Immaterial substances
My first thread... I think this is the best place as it pertains to immaterial things and knowledge but will bow to more experienced users.
Quick defining of terms.
"Material" here is in the contemporary sense that if it is affected by and/or affects material things, it comes under the material world's purview (e.g. spacetime, electric fields, etc.) In short, if we can detect it, even indirectly, it gets classed as material.
"Unambiguously immateral fields" is any substance or realm that cannot be detected, even indirectly. If it exists, it makes no impression on us whatsoever. It is completely uncoupled from our material reality.
My initial position was that any belief in any unambigously immaterial realm is unjustified on the basis that we cannot say anything about it and cannot determine if it really exists even by indirect means.
The modern view of the material world is that everything, except maybe gravity, is quantum fields. If it exists, it exists as a collection of interacting excitations of those fields, fleeting or permanent. There are many fields, all with their own properties. These underpin the entire Standard Model.
If someone discovered a grand unified field theory that yielded:
such that no one of the above can be removed and the model stand, and if we then empirically verify the unknown material field (in, say, a particle accelerator), would that justify some credence in the immaterial one? I'm inclined to think it does.
Things to note:
1. the uncoupling field is still not directly or indirectly discernible: it is considered out of completeness because the model demands it for purely mathematical reasons;
2. the model is clearly predictive and consistent with all prior experiment and observation (except existing issues in quantum theory);
3. it's still only a model.
Quick defining of terms.
"Material" here is in the contemporary sense that if it is affected by and/or affects material things, it comes under the material world's purview (e.g. spacetime, electric fields, etc.) In short, if we can detect it, even indirectly, it gets classed as material.
"Unambiguously immateral fields" is any substance or realm that cannot be detected, even indirectly. If it exists, it makes no impression on us whatsoever. It is completely uncoupled from our material reality.
My initial position was that any belief in any unambigously immaterial realm is unjustified on the basis that we cannot say anything about it and cannot determine if it really exists even by indirect means.
The modern view of the material world is that everything, except maybe gravity, is quantum fields. If it exists, it exists as a collection of interacting excitations of those fields, fleeting or permanent. There are many fields, all with their own properties. These underpin the entire Standard Model.
If someone discovered a grand unified field theory that yielded:
- all Standard Model fields exactly
- one unknown material field (should couple to our material world)
- one unknown immaterial field (should not couple to our material world)
such that no one of the above can be removed and the model stand, and if we then empirically verify the unknown material field (in, say, a particle accelerator), would that justify some credence in the immaterial one? I'm inclined to think it does.
Things to note:
1. the uncoupling field is still not directly or indirectly discernible: it is considered out of completeness because the model demands it for purely mathematical reasons;
2. the model is clearly predictive and consistent with all prior experiment and observation (except existing issues in quantum theory);
3. it's still only a model.
Comments (60)
Is it possible to think of a model that would rely on an immaterial field that cannot be removed for the model to hold? Per definition the immaterial field doesn't effect anything material, so how could it then be necessary for the model if it doesn't effect anything?
If we were to be really strict about it, all we can direct detect are the immediate occasions of our experiences. Everything else, from rocks and trees to electrons and quarks, are abstraction the existence of which we posit because they serve a role in the best available explanation of those experiences. So if the best explanation for our experiences includes features we can’t experience, then those features are allowable even on the strictest physicalist account.
Things like other possible worlds fall into this category too. If the best explanation for the actual world involves there being infinitely many possible worlds of which the actual one is the only one we have experiential access to, then okay, it looks like there’s infinitely many possible worlds, even if we can’t experience them, because the negation of that fits worse with experience.
I had in mind something like Kaluza-Klein theory, which fulfilled the first criterion (unifies known physical law) and also predicted a new field that was never found. Despite its attractiveness, it is deemed unscientific. But if it had predicted another field that was discovered, I imagine it would have been accepted, and would have had a big impact on our common understanding of the universe (e.g. that it is 5D, not 4D).
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, the thought didn't even occur to me. I suppose the difference is that the hypothesised field is still local, mooching around about, getting up to its undetectable mischief.
