1.2.7 Non-Materialist Ideas

Version 1.0 September 2016                                        (Previous Version)

Section 1.2.5 Realism and Materialism explains the positive reasons for adopting materialism, because of its explanatory power and because it actually helps us to determine reasonable values.  But many people reject materialism, for a variety of reasons:

●    They can’t see how to resolve the problems linking appearances to reality.

●    They can’t see how a materialistic world could have values, meaning or purpose.

●    They can’t explain consciousness or free will in a materialist world.

●    These supposed inadequacies of materialism mean we can't assign responsibility for actions.

If we resolve these failures of understanding we remove the need to adopt non-materialist views.

Solipsists don't believe in anything apart from themselves, but we explain why we reject this view in subsection 1.2.1.4.  Here we consider a variety of other positions people hold:

●   Nihilists believe nothing important exists.  To suggest that all the suffering in the world is all meaningless seems heartless.  But more significantly, we can do something to reduce suffering, whether it has meaning or not, only if we recognise that it exists and is important.

●   Monists believe the universe comes from or is made of a single kind of substance.  We can accept that the mass/energy of modern physics is the one substance, but not that it is mental events.

●   Idealists assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial.  it's a form of monism, but it doesn’t help to explain how we should behave any more than materialism does, and in fact it has too many inherent problems.

●   Dualists claim that mind and matter are two separate kinds of reality.  One major difficulty is how the two worlds interact.  Another is that positing a separate kind of substance for meaning and morals doesn’t solve the problems that idealists think they solve.

●   Pluralists claim that there may be many separate kinds of reality.  Not many people take this seriously, and pluralism has similar problems to dualism, except even more so.

We look non-materialist ideas under the following topic headings:

1. Nihilism:	Is nothing really important?.
2. Monism:	Is there only one fundamental substance?	Is it reasonable to break down this area into these topics at this level? Click on feedback, or add a comment below, to tell us if you agree or disagree, or suggest improvements.
3. Idealism:	Is everything just made up of ideas?
4. Dualism:	Is the physical world separate from the mental or spiritual world?
5. Pluralism:	Are there more than two kinds of world?

We suggest the following summary: