actually planing to make videos on that soon lol.

@@themarxistproject So basically, we're the same person.

Haha it would appear so!

@@themarxistproject Friend, I'm currently writing a very long script on the DPRK, do you yourself have any links to anything I can read which would further push my point on the DPRK being a deeply democratic and Socialist country?

@@PremierMatthew Check out Juche Gang or hit up Shane Lawrence Pick on FB

Well it's more the notion that thoughts/ideas don't have a special role in the world, that they're no different from the material. Obviously they are based in material processes, but there is a certain qualitative aspect to them and they do possess the ability to shape the world around us. I don't think vulgar materialism is strictly incompatible with Marxism, but Marx and others did draw a distinction between their interpretation of materialism and some of the more uncompromising positions, which they referred to as vulgar.

Thanks for the clarification, your channel is great.

You enter into weird territory when you only believe matter and energy are all that exists. How can something "new" come into existence if new matter and energy can't be created? If it doesn't, are you implying you always existed or that you never existed? Is the category of one's own identity a nominalist constructed falsehood?

The idea that thoughts are directly reducible to material processes is far from a given. *There are three main competing materialist positions:* 1. At the most basic level, matter is not conscious. Conscious experience is directly reducible to the non-conscious. 2. At the most basic level, matter is not conscious. Conscious experience emerges from "complexity" in non-conscious systems. 3. At the most basic level, matter has some form of primitive consciousness. In complex systems, these primitive conscious perspectives combine into a greater conscious perspectives. The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of how we get subjective experience from non-conscious bits of matter. If, on the most basic level, nothing but non-conscious bits of matter exist, then how is consciousness explained? The first position that I stated is a ridiculous form of reductionism that offers no answer to the hard problem. It holds that ultimately only non-conscious bits of matter exist, and it simply calls certain arrangements of matter "consciousness". It's nothing more than a semantic game to disguise the fact that its proponents are claiming that 1=0. The second position proposes strong emergence as an answer to the hard problem. To say that conscious experience "arises from complexity" sounds respectable, but it's just a fancy way of dressing up a ridiculous idea in nice sounding words. They are proposing an irreducible property called consciousness that magically pops into existence when non-conscious bits of matter are arranged in juuuust the right way. What's more, this property cannot be deduced from its components. The final position is a form of panpsychism that gets around the hard problem by proposing that consciousness exists on the most basic scales. Under panpsychism, consciousness doesn't magically pop into existence. This is probably the strongest materialist position, but it has its own problems - namely the combination problem. It has to explain why smaller perspectives unify into larger more complex perspectives in complex systems. Modern idealism is far stronger than this video seems to make it out to be. In fact, it's probably the strongest position that there is, as it's compatible with everything that we can observe and it has Occam's Razor on its side. It also lacks the logical problems that come with materialism. I highly recommend looking into the work of Bernardo Kastrup.

​@Random User Materialism doesn't necessarily imply that the primary physical world is unconscious, as panpsychism is considered a materialist position. Granted, panpsychism is not the mainstream position. I oversimplified some of those positions for the reader, but the point remains. Regardless of whether you consider matter at the most basic level to be irreducible or unchanging, mainstream materialism still explains consciousness in terms of the activities of non-conscious matter. It still runs into the hard problem of explaining how we get subjective experience from physical things that supposedly have none of the qualities of subjective experience. Reductionists like Daniel Dennett have no answer to that problem, rendering their position untenable. The other popular position is to suggest that consciousness just pops into existence because of "complexity".

I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on vulgar materialism, but my assumption is that everything is reduced to interaction between matter. Even identity could be categorized as a consistent cognitive process, resulting from particular neural pathways created and reinforced by lived experience.

@@themarxistproject So do clones or copies in theory share the same identity, or could a singular identity have multiple bodies? Cause it sounds like only a person's specific construction or a person's brain's construction determines a person's identity. The problem of emergence is also still there unless we deny one of two premises; that matter and energy can't be created or destroyed, and that at some point in the past you did not exist.