I take your point that we still know something about it through physics, that whatever would necessitate its co-existence with observable fields would constitute some kind of very indirect observation after-the-fact. However it is still only a model: we can seek another without recourse to undetectable fields that yields the same predictions, and if we find it apply Occam's razor without new empirical evidence. Does not finding such a model make undetectable fields more real to us, or is it simpler to assume we don't have the best model?
I'm mainly trying to figure out what it would take to convince me that something undetectable might exist. I'm gonna mull your argument, but I think I might agree: it is still detectable, albeit in a different way.
Well I guess that depends on how you would define simplicity. Some would probably say a less complex mathematical model is more simple, while others might say less empirically unverifiable stuff is more simple. This doesn't seem like a question there is definite answer to.
Yes of course. But the same is in principle true of basically everything. The objects that we infer to exist from our experiences are all models, and if we should come up with better models according to which we don’t need to posit the existence of such objects, we’re free to revise our beliefs and do away with supposing that they exist.
Yes, another might be good old-fashioned inertia: we're sticking with the first thing that came along without empirical reason to abandon it. I suspect there's been a lot of that.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I get what you're saying, but this is qualitatively different insofar as it depends on undetectable things: it would be the first theory to be considered an empirically-verified scientific theory to do so tmk.
There is perhaps nothing stopping us from adding the new field by hand to the Standard Model, abandoning whatever physical considerations that yielded the model in the first place as now unscientific. I would imagine that would be an unpopular route (not least because the SM is itself symmetric, but nor is it completely ab initio, so...). This would then put the model in the same-place as Kaluza-Klein theory: admirably unifying, attractive, but no longer empirically-verifiable.
Or in other words, if a more reductive theory of the universe yielded observable phenomena but also unobservable phenomena, it might be justified to just incorporate the observable stuff into a less simple model of the universe at the expense of the otherwise perfectly viable, simpler theory.
I bring that up because the use of the term ‘substance’ in philosophy is different to the everyday use of the term. It was originally used as the Latin translation ‘substantia’ for the Greek ‘ouisia’ which was found in Aristotle’s metaphysics. And in that context, ‘substance’ means ‘the bearer of attributes.’ A stock example is that Socrates’ having blue eyes, which are ‘accidents’ of the substance ‘Socrates’. So in this context, ‘substance’ means something nearer to ‘being’ than to ‘stuff’. Classically, the significance of a substance was the sense in which was not dependent on something else for its being, whereas, plainly attributes can only inhere in a substance.
In philosophy, a dominant model since Descartes has been the division of the world into res extensa, matter, and res cogitans, literally ‘thinking substance’. On that is based the idea of the world as ‘mind and matter’ which somehow interact.
But this was complicated by the parallel introduction in early modern philosophy of the primary and secondary attributes of particulars (by John Locke, and also by Galileo), which carves up the territory in a different way. Here, ‘primary attributes’ are those that are said to be inherent in an object, specifically the attributes measured by the then-new physics of Galileo such as solidity, extension, motion, number, etc. ‘Secondary attributes’, then, were those that were said to be in the mind of the perceiver - color for example - rather than inherent in the object.
This way of looking at things became the dominant model in modern thought generally, meaning that the notion of ‘substance’ in the earlier sense of ‘substances, modes and attributes’ fell almost entirely out of use. This naturally lead to the conception that the universe can be understood wholly and solely in terms of the objects of the physical sciences, ‘bearers of primary qualities’, which is the underlying paradigm of scientific materialism. Within that paradigm, the idea of a ‘thinking substance’ or an ‘immaterial substance’ is nonsensical, as no such object can be demonstrated.
But the very subtle, underlying point is not actually a difference over what exists, but a different conception of the nature of reality, from a shift to the conception of being, modes and attributes, to a conception of the sole reality of bodies. But that is an inevitable consequence of the way the territory was divided in early modern science, which is still playing out.
Self-referential definition? Try, ". . . and/or affects physical objects"
Yet you got from classical Greek meaning of 'substance' to the very raison d'etre of my question yourself! :) The quality in question is undefined. It can be squareness or happiness for all I care. The point was, is demonstration that it should exist sufficient to justify belief in it, even though we cannot demonstrate it itself.
