Fundamentals of Marx: Idealism vs. Materialism 

@Hugh Mungis Cope

@Hugh Mungis materialism is important for society dont have christian belief. They simply have no meaning of life, budhism is just twisted fate of no ending, the middle east is keep changing their "belief", and the Jew still waiting for the Messiah (pretty weird)

@Hugh Mungis OK Tinfoil Hat.

linen, it's all just linen and coats linen, it's all just linen and coats linen, it's all just linen and coats....

lol lol

Thank you! And yup, gonna release that video in the coming weeks! I'll do a dialectics video first, and then hismat.

Nice

I would like to see a more accurate depiction of idealism as a whole. Only the most insane forms of solipsism take the position that everything blinks out of existence when you are not looking. There are forms of monistic idealism that imply that the world around us is mental in nature, and that those mental processes still carry on when you are not looking. The video seems to touch on metaphysics, but then diverges and talks about nature versus nurture. However, nothing about idealism requires favoring nature - nor does materialism inherently favor nurture. For example, idealism is compatible with the idea that an evolved human brain is required for us to have our uniquely human experience of separation from the rest of mind. The practical predictions that such a view would make about the correlations between brain states and conscious experience largely overlap with materialism and can favor either nature or nurture. The practical predictions of the two views only really diverge under special circumstances like altered states of mind, brain damage, and death. For example, if you take a mind-altering psychedelic that reduces your brain activity, most materialists would predict that this would result in less energetic and intense experiences, but idealism allows for the opposite. As the dissociative boundary between your mind and the rest of mind-at-large dissolves, you may have more intense mind-blowing experiences. Anyway, this has little relevance to the nature versus nurture argument. Materialism offers no advantage when it comes to science either. Observing, testing, and understanding the behaviors of the world around us can be done just as easily under the view that the world around us is mental in nature as it can under the view that the world is physical in nature.

@@anduinxbym6633 I agree with this, I think that at the science section he kind of mixed up idealism vs. materialism with rationalism vs. empiricism, which were both actually synthesized into German idealism, which also led to the forming of materialism through former Hegelians, if I'm not mistaken, one of whom was Marx.

​@@anduinxbym6633 You sure produced a wide range of examples! I tend toward evolutionary psychology, which at once gives a materialist basis for human nature but also some limitations that might be taken for immutability -- ascribed in this video to idealism. I hope that modern Marxists can accept that as social animal, the unit of selection in human evolution may well have been at the society level from the time we began to live in bands as our cousin apes do. Various personality traits and types now occur with specific incidences across human societies. There are hereditary followers, leaders, homosexuals, loners, freeloaders, psychopaths, geniuses. There are. But it's nothing to be alarmed about! The balance is correct for a cooperative society ruled by legitimate and democratic authority, with a basic political unit (voting block) of between 250 and 450 individuals. We are adapted for this. It is a gift. It is our birthright.

It really can be exhausting to learn new theory on your own time, especially since it often involves unraveling the propaganda and ideologies we've been force-fed our whole lives. I have to do it in chunks to keep it manageable. But it's definitely all worth it! Glad you enjoyed the video :)

The perception of being exploited is a feeling

Is that first part a Dave Rubin quote?

MichiruMichiMi So is being stung by a hornet...

​@@WorldGovernmentGeoInstitut But whether or not I hate the hornet for it, even demand their extermination, or instead think their stingers are really cool and everyone should be stung, or maybe feel indifferent about it and say it's part of nature, is subjective. To say that one of these interpretations is the "correct" one while the rest are "false consciousness" is fallacious bullshit.

Hedonism, individualism, egoism are the greatest truths of human existence. But yes, it is harmful when we consider it as a society apart from the individual.

@@umut967 God is the greatest truth of human existence.

@@umut967 idealist nonsense

@@johannjohannes8265 human existence is physical god is imaginary lmao, how can some make such comment under a Materialist video

@@studentshdhhdhd1849 God transcends existence, how can you make such an unqualified comment

Perhaps it could be used as some kind of social analysis after all indeed. But there's nothing of it (nor from a dichotomy of so-called idealism vs materialism) that could make it true in metaphysical terms at all. The best answer is just "we don't know." We may only describe societal structures and analyze them, but there's no need to get into consciousness territory and try to dig for the truth in metaphysical debates to do that. We can only see social phenomenons and perhaps analyze and critique them. A diagnostic can be made without digging into an "idealism vs materialism" debate that tries to dig deeper into "truth" but seems like a false proposition to me.

Bro… how do you type this shit out and not realse DM is pure idealism is beyond me. whats great about christianity is that is can also be applied to everything thing in life. - thats you! You realize that Physics can literally explain all the physical processes of reality but is still NOT universal because no ideas can be universal. Only Irrational beliefs can be universalized.

I totally agree with you, and I'll be sure to do more videos on idealism in the future! There's definitely more to be said, especially with regards to objective idealism as you point out. Спасибо, товарищ!)

@@themarxistproject sorry for abruption of the comment.

That's a fair point, and for what it's worth, I do agree with you that Marxists should be cautious with philosophy. Lenin was pretty staunchly "anti-philosophy" and wrote about it only in times when it became a political obstacle. To my best knowledge there isn't much effort on Marx's part either to engage in philosophical debate. Actually, I think Althusser's "Lenin and Philosophy" deals with Marxism and philosophy in a very intriguing way. If I understand Althusser correctly, he is suggesting that Marxism, and more specifically historical materialism, is actually a completely new "continent," separate from philosophy.

I also think that it is unjustified to say that Marxism is somehow overstepping itself when it tacks philosophy head-on. While it is true that Lenin did not indulge in the philosophy underpinning Dialectical Materialism, many Marxists did--notably Mao. While he was not necessarily the best at doing so, and certainly wasn't the only, he deeply engaged with Philosophy of Science through his understanding of Dialectical Materialism, giving a brief but sophisticated commentary on the Idealism/Materialism split in the history of philosophy in his works "On Practice" and "On Contradiction". I see you alluded to Kuhn's notion of scientific revolutions, however, it should be noted that this 'relatively' pessimistic outlook on the progress of science is not the standard either--in fact, I believe at this point in the philosophy of science, one would be just as justified to say that a Kuhnian perspective which flirts with an anti-realist or post-modern (I say post-modern because of its historically discontinuous conception of the history of science) is at the very least no MORE justified a perspective in the conversation of the philosophy of science than is a Dialectical Materialism perspective: indeed, then, (and maybe I'm overstepping here somewhat for rhetoric effect) perhaps anti-realist/post-modern Kuhnians and New Humians sorts, not Marxists, are better off leaving the philosophy of science untampered.

@@themarxistproject MATERIALISM IS IMPORTANT THAN IDEALISM OR ANY KIND OF RELIGIONS ! IF YOU GIVE UP MATERIALISM THEN CONSIDER THAT WAS HORRBLE SOVIET UNION ! SCIENCE MAY FALL APART AND RELIGIONS START STRONGER ! THAT'S WHAT HAPPENED IN SOVIET UNION MATERIALISM HAVE BEEN ABOLISHED AND HISTORICAL MATERIAL HAVE BEEN ABOLISHED BY SOVIET UNION AND ONLY IDEALISM AND RELIGIONS RULE SOVIET UNION ! THAT'S WHY IT FALLS APART

@@themarxistproject Lenin read Hegel though and was actually very interested in his attack against Kant’s subjectivism and the “Absolute Idea” chapter from Science of Logic. Althusser wrote about this. I feel like Hegel is often neglected by Marxists today even though there is a lot to gain from reading him through a materialist lens (through a proletarian class view-point). I’m paraphrasing Althusser so I’d suggest you read his work on this.