Again, I'm definitely not qualified to say anything definitively on this, but I think clones would have different identities since neural pathways are formed through experiences and cognitive development occurs in the context of the environment of the individual. Yes, that's true. Perhaps that would be explained as the need to cross a certain threshold in development? After a certain point of exposure to the outside world, identity begins to take rudimentary shape (in a very physical sense in the brain) and continues to develop for the rest of someone's life. That would be consistent with the first premise since the formation of neural connections does not require new neurons (though it does require certain other elements). And the second premise would hold too, since it takes some certain amount of biological development before one could count as "existing." Maybe someone out there has a more informed understanding of this than me, though I honestly cannot even think of anyone who clings to closely to vulgar materialism.

You’re still an idealist. Marxists pull a sleight of hand to trick people into thinking that “the marxist understanding” of materialism opposes traditional materialism but this is a fake binary. Marxists definion of materialism is just another form of idealism. Marxists must reject Materialism because if it turns out that Human Societies cannot be sustained without exploitation then… what?

I totally agree with you, and I'll be sure to do more videos on idealism in the future! There's definitely more to be said, especially with regards to objective idealism as you point out. Спасибо, товарищ!)

@@themarxistproject sorry for abruption of the comment.

So atheistic

​@@Hhjhfu247what happened?

I think is most about the material conditions you must face to get food, as example. You will always need a wage to buy it in a system that, otherwise, doesn't allow you to eat. You can clearly go for hunt but without a wider group and a big land of your ownership average results risk to be very low and you'll be compelled to re-enter the system you fled for survival. So the problem is about what materially shapes our opportunities.

I think a materialist would say that it does not exist because everything can be reduced to chemical process in your body telling you to do things. So yes I think that it is idealist. Concepts such as the perfect person or the perfect circle which come from the forms by Plato are idealist in nature. They are not based on anything material that exists around, but we still have the concepts of them thanks to Idealism. Although it is entirely possible to be a mix of materialistic and idealistic like this video explains so an idealist can still reject free will

@@luisarmenta2619 You are idealist bc a materialist says so.thats circular logic m8.It has to be why i would universaly be an idealist... Anyway, this type of thinking could lead to some scenarios as totalitarianism, brainwashing and castrating people with high chance of psychopathy, and high chance of being criminals. And practicing of eugenics in general. Since, its just going to be better for everyone in the end. Removing traits associated with criminals and the scum of society, since there is no reason to believe they can change brainwashing in this sense too.And im talking about a communis(or socialist) society here, since external negative factors are mostly removed.

Nah

@@lugus9261 It is accordinh to the vid tho

@@Th3EnterNal no its not Marxism doesn't rule out "free will", it rules out the idealist version of it. Humans create all the time, that is the true essence of free will

​@@novinceinhosic3531 What materials are being created in the brain? Or is thought a chemical--electrical pattern, active pattern. A pattern could be a construct. A construct could be considered to be a material thing. So, maybe you are right.

@@novinceinhosic3531 Would you say quantitative change leading to qualitative change is an example of emergence? A car is a certain configuration of parts. The parts may not be incoherent to a mechanic. To say a stack of car parts is nothing but a bunch of atoms is incoherent is to see it from the point of view of a bad mechanic. To see that stack form the point of view of, say a metalergist, maybe not. The car parts themselves are the result of multiple levels of emergence and processing. You seem to be saying that physicalists are saying nothing emerges from quarks. You say 'predestined'. Is that a fudge word for 'preconceived'?

@@novinceinhosic3531 Nature as potentiality--actuality, which 'actuality' is itself a potentiality--actuality. This may be the phrase I've been looking for, if only for myself. This combined with creative destruction as potentiality--actuality. Entropy as the man behind the curtain directing biological evolution in the game of actuality--potentiality/ end of one actuality--beginning of new potentiality. I consider 'Existence exists' as a self-actualizing, self justifying premise. I regard it as the premise of premises. I have to think more about 'place holders'.

@@novinceinhosic3531 I'm a retired factory worker with a two foot high stack of notebooks I've filled up. I take a special interest in General Semantics, the center of which I believe to be Lee's Elucidation: A finite number of words must be made to represent an infinite number of things and possibilities.

