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wnoise comments on The two insights of materialism - Less Wrong
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Don't we call whatever is at the bottom matter? It all adds up to normality...
Not in everyday language, for instance we don't think of vacuum as being matter; so the fact that "matter turns out to be vacuum fluctuations" strikes us as surprising.
If we refine our definitions of "materialism" and "matter" appropriately, then sure. But that seems like turning a blind eye to the connotations of the word "matter", and perhaps these connotations will be lurking in the background of our thinking about materialism, and give us a nasty mistake at some inopportune moment.
(And at the everyday scale, we get useful cognitive work out of the matter-vacuum distinction.)
Fair enough. I suppose it'd be more accurate to say that whatever matter is fundamentally, so is everything, which is not at all the same thing as matter is fundamental.