Justin, I see your point. I have only one wordy question to you. If this "materialist vs idealist divide is useful when criticizing political thoughts that are not built on historical material conditions" why can't it (the divide) be applied to everything? if some thing manifests itself in the observable objective reality (in Matter) - it exists.The person who says otherwise is an idealist (pluralist, solipsist ) of some kind. it's quite universal. I'm not an atheist, I don't "BELIEVE" that there's no god. God just doesn't manifest himself in the objective reality. He isn't a physical being, not real. BUT, god is material only in the sense of being a part of social matter - he exists in people's heads,books, shrines, churches - things made by humans. and you can "divide" any category. philosophers can be characterized by this category. there's nothing immaterial in that sense. Matter is everything that exists. it's easy as that. Being a coherent materialist it would be stupid (idealist) of me to deny god or any other thing if it's scientifically proven. for example, a being moves a mountain with a chant\prayer and it's experimentally verifiable. Materialists wouldn't be able to deny the actual change in matter. Believing has nothing to do with it. I guess, you get my point. we don't argue that the philosophy is completed with marxism, but it's totally fallacious worldview you say that "the earth is flat" or "market economy is wholesome for the majority of population" whereas the matter itself contradicts the statement, people just fail to see, to look at(due to pre-installed ideology or obscurity) , or deny the objective truth. hence materialism vs idealism.

Its basically that materialism says then they talk about ideas wont affect materia cose ideas effected by materials condition that are already sets in world that was couses of diffrent ideas of diffrent peoples effecte by diffrent materials and so on so on. Or just starts to loosing my mind covering this topic who knows

Ideas don't even exist as some separate substance alongside the material. There is _just_ the material. What we call "ideas" are complex processes distributed throughout the social structure (not even entirely isolated to our physical brains).

Joe Dispenza is a snake oil salesmen.

Quackery and pseudo-science detected.

Objective idealism is sophistry. It claims there can be an "absolute point of view" that is somehow more special than any other point of view and exists outside of it. Michel Bitbol already ripped this to shreds. It is not possible to even conceive of some sort of point of view outside of any perspective. A third-person perspective is not some sort of "absolute" perspective, it is still a perspective from the point of view of that third person. Objective idealism tries to posit some sort of special objective point of view within some "divine mind," but it only leads to an infinite regress, because it is a point of view from a subject which itself could only exist from another point of view. Nothing can be point-of-view independent.

How are our feelings material ?

@@justaguywithaturban6773 because they exist😆

@@user-td3ut4tg3v But that doesn’t make them material

@@justaguywithaturban6773 if no material what are they? Non-material? Is that a thing? all those words are invented to confuse people, marking them believe there is difference when in fact they are not

@@user-td3ut4tg3v They're made out of something which you’re currently not able to comprehend if you depend on modern science, but I’m trying my best to explain in modern science language and I’ll call them immaterial. Emotions are spiritual and the language of spirit realm cannot be translated in human man made language. But the nearest thing to describe, the spirit "language" can be felt.

Not really. Capitalism has to rely on "purpose" and "intentions" in order to argue its case. There is no ground on which capitalism can stay neutrally other than the self-made one. It takes one to just put into question the premises of capitalism and it has nothing else to answer, hence why capitalism has to constantly rely on self-contradictory thesis of theologists and philosophers or even speculative speudo-science.

You cannot be a vulgar materialist and a marxist in the same time since vulgar materialism is embraced only by bourgeois and theological thought, hence why you have to appeal to metaphysical units such as "electrochemicals" and other made-up "Gods". By the time you have finished of worshipings atoms, we have already mastered them.

You’re still an idealist. Marxists pull a sleight of hand to trick people into thinking that “the marxist understanding” of materialism opposes traditional materialism but this is a fake binary. Marxists definion of materialism is just another form of idealism. Marxists must reject Materialism because if it turns out that Human Societies cannot be sustained without exploitation then… what?

So atheistic

​@@Hhjhfu247what happened?

I think is most about the material conditions you must face to get food, as example. You will always need a wage to buy it in a system that, otherwise, doesn't allow you to eat. You can clearly go for hunt but without a wider group and a big land of your ownership average results risk to be very low and you'll be compelled to re-enter the system you fled for survival. So the problem is about what materially shapes our opportunities.

Both seem to be authoritarian in their own conclusions and yet there also seems to be this sense of false dichotomy (even present in this video). A better position would be "we don't know." And yet that doesn't mean we can't make a social analysis without clinging onto these two concepts as if they were a sacred text.