I would argue it's not. Materialism upholds the philosophical category of "matter" which Engels borrows the same definition from Hegel, referring to some sort of fundamental entities that are abstracted from observable forms, and so by definition as an abstraction of our observation it necessarily, logically, has to take on particular observable expressions. The point here is that matter is inherently observable as part of its definition. Different kinds of particles, _beables_ if you will to borrow a term from John Bell, are associated directly with observable properties as part of their definition. Physicalism, on the other hand, arose with the discovery of fields. Many physicists chose to interpret fields as their own fundamental entities, yet fields are not directly associated with observable properties. It's sort of like, a wave on the ocean is only observable because it is _made up of_ observable water molecules, but the _wave itself,_ as some separate entity _besides_ the water molecules, is not observable, and so a materialist would reject that such a _wave itself_ even exists. Physicalists, on the other hand, do apply this kind of thinking to fields. If you sprinkle some metallic dust around a magnetic, it will form to a particular shape. What you are seeing is the behavior of the particles, not some separate entities, but a physicalist would argue there is indeed a separate entity there which _causes_ the particles to conform to that particular shape. It would make more sense in a materialist framework to say that the particles have the _disposition_ to conform to that shape. The mathematics of fields describe the _behavior of particles._ Particles conform to that shape because it is in their nature, not that a separate unobservable entity _causes_ that conformity. Most people don't make this distinction between materialism and physicalism, but I think it really matters, because physicalists then proceed to apply this thinking everywhere and their ideology becomes incredibly confusing. They claim gravitational fields are literally like a fabric which curves, but fabrics are always _made up of_ something, so it then raises the question of what the fabric of spacetime is made up of, but the fabric of spacetime doesn't seem to be made up of anything. They argue that the universe is expanding literally like a balloon, but the balloon expands into surrounding space, so this then raises the question of "what is the universe expanding into?" which then doesn't seem to have any clear answer. Neither of these questions come up if you just state that the fields in general relativity describe the disposition of particles to curve their path in the presence of massive objects, and that the universe's expansion really is just the disposition of particles to be repelled from one another according to Hubble's law. There is no literal fabric or expansion, these are really just analogies or visualizations, but in reality they are just properties of the behavior of particles and not _caused_ by some sort of additional entity. The worst case of this is in quantum mechanics. Both Einstein and Blokhintsev pointed out that waves in quantum mechanics are like waves on water: they are only visible in the form of large collections of water molecules, but there simply is no visible wave if you zoom in on a single water molecule. It's an observable property of how many behave together, not a property of a single particle in isolation. Physicalists claim that wave functions represent real physical entities that are associated with even a single particle, but these entities are fundamentally not observable. They then argue that there is some sort of "collapse" that causes the fundamentally unobservable wave to transform itself into an observable particle. You then end up with an _explanatory gap_ of how a natural world based on fundamentally unobservable entities could somehow, upon the very moment of observation, produce an observable world. This explanatory gap, the _measurement problem,_ directly parallels Kant's mind-body problem. The noumenon is fundamentally unobservable physical reality that somehow, upon observation, gives rise to the observable phenomenon, and there is no explanation of how this could possible occur, nor any obvious method by which such an answer can be found, because everything we observe is in the phenomenon and not the noumenon, and so no observation could show us how the noumenon gives rise to the phenomenon. The only way out of this is to never abandon the connection between observability and material reality. Material reality does not "give rise to" observable reality. Material reality _is observable by definition_ at every step of the way and there's never a break. This requires interpreting wave functions as descriptions of the disposition of the behavior of particles and not as literal autonomous entities, as if there are floating waves out there that "collapse" upon measurement. Most physicalists, if you ask them, they will admit the "hard problem" is indeed a _hard_ problem which they have no solution for. They end up reproducing this problem a second time in quantum mechanics as well and again have no solution for it. Yet, the hard problem, which is really just a reformulation of the mind-body problem, has been viewed as closed in materialist philosophy since the 19th century. This also allows the closure of the measurement problem as well, since they are parallel problems in structure.