Reference, or inertial, frames? They are immaterial, but they make perfect sense, and without them, SR is mighty hard to explain.
That is true, but I included spacetime under the material category because I can do an experiment with material objects to determine e.g. the time difference between two events for me and for you (muon decay experiment, for instance). Beyond that, I don't interpret relativity as saying that reference frames have any ontological value. They are a useful tool for doing relativity, and as such I think fall under the broad category of human ideas, encodable in materials, and likely encoded in materials when being considered or memorised.
And perhaps that's all my hypothesised immaterial substance is: an idea that helps one to think about reality by casting it in the only available simplified mathematical model, itself merely a tool to account for the properties of matter.
Yes, in books, brains, lecture notes, academic papers. In lots of places. :)
Any theory stated exists. Sufficiently conforms with scientific law enough at least to the person asked, well, we await the answer.
So if there were none of these, would e still equal mc[sup]2[/sup]? Do such facts only come into existence when discovered by us?
The laws underpinning or being (perhaps approximately) described by theories would not seem to me to come under the definition of unambiguously immaterial substance, since they ate indirectly observable, i.e. they effect matter. This is why I tried to be careful in limiting consideration to undetectable things.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What this doesn’t allow for, is the fact that they enable predictions regarding things, about which we had no previous knowledge. They can’t simply be in the mind, as they’re efficacious and predictive with respect to objective phenomena. Nor, I think, peculiar to humans, as presumably the same principles would be discoverable by other intelligent beings.
Mathematical Platonism posits that there are real ideas, that is, ideas that are the same for any rational intelligence - such as e=mc[sup]2[/sup] - but that are only graspable by a rational mind. Ergo, real but incorporeal. I think that is the direction one ought to be looking for something approaching immaterial realties, if not ‘substances’, as such.
This is an unrelated and rightly disputed claim. The wording of the OP was precisely to avoid the necessity of deciding whether phenomena like human ideas are material or not. The "Materialism and consciousness" thread is an obvious home for this sort of discussion. Here, if it is predictive, it is considered by the definitions in the OP to be material in the modern sense.
I think that’s because it’s a fact that is inconvenient to naturalism. It’s the crack in the egg.
It arose out of the idea, espoused by myself on said thread, that if a thing does not interact with matter at all, belief in it is unjustified. This thread takes a special case of some abstract thing that, perfectly allowably in a fundamental physical model, does not couple to any material. That was what interested me; that is why I asked that specific question. The "Materialism and consciousness" thread perfectly covers what interests you, and I can battle it out with you over matters of mind there if you like :)
But your criteria says spacetime, being affected by material objects, is under the purview of the material world, and, if inertial frames are only contained by or in spacetime, it would appear such frames are every bit as affected by material objects, thus also under the purview of the material world, suggesting an ontological value.
But a reference frame cannot in itself be detected, and isn’t even a valid concept with respect to any single spacetime object anyway, but only in relation to another one separated from it, so it must be an “unambiguously immaterial substance” for which the belief “is unjustified, because they makes no impression on us and we can’t talk about them.” But they do, and we can, so......
But I agree: reference frames are unambiguously immaterial fields; I agree they do not exist as material objects exist, hence have no dedicated ontology; I don’t agree they have no ontological value.
I understand the limitive “contemporary criteria”. I don’t think a productive dialectic is possible using it alone. But interesting notion, nonetheless.
Referring to the emphasised section, I'm unaware of anyone saying that spacetime contains reference frames. Reference frames are a mathematical tool for describing spacetime and the moving bodies within it. It is an artefact of these tools that an origin and some scales must be chosen to realise that utility, and these are arbitrary unless one specifically desires to consider a particular body to be in fact at rest, such as a laboratory or a hypothetical twin. What we detect is the phenomena that reference frames in relativity are so good at describing, such as the observer-dependence of whether the motion of a freefalling body is linear or parabolic, the discrepancies between accurate clocks close to or far from the Earth's surface, or the velocity-dependence of decaying unstable particles. These are frameworks within which we can ask insightful questions, i.e. ideas, rather than anything physicists consider to be out there somewhere. As ideas, they are again existing in minds, books, papers, lecture notes, memories, etc. and as such influence matter.
But the whole point of relativity is that physical laws are not in terms of frames. If I wish to state coordinates, I can only do so with respect to frames. But the vectors themselves are invariant under frame transform, and it is those that dictate the particular manifestation of physical law under study.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
All I’m saying is some “unambiguous immaterial substances” seem to be quite justified. Unambiguous and immaterial being uncontested, substance being not so lucky.
Well, I'd say not in this case. The idea of reference frames strikes me as material, as does the actual thing it represents. You might, if you were an idealist for instance, disagree. That was precisely the ambiguity I sought to exclude, although, as Pfhorrest pointed out, it could be argued that my hypothetical example suffers another ambiguity.
OK.
I feel bad, like I've offended you somehow, but I'm not sure if that's because my partner has conditioned me to take "OK!" as "I'm angry!" :rofl:
Nope, not offended. I cherrypicked from your criteria and conditions, so rapidly exhausted my potential argument.
In what sense are ideas material? If I asked you to send it to me, or show it to me, would you be showing me a material thing, with mass, and so on? I will answer that for you: no, you would be showing me a set of symbols, and trying to explain their meaning. If I couldn't read those symbols, or grasp their meaning, then I you would not be able to 'convey the idea'. Therefore, the idea is not material.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
As you know, reference frames are a formalism that abstract over the systems they stand for. Physicists use that formalism to say that when you do this experiment, this outcome is predicted.
It is those observable systems that ground the formalism.
Now you're just saying that that grounding and use is what makes them material - physicists couldn't explain their experiments without them.
That's OK. But it doesn't quite fit your definition above. A reference frame isn't itself detectable, it's instead part of the formal machinery that physicists use to detect things.
where 'machinery' is a metaphor for a network of concepts and predictions that arise from them.
Yes, and you can probably extract everyone's view of universals right there.
Contra Nominalism, reference frames aren't just in the mind or in language, they are a formal aspect of the world being investigated. And contra mathematical Platonism, they are not prior to or separate from the world.
I shall probably regret asking this, but to satisfy my curiosity, why can things which are in minds not be efficacious and predictive?
I was responding to this:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There is a broad tendency nowadays to assert that ideas are in minds, that minds are a product of the brain, which has evolved out of adaptive necessity. So that kind of subjectivizes and relativizes ideas -- saying their 'human inventions' but have no 'ontological status' beyond that.
Whereas, what I'm pointing out, is that such ideas are not simply in the mind, because they enable us to discover things about nature that we otherwise couldn't know. The whole history of mathematical physics has been testimony to that. Eugene Wigner's essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences explores this idea.
So, my argument is that ideas - not just any ideas, things that you or I happen to think of, but formal concepts, like mathematical principles - are real, but they're incorporeal. (Hence I'm arguing for a form of dualism, but not Cartesian dualism.) Ideas have a reality that can't be reduced to or explained in terms of physical laws, indeed, we would have no conception of what physical laws meant without first having such ideas. I'm saying that the notion of 'immaterial substances' as given in the OP, is looking at it the wrong way, for the historical reasons I sketched out in my first response.
Yep, thought I'd regret it. More "I'm arguing that..." where what you mean is "I'm saying that...". Pointing to even more people saying it does not turn it into an argument.
I just thought I might get a clearer insight into your thinking if you had some reason why you thought minds incapable of holding models which are efficacious, but I see you can't even back up that simple assertion without deflecting to a journalistic description of what people tend to believe rather than any actual analysis of it. Nevermind.
I think you're conflating 'understand' with 'agree'. One of the options is that what you're saying doesn't make sense. If it doesn't make sense there's no 'understanding' to be had. You're looking for a measure which might not even exist, you're trying to judge whether I 'understand' your arguments presuming already that there's something there to be understood. Of course I'm going to fail that test because I don't agree from the outset that there's anything there to be understood.