Well it's more the notion that thoughts/ideas don't have a special role in the world, that they're no different from the material. Obviously they are based in material processes, but there is a certain qualitative aspect to them and they do possess the ability to shape the world around us. I don't think vulgar materialism is strictly incompatible with Marxism, but Marx and others did draw a distinction between their interpretation of materialism and some of the more uncompromising positions, which they referred to as vulgar.

Thanks for the clarification, your channel is great.

You enter into weird territory when you only believe matter and energy are all that exists. How can something "new" come into existence if new matter and energy can't be created? If it doesn't, are you implying you always existed or that you never existed? Is the category of one's own identity a nominalist constructed falsehood?

The idea that thoughts are directly reducible to material processes is far from a given. *There are three main competing materialist positions:* 1. At the most basic level, matter is not conscious. Conscious experience is directly reducible to the non-conscious. 2. At the most basic level, matter is not conscious. Conscious experience emerges from "complexity" in non-conscious systems. 3. At the most basic level, matter has some form of primitive consciousness. In complex systems, these primitive conscious perspectives combine into a greater conscious perspectives. The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of how we get subjective experience from non-conscious bits of matter. If, on the most basic level, nothing but non-conscious bits of matter exist, then how is consciousness explained? The first position that I stated is a ridiculous form of reductionism that offers no answer to the hard problem. It holds that ultimately only non-conscious bits of matter exist, and it simply calls certain arrangements of matter "consciousness". It's nothing more than a semantic game to disguise the fact that its proponents are claiming that 1=0. The second position proposes strong emergence as an answer to the hard problem. To say that conscious experience "arises from complexity" sounds respectable, but it's just a fancy way of dressing up a ridiculous idea in nice sounding words. They are proposing an irreducible property called consciousness that magically pops into existence when non-conscious bits of matter are arranged in juuuust the right way. What's more, this property cannot be deduced from its components. The final position is a form of panpsychism that gets around the hard problem by proposing that consciousness exists on the most basic scales. Under panpsychism, consciousness doesn't magically pop into existence. This is probably the strongest materialist position, but it has its own problems - namely the combination problem. It has to explain why smaller perspectives unify into larger more complex perspectives in complex systems. Modern idealism is far stronger than this video seems to make it out to be. In fact, it's probably the strongest position that there is, as it's compatible with everything that we can observe and it has Occam's Razor on its side. It also lacks the logical problems that come with materialism. I highly recommend looking into the work of Bernardo Kastrup.

​@Random User Materialism doesn't necessarily imply that the primary physical world is unconscious, as panpsychism is considered a materialist position. Granted, panpsychism is not the mainstream position. I oversimplified some of those positions for the reader, but the point remains. Regardless of whether you consider matter at the most basic level to be irreducible or unchanging, mainstream materialism still explains consciousness in terms of the activities of non-conscious matter. It still runs into the hard problem of explaining how we get subjective experience from physical things that supposedly have none of the qualities of subjective experience. Reductionists like Daniel Dennett have no answer to that problem, rendering their position untenable. The other popular position is to suggest that consciousness just pops into existence because of "complexity".

I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on vulgar materialism, but my assumption is that everything is reduced to interaction between matter. Even identity could be categorized as a consistent cognitive process, resulting from particular neural pathways created and reinforced by lived experience.

@@themarxistproject So do clones or copies in theory share the same identity, or could a singular identity have multiple bodies? Cause it sounds like only a person's specific construction or a person's brain's construction determines a person's identity. The problem of emergence is also still there unless we deny one of two premises; that matter and energy can't be created or destroyed, and that at some point in the past you did not exist.

Again, I'm definitely not qualified to say anything definitively on this, but I think clones would have different identities since neural pathways are formed through experiences and cognitive development occurs in the context of the environment of the individual. Yes, that's true. Perhaps that would be explained as the need to cross a certain threshold in development? After a certain point of exposure to the outside world, identity begins to take rudimentary shape (in a very physical sense in the brain) and continues to develop for the rest of someone's life. That would be consistent with the first premise since the formation of neural connections does not require new neurons (though it does require certain other elements). And the second premise would hold too, since it takes some certain amount of biological development before one could count as "existing." Maybe someone out there has a more informed understanding of this than me, though I honestly cannot even think of anyone who clings to closely to vulgar materialism.

