Materialism
Materialism is the idea that nothing exists in the universe except material objects. This extreme view is often called
eliminative materialism, to indicate its elimination of anything
immaterial, like a
mind or an
abstract idea (pure
information).
Idealism was the claim of the British empiricist
George Berkeley, who argued that since all our knowledge of the world is limited to our perceptions of sense data, we have access only to what
John Locke called the "secondary qualities" and could never know anything about the "primary qualities" of what
Immanuel Kant came to call the "things themselves."
Berkeley's idealism therefore assumed the world can consist only of the ideas in our minds about the world. He was an
eliminative idealist.
Materialism and idealism are both monisms. They are usually contrasted in a famous
dualism between materialism and idealism .
Materialist metaphysicians hold that the fundamental nature of underlying reality is matter, which is partly correct. They think that all
mental phenomena, e.g.,
consciousness, can be explained as material interactions. This is incorrect.
We must also investigate the arrangement and organization of matter (in short, its
information), and we must investigate the communications between material things (the communication of
immaterial information, inside living things and between living things).
Human beings are biological information processors. They are processing ideas.
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