If you want to discuss matters at a level where people might not even take for granted the coherence of your position, you need to be more open to a deeper analysis of it.
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/critical-theory/v-1/sections/critique-of-instrumental-reason
That's not what I meant, but you're right it wasn't clear. When I say the 'idea' of reference frames is material, I mean it is encoded in books, brains, etc. The phenomena they describe are observable phenomena. But reference frames themselves are not real, i.e. they don't exist independently of us out in nature.
That is what I was taking issue with.
This is why the question is worded as it is. What I said was a materialist viewpoint, your idealist one is different. The ontology of reference frames may be under dispute, so does not fall under the definition of an unambiguously immaterial thing.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
All of this still however wishes to treat 'the immaterial' as in some sense objective. But then when I point out that something actually immaterial, namely, mathematical and physical ideas, actually play a fundamental role in determining what is physical (or for that matter what is objective) then you say these don't fall under your definition of what you would accept as immaterial.
So you've defined 'the immaterial' out of consideration!
You're not going to get very far by limiting "immaterial" in this way. It's a straw man which doesn't in any way represent what a person who believes in the immaterial believes in. We believe that certain things which effect the material world, intention, soul, and God, for example, have an effect on the material world. In fact the existence of these immaterial things is commonly demonstrated by their effects on the material world.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This is an ambiguous distinction. A logical demonstration is a demonstration of what "should" be. It is the only type of demonstration which can be used to justify the belief in anything. The necessity which supports belief is a necessity of what "should be".
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The idea that a "field" is something material, is what needs to be demonstrated. I once argued on this forum, that fields are believed by physicists to be real, active, causal, material things, and I was laughed at for this. But that's just an indication that people have the tendency to laugh at the things which I argue for. Perhaps you are better positioned to make this argument.
I even provided quotes from Dr. Feynman, describing how when electrical energy moves, it moves through the field, rather than as electrons moving. But people here insisted that what was real was energy moving as electrons. We have the same problem here with regard to light energy. People here insist that electromagnetic energy moves as photons (particles) rather than as waves in the electro-magnetic field.
Yeah, pretty much, which just goes to show that while materialism alone isn’t false, it alone is insufficient as a explanatory device in all cases.
The Kid is technically correct, but his contemporary restrictions are self-defeating, insofar as neither, e.g., the home twin nor the traveling twin have any use whatsoever for reference frames, until or unless they ask why their clocks don’t match.
I find it difficult to envisage what an "unknown immaterial field" could be. If the GUT requires it, then isn't it then coupled to the world by virtue of that? Or perhaps you mean something like the Many Worlds interpretation of QM where the copies of you are undetectable - in a sense uncoupled from what is directly observable?
No shit.
Quoting Wayfarer
The question isn't lacking a hypothetical immaterial: it provides one consistent with the definitions given. I agree this is an extremely narrow range of possible unambiguous immaterial substances, but then that was precisely the point.
Quoting Andrew M
If you look into something like Kaluza-Klein theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluza%E2%80%93Klein_theory) you'll get a sense of what I had in mind. The mathematical model itself demands the existence of a new field (the radion field) that has not been observed. The theory unified general relativity and electromagnetism, but because the radion field is predicted but not found, the theory is not deemed scientific. One reason might be that nothing has the property of coupling to the radion field (unlikely in this case), which made me wonder: if something like KK theory were formalised that predicted two new fields -- one detectable and detected, the other undetectable even in principle -- would the predictiveness and simplicity of the theory justify belief in something out there that we cannot possibly detect under any circumstances?
The brief conversation at the start of the thread raised the following points:
1. does the existence of the detectable field grant some higher ontological status to the model's features, such that detecting it itself is an indirect observation of the undetectable field? (e.g. we also learn things like geometries and symmetries of the universe that necessitate the undetectable field)
2. there is nothing stopping us in principle from adding the newly detected field to an extended Standard Model by hand, in which case the original model -- the raison d'etre of that new field's discovery -- is nominally unscientific again.