It is precisely because dialectical materialism is antimetaphysics. There are many antimetaphysical philosophies: dialectical materialism, contextual realism, empirio-criticism, and centrism to name a few off the top of my head. The similarity between all these is that they are antimetaphysics. They do not posit anything _a priori_ about reality, reality just, as Benoist would put it, _is what it is._ Even our conception of matter is not _a priori_ in materialist philosophy, it is _a posteriori._ Idealism is metaphysical precisely because they insist "consciousness" and "the self" and the "subjective 'I'" are all _a priori_ truths. Idealists believe that everything is questionable _but the self,_ which they view as really existing in exactly as how they imagine it to be. An antimetaphysicalist views even the self as something that can be questioned. Engels' rejections of things-in-itself can be turned inward to reject the self-in-itself. There is no hard-and-fast line between the subjective "I" and the rest of nature. Something idealists will not accept because they insist the metaphysical self is an _a priori_ truth.

@@QuantumPolyhedron if this is the case, then Materialism isn't what should be used to dispute metaphysics and argue for antimetaphysics because it doesn't directly deal with questions of metaphysics A good example for why this comparison is flawed is that one can be a historical materialist and be pro-metaphysics. There's nothing explicitly in historical materialism that necessitates that someone should be antimetaphysics.

​@@damiendp8804 Historical materialism is an _a posteriori_ conception about the world. Categorically the same as any other _a posteriori_ conception, such as, the claim we live on a spinning ball orbiting a star. Metaphysical materialists would uphold that claim as well. Historical materialism is not a criticism of metaphysics. _Dialectical_ materialism is. Historical materialism is a necessary component if you do not want descend into postmodernism. The rejection of metaphysics can lead you down a rabbit hole of rejecting everything and thus having no ultimate reason to believe anything captures reality at all. Historical materialism provides a grounding, it explains that our social consciousness is heavily derivative of the industrial base, which is directly in connection to the natural world, and so it gives justification to believe that over time human societies really (as a very long term tendency and not a law) are coming closer to grasp the natural world *in some abstract and approximate sense* (not in an absolute sense as there are a lot of asterisks to this). Without historical materialism, rejecting metaphysics leads you to postmodernism. You would reject all concepts as _a priori_ and thus everything would be up for questioning, but you would then have no grounding for anything, you would have no reason to believe the ideas of civilization today are any closer to an understanding of the natural world than the ideas of human societies a thousand years ago. You would have no reason to believe that the schools teaching you that lightning is a high voltage discharge from the clouds to the ground is any more true than the school teaching you Zeus throws lightening bolts. The idea of any possibility to move towards a better understanding of nature would be entirely unclear and unjustified. Historical materialism is not itself a criticism of metaphysics. That's what dialectical materialism is about. Historical materialism is an attempt to explain "history" (the progression of human ideas, in Hegelian terms, the movement away from ignorance to the "kingdom of reason") from a materialist lens, how is it that people today can actually know more about the natural world than people a thousand years ago, to avoid what would later become postmodernism.

Nope. It's actually quite correct unless you reject the self-conciousness of the material world. Vulgar (mechanical) materialism would rather rely on the Big-Bang overdetermination thesis on order to reason out the premise-conclusion and this support its epistemological grounds.

What ontological materialism seeks to emphasize is not the denial of ideas. Materialism underlines that ideas are reflections of the existing reality. In the same way that we aren't able to just "let" the "light" to just be there by a thought and have to lit a candle by the matchstick, both independently existing outside of our desire to not be in the dark, we also cannot generate an existence from ideas without preexisting matters.

Thoughts are material. What is your brain doing if not cogniting thoughts?

​@@novinceinhosic3531 What materials are being created in the brain? Or is thought a chemical--electrical pattern, active pattern. A pattern could be a construct. A construct could be considered to be a material thing. So, maybe you are right.

@@arthurwieczorek4894 It's the law of quantitative change leading to qualitative change. The pieces of a car are just that, pieces, but when you put them in the right pattern, they become a full car and they cease to represent mere unrelated pieces. To say that a car is just a bunch of atoms it's basically to dump everything down to incoherence... physicalists would say that that's the case, even humans don't exist, there are just some quarks which move on a predestined path since the Big-Bang and so on.

@@novinceinhosic3531 Would you say quantitative change leading to qualitative change is an example of emergence? A car is a certain configuration of parts. The parts may not be incoherent to a mechanic. To say a stack of car parts is nothing but a bunch of atoms is incoherent is to see it from the point of view of a bad mechanic. To see that stack form the point of view of, say a metalergist, maybe not. The car parts themselves are the result of multiple levels of emergence and processing. You seem to be saying that physicalists are saying nothing emerges from quarks. You say 'predestined'. Is that a fudge word for 'preconceived'?

@@arthurwieczorek4894 it's more like a certain kind of something eventually turns into something else when under the right conditions. It's somewhat similar to Aristotel "potentiality-actuality", but at a more general level. What I mean by predestined is overdetermination. I suppose you know since the time of Socrates knowledge is defined as "true justified belief", right? Well, to be justified is to be concluded through deduction (basically you do syllogisms), but in order to be true, the premise has to be also true, and in order for the premise to be true and justified, the premise of the premise has to be as well... and so on ad infinitum. The error ad infinitum is addressed in a rhetorical manner by Aristotel by basically invoking a God which he named "the unmovable-mover". The unmovable-mover is basically a self-actualizing (self-justifying) premise for which no other premises are needed to prove, thus he acts as a placeholder to our lack of knowledge in the chain of premises. Call it God/Allah, atoms, dark-matter, Big-Bang etc. they are all man-concepted metaphysical units which are simply placeholders in order to fill the gaps in our theories and general knowledge.

I did, and I really enjoyed it! I also loved your discussion of diamat and hismat. I'm actually planing to make videos on that soon lol.

@@themarxistproject So basically, we're the same person.

Haha it would appear so!

@@themarxistproject Friend, I'm currently writing a very long script on the DPRK, do you yourself have any links to anything I can read which would further push my point on the DPRK being a deeply democratic and Socialist country?

@@PremierMatthew Check out Juche Gang or hit up Shane Lawrence Pick on FB

I mistook your channel with another rpg gamer also called NeverKnowsBest (all together). I saw him reviewing Disco Elysium and thought it was you but changed your pfp.

I think a materialist would say that it does not exist because everything can be reduced to chemical process in your body telling you to do things. So yes I think that it is idealist. Concepts such as the perfect person or the perfect circle which come from the forms by Plato are idealist in nature. They are not based on anything material that exists around, but we still have the concepts of them thanks to Idealism. Although it is entirely possible to be a mix of materialistic and idealistic like this video explains so an idealist can still reject free will

@@luisarmenta2619 You are idealist bc a materialist says so.thats circular logic m8.It has to be why i would universaly be an idealist... Anyway, this type of thinking could lead to some scenarios as totalitarianism, brainwashing and castrating people with high chance of psychopathy, and high chance of being criminals. And practicing of eugenics in general. Since, its just going to be better for everyone in the end. Removing traits associated with criminals and the scum of society, since there is no reason to believe they can change brainwashing in this sense too.And im talking about a communis(or socialist) society here, since external negative factors are mostly removed.

Nah

@@lugus9261 It is accordinh to the vid tho

@@Th3EnterNal no its not Marxism doesn't rule out "free will", it rules out the idealist version of it. Humans create all the time, that is the true essence of free will

Thanks for your comment. I've actually done a good bit more reading on this subject and definitely see the need for some major revisions. It'll probably be a while before I can revisit this but it's on the to-do list. Not sure it's accurate to suggest that Marx didn't understand epistemology or ontology though.

@@themarxistproject Marx understood epistemology & ontology, but only superficially. His & Engels objections to idealism were never very good & often involved strawmanning. Some of what they say is right, but they would often overlook the nature of what they spoke about (on a philosophical level, I cannot speak for economics due to my own ignorance).

