I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or serious. Beyond that, idk who they are portraying on the left. I’d appreciate some help clearing this up.

Like, um light is still made out of particles??? We can measure and detect wavelengths through photos like x-rays, and telescopes. I’m super confused on how this is a serious criticism on materialism.

  • Shaggy0291@lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    It’s the vulgarisation of materialism. This is done to misrepresent an idea that is otherwise difficult to attack in such a short form.

  • HaSch@lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    Even if you accept only the strictest possible interpretation of materialism, which is called physicalism and which posits that everything consists of elementary particles, this can bring you a long way. The point is that matter obtains only its most primitive properties from its elemental composition, by far most of the properties it exhibits stem from the way it is structured. A chemical example of this is that all organic substances consist of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, but the different shapes of their molecules allows for a vast variety of materials.

    In the physicalist interpretation, an idea is a collection of neuronal or electronic configurations which - by mechanisms not yet entirely understood - can be transcribed into e.g. binary code or the Latin alphabet. We know a configuration represents the idea we want it to, if we can feed thus-configured solvers a problem to test that it has “understood” the idea, and it will put out the expected solutions. Great numbers of increasingly complex, successful experiments with neural networks and deep learning should serve to illustrate that such an interpretation of an idea is viable. In particular, the electromagnetic spectrum is any configuration which we can feed into our brain - perhaps in the form of reading a textbook or looking at diagrams, or into a machine - in the form of code - which then enables either to distinguish between different wavelengths of light.

  • NothingButBits@lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    You can touch light. Visible light doesn’t do anything to you. UV rays will give you sunburn and X-Rays cancer, and so on.

  • SovereignState@lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    Yeah, ideas are material in that they’re caused by firing neurons in the brain that we can study. Who’s to say in the future that we won’t be able to literally extract ideas from peoples’ heads and put 'em in flash drives?

    If they have a point and it isn’t just light hearted roasting, it’s a dumb one. If it is a joke I like this one better

    • Samubai@lemmygrad.mlOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      I feel like materialism really isn’t that complicated or obtuse of an idea and Stalin does a good job at explaining it very intuitively. Ideas come from BRAINS, not some abstract non-material source.

      I mean, name an idea that didn’t come from a brain… I’ll wait.

  • big_spoon@lemmygrad.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    well…if you put an idea as a “chad” idea vs another one who looks like a “virgin” wojak idea, the “virgin” idea is immediately refuted!