Thanks for offering this opportunity, Laika. Here are my questions:
How do modern materialists deal with the fact that matter is not one of the fundamental conserved quantities in physical systems, such as energy, angular momentum, linear momentum and charge, and is not even one of the inexact conserved quantities, such as rest mass? In short, matter is not a necessary concept in contemporary physics at all; generally physics textbooks do not bother to define the word “matter” (some chemistry textbooks do). Objects that have mass and volume (i.e., matter) are definitely not the only or the most fundamental phenomena. Doesn't that refute the thesis of materialism?
it would be worth you looking at post #7 as that is sort of an introduction to this topic.
Everything below is coming from a non-scientist and is an attempt to explain the
philosophical controversies surronding materialism in relation to physics but may not be accurate of scientific literature. This has been a fundamental problem for materialists since the beginning of the early 20th century. Physics is the basis for our understanding of the physical world, so the discoveries there which culiminated in Einstein's theory of relativity has proven to be a serious challange to materialism. For Marxists, it was a persistent problem in Soviet Science because it represented a challange to the certianities of Newtonian Mechanics and resulted in nurmerous challanges to Soviet ideology throughout the existence of the USSR. The same set of controveries also occured in China during the Cultural Revolution and may
still be ongoing there. In the USSR, there were periods where the offical ideology was very assertive in insisting that relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology
were compatable with Soviet philosophy of dialectical materialism and that philosophy can and should play a role in science to give a consistently materialist interpretation of physics. there were also periods of relative liberalisation and in which science was largely left alone.
"dialectical materialism" (i.e. the Marxist variety) is a worldview which affects both the understanding of nature and society- so discoveries in natural science therefore affect social science. This is why it was necessary for the Soviets to intervene in natural science and physics (because of the knock on effects it would have). Matter has been equated with Atomism (since Democritus and Epicurus), treating the universe as divisible down to indivisible particles of matter. these indivisible particles are assumed that to have always existed in that matter cannot be created or destroyed (simply re-arranged). This determines the properties of cosmology in that, either that universe (and all the matter in it) is finite in time and space and therefore was "created" or that it is infinite and has no begining or end. The problem for materialism is that treating the universe as finite in time and space leads to questions as what is "beyond" the universe, what came "before" it. In Marxism, the answer is pretty much always a variation on religious belief in god and the creator.
The discoveries which led up to the big bang therefore are very threatening to Marxist materialism because of its religious implications. Ideas such as Dark energy, Dark Matter, Multi-verse theory are "threatening" and are potentially dismissed as an error in abstract reasoning due to excessive use of mathamatics which does not rely on observational data in a way that resembles "philosophical speculation". they therefore tried to find
alternative explanations for the Red shift in cosmology other than the big bang because of the problems it caused. In the west the eqivilent of this debate was closed in the 1960's and 70's with the discovery of cosmic background radioation meaning that the scientenists reached the conclusion that demonstrated that there was "cosmic inflation" and therefore discounted the "steady state theory of the universe". The steady stage theory is more in line with Marxist materialism, but by the time these discoveries were made political controls on Soviet science has significantly relaxed and demands for scientists to fit discoveries into materialism had fallen away. It was really a feature of the period from about 1930's to the 1950's when Stalin turned Marxism into an "orthodoxy". the 1920's were considerably freer in terms of discussion on the topic with a variety of views both for and against relativity and its implications.
Another dimension of this is the breakdown in determinism; the Soviets essentially believed, as Einstein did when discussing with Bohr over quantum mechanics, that "god does not play dice" (minus the god part). Their view is that nature follows deterministic laws of cause and effect (like Einstein) and that the behaviour of atomic particles (and when scaled up, the universe) is therefore assumed to be governed by laws of cause and effect which are
knowable. indeterminism means that we cannot predict the behaviour of atomic particles and that's a problem. In it's way, the breakdown of causality is very destructive to Marxist theory of society as Communism is a "scientific" prediction; if the laws of cause and effect don't "work" in predictable ways that starts to undermine the view that social development can be predicted. For Soviet philosophers, it then became a question of insisting that the indeterminism of quantum particles was projection, and that we are projecting attributes of "free will" on to the atom and implicitly treating them as if they have consciousness. (similar ideas have been suggested in the West, known as "quantum mysticism").
How did Lenin try to get round this minefield? As I said, he redefined matter away from the "atomist" view that matter is indivisible particles acting as "bricks of the universe". The problem was that the conversion of matter into energy led some people to speculate on the "disappearence of matter" (and therefore of materialism). If this energy was attributed properties such as consciousness, it opened the door to religious interpretations of physics. So lenin said that materialism is about the relationship of consciousness to the external world and the
source of knowledge. "For the
sole 'property' of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bounded up is the property of
being an objectivity reality, of existing outside our mind."
This interpretation does not give a definitive answer to any of the controversies above, but simply take materialism out of them (as best as it can) so that science can settle the disputes with new discoveries. There were
numerous interpetations of materialism which both supported and opposed current theories in the USSR. the only thing that it would say, is that a "materialist" answer is possible and that you don't have to resort to theories which are opposed to it (e.g. quantum indeterminism, finite universe, space, time, the big bang, etc).
frankly, that's problematic because of how much science it potentially throws out on philosophical grounds. the thought experiment of "Shrodinger's Cat" might be useful here to illustrate: the cat is in the box with a vile of poison that can be released by decaying isoptes, the box is closed and so until we open the box we assume that the cat is simulatenously dead AND alive. A materialist response to that is that it is better to admit that we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive and that we are simply projecting those possibilities onto the situation. In terms relating to physics, this means that we are implicitly assuming we
can't know the properties of sub-atomic particles (the box is closed and knowledge is inaccessible) so we simply attribute mathamatical probabilities onto those particles with or without knowledge of them. A materialist would say we must seek
knowledge of the casual relationships that govern subatomic particles rather than
projecting indeterministic probabilities on to them. This same idea is re-occuring through out Marxist criticism of the current state of physics. So it doesn't "refute" materialism but remains a very serious challange to a materialist understanding of nature.
my apologies if that explanation is rather long and "dense". its a tricky but intresting topic.