Nah, that is merely one of the many interpretations of it.

QUANTUM MECHANIC IS IDEALISTIC ! IT'S DEFIES LOGICAL AND MATERIALISM ! GENERAL RELATIVITY IS MORE MATERIALISTIC

I think that idealism would mean that despite changing the material environment and phenomenons around us, human nature would stay the same

Human nature is idealistic because it stems from the theological belief that humans have a "soul" which is fundamentally irreducible to material reality. This "soul" would thus have a logic of its own: its own set of "laws" which would be separate from and fundamentally irreducible to any sort of physical laws, and would not change or being affected by material circumstances. This was the analysis Hegel worked with, he believed the subjective ideas of the human spirit were spontaneous and then subject to laws in how they interacted which were irreducible to anything else, and the laws governing their interactions would drive the development of the objective Idea and the course of "history." This same mindset was then adopted into neoclassical economics beginning with Alfred Marshall. Marshall believed that you can reduce the human spirit down to a set of its own internal laws from which the whole economy could be derived from. There is no reverse-causation of the material institutions of society upon those laws of the human spirit, they are treated as fundamental and unchanging. This was then became a cornerstone of marginal utility theory, its very foundations known as "consumer preference theory," which is a whole list of claims about how the fundamental unchanging laws governing the cognition of the "rational consumer." None of these laws, mind you, were ever demonstrated in psychology or neuroscience. They were just all invented in someone's armchair one day. I don't really get how people take marginal utility theory that seriously, but it is what it is.

It doesn't. But the proposition of the video seems like an assumption anyway. The best position IMO is "we don't know."

Neither the idea nor the matter really exists.. That you who interpreting it exists forever

@@pranavm.d457 matter only exists.And since we are made of matter ,we also exist.Idead are something we create.

@@arcticwind1368 so as per your view, Matter is inert or tend to change?? If it changes into idea then matter won't exists.. What is that motivating moving factor that changes matter into world??

@@pranavm.d457 Matter always changes. And because matter changes ,new ideas are born

Quantum mechanics casts doubt on ontological materialism. The idea of “matter” is more or less an imposition of the mind.

Many branches of Abrahamic religions kinda make more sense with Materialism than Idealism. Though it may be in line with non-Monism and both. Calvinists and Pre-Destination believers really seem to have more in common with Materialists than with Idealists and other Non-Materialists.

@christopher snedeker lol gottem

@christopher snedeker YES YES IT IS ! :) ! MORE THAN RELIGIONS !

Maybe you should read the actual literature before assuming others' opinion. "My point is that you can’t change the world without understanding it." > you should follow your advice here. I wonder why Lenin said that there cannot be a revolution without revolutionary theory 🤔 I guess he was an idealist too.

@@novinceinhosic3531 Can you explain to me what "materialist" means in Marxist parlance ? and what it means outside of it? Maybe you'll understand what I was getting at.

@@hansfrankfurter2903 Sure, I will begin by telling what materialism isn't: materialism, in the marxian context, is not a metaphysical category as it was in the case of the pre-socratics. Marx never ever spends time trying to argue about the existence of "material as substance" or to prove that "atoms, not God" is all there is, not a single line of text is about that. Materialism is rather a framework from the position one speaks, more exactly is the recognition of the condition of existence to begin with, e.g. humans need food to live, they need to live in order to philosophize or do anything, hence any position from which the primacy of the material is denied is by itself self-refuted since one cannot exist and deny his/her existence. From this very onset Marx begins his analysis of economics and sociology where he understands humans as being under the empire of "determination" (dependency of external factors/needs outside of them) and not just simple determined beings, but beings who also have the ability to self-determinate (this is the dialectical part in materialism, matter does not just determinate humans, but determined humans determinate matter in reflection). Basically ideas are reflections of the conditions of life (socialism being the product of the proletrarian experience under the capitalist mode of production) and in turn the very ideological opposition because by capitalism's internal contradictions causes the proletarain to develop and materialize (socialist thought becomes socialist mode of production) the theory through practice. This is very different from the mechanist of the 18th century or the pre-socratics who merely talked about the ontology of "substance" that makes up the Universe. Marx was uninterested in ontology, hence why hin his thesis on Feuerbach he said "Philosophers have hitherto merely interpreted the world, the point is rather to change it", through this he states that his interest is not the question "What/from what is the world?" (ontology), but "how does the world work and how can we make it in our image?" (science/practice).