I mistook your channel with another rpg gamer also called NeverKnowsBest (all together). I saw him reviewing Disco Elysium and thought it was you but changed your pfp.

It is precisely because dialectical materialism is antimetaphysics. There are many antimetaphysical philosophies: dialectical materialism, contextual realism, empirio-criticism, and centrism to name a few off the top of my head. The similarity between all these is that they are antimetaphysics. They do not posit anything _a priori_ about reality, reality just, as Benoist would put it, _is what it is._ Even our conception of matter is not _a priori_ in materialist philosophy, it is _a posteriori._ Idealism is metaphysical precisely because they insist "consciousness" and "the self" and the "subjective 'I'" are all _a priori_ truths. Idealists believe that everything is questionable _but the self,_ which they view as really existing in exactly as how they imagine it to be. An antimetaphysicalist views even the self as something that can be questioned. Engels' rejections of things-in-itself can be turned inward to reject the self-in-itself. There is no hard-and-fast line between the subjective "I" and the rest of nature. Something idealists will not accept because they insist the metaphysical self is an _a priori_ truth.

@@QuantumPolyhedron if this is the case, then Materialism isn't what should be used to dispute metaphysics and argue for antimetaphysics because it doesn't directly deal with questions of metaphysics A good example for why this comparison is flawed is that one can be a historical materialist and be pro-metaphysics. There's nothing explicitly in historical materialism that necessitates that someone should be antimetaphysics.

​@@damiendp8804 Historical materialism is an _a posteriori_ conception about the world. Categorically the same as any other _a posteriori_ conception, such as, the claim we live on a spinning ball orbiting a star. Metaphysical materialists would uphold that claim as well. Historical materialism is not a criticism of metaphysics. _Dialectical_ materialism is. Historical materialism is a necessary component if you do not want descend into postmodernism. The rejection of metaphysics can lead you down a rabbit hole of rejecting everything and thus having no ultimate reason to believe anything captures reality at all. Historical materialism provides a grounding, it explains that our social consciousness is heavily derivative of the industrial base, which is directly in connection to the natural world, and so it gives justification to believe that over time human societies really (as a very long term tendency and not a law) are coming closer to grasp the natural world *in some abstract and approximate sense* (not in an absolute sense as there are a lot of asterisks to this). Without historical materialism, rejecting metaphysics leads you to postmodernism. You would reject all concepts as _a priori_ and thus everything would be up for questioning, but you would then have no grounding for anything, you would have no reason to believe the ideas of civilization today are any closer to an understanding of the natural world than the ideas of human societies a thousand years ago. You would have no reason to believe that the schools teaching you that lightning is a high voltage discharge from the clouds to the ground is any more true than the school teaching you Zeus throws lightening bolts. The idea of any possibility to move towards a better understanding of nature would be entirely unclear and unjustified. Historical materialism is not itself a criticism of metaphysics. That's what dialectical materialism is about. Historical materialism is an attempt to explain "history" (the progression of human ideas, in Hegelian terms, the movement away from ignorance to the "kingdom of reason") from a materialist lens, how is it that people today can actually know more about the natural world than people a thousand years ago, to avoid what would later become postmodernism.

What ontological materialism seeks to emphasize is not the denial of ideas. Materialism underlines that ideas are reflections of the existing reality. In the same way that we aren't able to just "let" the "light" to just be there by a thought and have to lit a candle by the matchstick, both independently existing outside of our desire to not be in the dark, we also cannot generate an existence from ideas without preexisting matters.

I think that idealism would mean that despite changing the material environment and phenomenons around us, human nature would stay the same

Human nature is idealistic because it stems from the theological belief that humans have a "soul" which is fundamentally irreducible to material reality. This "soul" would thus have a logic of its own: its own set of "laws" which would be separate from and fundamentally irreducible to any sort of physical laws, and would not change or being affected by material circumstances. This was the analysis Hegel worked with, he believed the subjective ideas of the human spirit were spontaneous and then subject to laws in how they interacted which were irreducible to anything else, and the laws governing their interactions would drive the development of the objective Idea and the course of "history." This same mindset was then adopted into neoclassical economics beginning with Alfred Marshall. Marshall believed that you can reduce the human spirit down to a set of its own internal laws from which the whole economy could be derived from. There is no reverse-causation of the material institutions of society upon those laws of the human spirit, they are treated as fundamental and unchanging. This was then became a cornerstone of marginal utility theory, its very foundations known as "consumer preference theory," which is a whole list of claims about how the fundamental unchanging laws governing the cognition of the "rational consumer." None of these laws, mind you, were ever demonstrated in psychology or neuroscience. They were just all invented in someone's armchair one day. I don't really get how people take marginal utility theory that seriously, but it is what it is.

Both seem to be authoritarian in their own conclusions and yet there also seems to be this sense of false dichotomy (even present in this video). A better position would be "we don't know." And yet that doesn't mean we can't make a social analysis without clinging onto these two concepts as if they were a sacred text.

That's just an incredibly lazy straw man. Matter (as a philosophical category) is defined in terms of abstractions made from our observations. They are the most abstract, and thus in some sense, the most "fundamental" entities which, being something derived from observation, are directly identifiable by their observational properties. There is no break between materialism and observability. Kastrup is too lazy to actually criticize materialism, so he just makes up ridiculous straw men arguments that materialists believe in some sort of reality that is fundamentally unobservable. He makes materialist philosophy seem ridiculous so he can knock down the straw man without having to actually address our beliefs, and then his sheep followers who never open a book on materialist philosophy in their lives assume his misrepresentation is accurate.

Materialism does not explain the hard problem of consciousness, as Dr Hoffman points out, spacetime as a concept is not fundamental, it is emergent from consciousness. Here is Dr Michael Egnor on the subject kzfaq.info/get/bejne/eNd4pdNztcrYg30.html @@QuantumPolyhedron

@@novinceinhosic3531 Can you explain to me what "materialist" means in Marxist parlance ? and what it means outside of it? Maybe you'll understand what I was getting at.

Ok, you just repeated in so many words, what I was saying. Materialism for Marx is just the practical conditions of our current existence. 1- that's a completely empty statement, because the given conditions of our existence include ideas, religion, culture, language...etc that may not necessarily reflect anything in reality. So when he says he's a "materialist" as opposed to an "idealist" its a completely empty statement. If you want to reduce "materialism" to just economics and relations/forces of production ..etc you're back to reductionism. So either he was tautological and vacuous or reductionist. Telling us we have to start with what we have is not a particularly insightful statement, everyone knows this. Telling us that economics is the "true" driver of history is a reductionist statement that needs justification. That we have free will or "self determination" to change the world, is also nothing new that we didn't know before. 2- When ppl hear "materialism" their mind will jump to matter and substance. The masses can't be bothered to spend years studying 11 Thesis on Feuerbach and these other obscure texts and pointless debates about the nature of "materialism". If you want to reach the masses or the global working class as you claim, you must speak with a plain language that everyone can understand. @@novinceinhosic3531 You can intellectually try to defend Marx's works all day, what I'm interested in, is what relevance does this have to the world 2023 ? what use is it?

At this point I wonder if you're reading what I'm writing or having a discussion with yourself? I'll do you the courtesy of repeating myself, but I suspect I'm wasting my time with an ideologue! I didn't say "ideas are unrelated to reality", I'm saying the opposite. What I said is that the concept of "materialism" you just attributed to Marx is either vacuous because "the conditions of life" include everything from food to language and ideas (which can't be separated) OR reductionist if you want to demarcate it to just economic related categories. Was that clear enough? Let me give it another shot, there is no such a thing as human life without language, without culture, ideas, religion, ideology and so on. And since every situation given to us as a starting point includes all or most of these things by anthropological necessity, what's the point in calling all of that "materialism" ? And if you want to say that materialism just concerns the economic "base" of life then you're being reductionist. Did it land? The other point, is that neither I nor the 9 billion "working class" on this earth have enough time to waste on these boring masturbatory discussions on the nature of "materialism" or what Marx really meant. Esp when the terms you use redefine concepts that have established meanings. Capice? "people need food to philosophize" yeah no shit Sherlock! @@novinceinhosic3531