Quashing my heart, I am inclined toward the latter: the model is just the only available model right now, and belief in the undetectable field is still unjustified. But the former is compelling, and in reality we would look for other evidence consistent with that model, which might make belief in the undetectable field more justified. It is an artefact of the question that this is not the case.
Given its predictiveness and simplicity (and perhaps also its explanatory power), I think it would have to be a strong contender. That the field is undetectable doesn't imply it's not there, so the theory could nonetheless be true.
But given that it is a physical theory, shouldn't we expect the field to be coupled to other things in some way? Otherwise what would it be contributing to the theory?
If not, perhaps the theory would lend itself to different interpretations, similar to QM. Which I think would be an indication that the theory is still lacking in some respect.
Right. I think I see what you mean. I looked at the Wikipedia article you mentioned - I'm impressed that it talks about 'the fifth dimension', although I don't understand the mathematics.
As is well-known, the current model of the Universe suggests that the kind of matter~energy known to science only comprises 4% of the totality of the mass of the Universe, the remainder existing in the form of dark matter and dark energy. So, as regards dark matter, as I understand it, this is thought to be ‘non-baryonic’, which means not consisting of the kinds of particles that science is familiar with through the ‘standard model’. So attempts have been underway for some decades to locate the purported non-baryonic matter, alas to no avail.
Let’s say that this effort goes on for a hundred years and nothing like ‘dark matter’ is ever found. Would it then be considered that the gravitational effects that are now attributed to dark matter, might actually be a consequence of a non-material source? Would this be the kind of idea you had in mind in your OP?
Not quite, that's something that would definitely have an empirical effect on matter but is beyond our theory. I was thinking more of something truly undetectable, belief in which can only be justified via otjerwise verified theory.
A implies B and C. B strongly suggests A and is true. C cannot be evaluated on its own.
I was thinking of something that is a consequence of, rather than by-hand contributes to, the theory. This is the case with the radion field. It contributes nothing at all to the theory, but if the theory is correct, it must exist.
Quoting Andrew M
The nub of the matter, really. Anything that is permanently or even wilfully outside the realm of the phenomonological cannot be proved to not exist. We usually talk about such things in terms of justifiability. I'm particularly a hardliner on this, so I was wondering what it would take for me to believe in something that cannot be even indirectly experienced.
No easy answer. But it seems to me justifiable just as believing the sun will rise tomorrow (or in a thousand years) is justifiable even though it hasn't been experienced.
That is a falsifiable proposition. The Sun is not undetectable. "The Sun will come up tomorrow" is a good test of the predictive power of: "The Earth rotates on a fixed axis as it orbits a locally stationary star".
I agree, knowledge is deferred in both cases. It might be seen as qualitatively similar to presume a law holds until it doesn't and to presume a model is a good match with whatever it represents until disproven. Science favours direct empiricism, however. If the same model that says the Sun will come up tomorrow also said there's a ghost in your water tank, one would treat it more cautiously ("it" being either the model or the water tank :rofl: ).
Yes, but I'm not sure that's essential for justification. You might justifiably believe it will rain tomorrow based on the weather report. Turns out it doesn't in this case. But that doesn't mean that you can't justifiably believe weather reports in the future.
An undetected field doesn't seem like a ghost in the water tank. We've detected plenty of other fields - this particular one just happens to be beyond our ability to test for. The upside considerations of the theory would seem to outweigh this particular downside.
Ahhhhh okay no, I don't mean it is undetectable insofar as it is beyond our current or future technological capabilities. I mean it's coupling to all other fields is zero even in theory. That would be something new.
Fair enough. It seems to me that belief can still be justified on balance of considerations.
This line suggests you’re imagining a confirmationist epistemology, which is problematic, especially since the question at hand is about justification of belief.
It's within a falsification framework. If a theory A predicts that B must occur, and B occurs, belief in the efficacy of A is strengthened. It is not confirmed, but is presumed good pending later falsification.
Were the only field predicted the successful one, the theory would be hailed as a success. The bonus undetected field C is the worry. C itself is not falsifiable, so full attempts to falsify the theory are not possible. (Compare to a theory that predicts two detectable fields but only one is found.)