Ok, you just repeated in so many words, what I was saying. Materialism for Marx is just the practical conditions of our current existence. 1- that's a completely empty statement, because the given conditions of our existence include ideas, religion, culture, language...etc that may not necessarily reflect anything in reality. So when he says he's a "materialist" as opposed to an "idealist" its a completely empty statement. If you want to reduce "materialism" to just economics and relations/forces of production ..etc you're back to reductionism. So either he was tautological and vacuous or reductionist. Telling us we have to start with what we have is not a particularly insightful statement, everyone knows this. Telling us that economics is the "true" driver of history is a reductionist statement that needs justification. That we have free will or "self determination" to change the world, is also nothing new that we didn't know before. 2- When ppl hear "materialism" their mind will jump to matter and substance. The masses can't be bothered to spend years studying 11 Thesis on Feuerbach and these other obscure texts and pointless debates about the nature of "materialism". If you want to reach the masses or the global working class as you claim, you must speak with a plain language that everyone can understand. @@novinceinhosic3531 You can intellectually try to defend Marx's works all day, what I'm interested in, is what relevance does this have to the world 2023 ? what use is it?

@@hansfrankfurter2903 your whole point boilds down to "I personally believe ideas are unrelated to reality" and "I cannot be bothered to read literally few pages witten by M&E to have a slight of clue what they were actually saying before I start attacking them". What should I even do with you if after anything I've told to you, you only got that I repeat myself? Should I type in a different language or speak in pure analogies, would that help you?

That's just an incredibly lazy straw man. Matter (as a philosophical category) is defined in terms of abstractions made from our observations. They are the most abstract, and thus in some sense, the most "fundamental" entities which, being something derived from observation, are directly identifiable by their observational properties. There is no break between materialism and observability. Kastrup is too lazy to actually criticize materialism, so he just makes up ridiculous straw men arguments that materialists believe in some sort of reality that is fundamentally unobservable. He makes materialist philosophy seem ridiculous so he can knock down the straw man without having to actually address our beliefs, and then his sheep followers who never open a book on materialist philosophy in their lives assume his misrepresentation is accurate.

Materialism does not explain the hard problem of consciousness, as Dr Hoffman points out, spacetime as a concept is not fundamental, it is emergent from consciousness. Here is Dr Michael Egnor on the subject ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BqHrpBPdtSI.html @@QuantumPolyhedron

MATERIALISM IS NOT IDEOLOGY ! MATERIALISM IS NOT IDEALISM ! MATERIALISM IS BASED ON MATERIAL THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN EXIST IN NATURE !

"Each position is used to justify social relations" Therein lies the problem. Social relations should be dictated by an analysis of people's will and what they can do about their circumstances. Why would they dig into metaphysics to do that? And more importantly, this really does seem like a false dichotomy.

@@WorldGovernmentGeoInstitut We agree that the resultant social relations is characterized by an Ideological error. However, as I said, this state of social relations is justified on pragmatic grounds. There is no alternative as argued by David Hawks.(see David Hawks Ideology second edition chp.1). Moreover, the Morality of this state of affair is subject to a vast literature which I think is beyond my capacity to lay bare. Thank you for your analysis.

@@Mathfinance. We'll see. I really don't see how engaging in this futile debate of Idealism vs Materialism dictates whether Socialism or Capitalism should be chosen but I'll give David Hawks a try.

@@WorldGovernmentGeoInstitut In his work "Democracy and Capitalism" Gabriel Almonds from Stanford University put forward the thesis that the economy and polity are the main problem solving mechanisms of modern society. How would you answer the question of how society should work and what means to be used for its attainment?