No, Marxists understand it very well. You say that idealists mean things removed from context, but Marxists reject the existence of things outside of context. There is quite a lot of parallels in Engels' _Dialectics of Nature_ and Benoist's _Toward a Contextual Realism._ Both uphold the notion that objects do not really have decontextualized "autonomous" existence as _things-in-themselves._ There are _only_ things _in context,_ that is to say, _in relation to other things._ It's odd to call Marxism reductionist when it is inherently at odds with reductionism. Reductionism is not compatible with any antimetaphysical philosophy because whatever you identify a cause to be is just _according to a particular contextual point of view_ and cannot be transformed into a universal claim. What you are engaging in is actually reductionism, talking about "culture and ideas" as if they are autonomous entities reducible to themselves, when they are overdetermined by material reality and are not separable from it.

"ut Marxists reject the existence of things outside of context." What do you mean by that? Do you mean the tautology that nothing exists outside of its contextual tethers to reality? well duh! Or do you mean that ideas which fail to take such context themselves don't exist? "There is quite a lot of parallels in Engels' Dialectics of Nat...t really have decontextualized "autonomous" existence as things-in-themselves." I agree with that, but that's consistent with Hegel and with "idealist" ontologies as well. You don't need to be a dialectical materialist to believe that. " It's odd to call Marxism reductionist when it is inherently at odds with reductionism." That part isn't, but there's another part that claims history is driven *mostly* by "material" factors. Material here doesn't mean solid matter, but the production and reproduction of life, or modes of production and relations of production. That's definitly reductionist. There's also Marxists, and some claim Marx/Engels themselves who make this kind of theory of history into an all encompassing metaphysics or ontology and try to impose it on physics, biology, psychology...etc. Engels definitely can fit that bill. "What you are eng...lves, when they are overdetermined by material reality and are not separable from it." I simply made a distinction, which Marx and Engle's themselves made. Between ideas and "material conditions". Making distinctions doesn't mean you think one matters more than the other, or one reduces to the other. Marx admitted that both the "base" and "superstructure" influence each other, but he claims that the base is what matters the most, to the point where he thought you could safely ignore the superstructure in his analysis almost entirely. So my question to you then would be, how do you prove that "material conditions" or "material reality" ...etc matters more in the movement/causation of history than ideas/culture? No Marxist has been able to answer this question for me without assuming it as an article of faith. @@QuantumPolyhedron

It doesn't. But the proposition of the video seems like an assumption anyway. The best position IMO is "we don't know."

Many branches of Abrahamic religions kinda make more sense with Materialism than Idealism. Though it may be in line with non-Monism and both. Calvinists and Pre-Destination believers really seem to have more in common with Materialists than with Idealists and other Non-Materialists.

Close. What’s actually happening is that Materialism is being conflated with idealism; therefore Marxist Materialism is another form of idealism. The truth is that Marxists can’t accept materialism because they can’t accept material reality. E.G. I cannot say if material inequality is “natural” or not. It depends on the specific cases. Marxists will say, however, that it material inequality is unnatural, unfair, unjust and also should be abolished. Thus, if material reality dictates that living creatures cannot live without exploitation then Marxists won’t accept this reality. TLDR; Marxists use the term ‘materialism’ to lend credibility to their ideology. They are ideologically spellbound by Karl Marx.

In a sense you're right. A truly consistent monist ideology could be described from an idealist or materialist lens, because it would separate the two in substance, it would just be a description from two different perspectives. Antimetaphysical philosophies like dialectical materialism, contextual realism, and empirio-criticism all place matter _and_ mind as _a posteriori_ conceptions on equal footing (this is opposed to certain metaphysical materialist schools which tend to place matter on a higher footing a _a priori)._ Idealists, on the other hand, _always_ place "mind" or "consciousness" as _a priori._ It is _always_ a form of one-sided metaphysics.