Metaphysics of Materialism
Metaphysics of Materialism
Old Paradigm Based on "What Is" or Being Substance Metaphysics
Old Metaphysics – Substance Philosophy
We're saddled with scientific materialism that blinds us to living process and we won't understand life or values until we can understand the holism of organisms. A new philosophy for the 21st Century is required, one that can account for what is being discovered about life and living processes. New foundations must be laid. We have to expand/start over with New Science, new metaphysics, new logic and new empirical philosophy.
To quote Whitehead (Whitehead, 25):
There persists …the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless and purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being.
This is called scientific materialism. It is not a scientific requirement. It is a metaphysical assumption based on “substance metaphysics”. Logic has been developed to be compatible with substance metaphysics.
Substance Metaphysics Characteristics
- Discrete individuality
- Separateness
- Fixity of nature
- Passivity (being acted upon)
- Classificatory stability
Substance (Metaphysics) Requires
- Determinism
- Cause/effect
- Passive Things
- A thing world
- A fixed thing world
- A study of only “what is”
- It makes “what is” permanent
The Old Material World View
Psychologist Eleanor Rosch characterized a perception we call scientific materialism as follows:
"In the analytic picture offered by the cognitive sciences, the world consists of separate objects and states of affairs, the human mind is a determinate machine which, in order to know, isolates and identifies those objects and events, finds the simplest possible predictive contingencies between them, stores the results through time in memory, relates the items in memory to each other such that they form a coherent but indirect representation of the world and oneself, and retrieves those representations in order to fulfill the only originating value, which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner”
Characteristics of Traditional Logics based on Substance Metaphysics:
- truth preserving
- thing oriented (extensional)
- consistent which denies process
- static
- excludes self-reference (self-knowing)
- excludes values