Originally Posted by
Darat
I've never been a materialist so for me it ain't even about letting go a childhood favourite, it's just about being pragmatic. What materialism refers to of course changes over time, but that is indeed its strength. I've often thought materialism would be better named stuffism I. e. the stuff that exists regardless of what that stuff is.
'Stuff exists' is probably as far as you can take it, although even then I wouldn't hang my hat on it (literally or conceptually). For day to day parlance it is of course useful to acknowledge that stuff exists, but in the quantum realm I'm not sure it even has meaning. After all, can something with no size be considered stuff? What about something with no mass? What about something with no directly observed attributes whatsoever? Is gravity stuff? Is an electromagnetic field stuff? Is time stuff? That's the thing with the quantum world, none of the attributes of 'stuff' is applicable to the mathematics which describe it.