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What does materialism have to do with communism?
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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askchapo
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Take a screwdriver as an example. Its purpose is to screw and unscrew screws. Screws are a social construct. I can use the social construct of screws to fix the social construct of my air conditioner. That'll create the social construct of cold air, which will give me the pleasant sensation of staying cool in the summer. The screwdriver is just a tool for manipulating my perceptual interface to grant me pleasure. It's a cultural technology.
Interesting ideas. But if all humans disappeared suddenly, the screw, air conditioner, and screwdriver would still exist as specific configurations of atoms. It is true that humans have conceptions of what those things are but they are merely reflections of the real material things, not the things themselves. If the air conditioner activated on its own, after all humans were gone, it would still measurably cool the air (as in slow the speed of interactions between the molecules of the air).
The more OP comments, the less I believe OP is here in good faith, tbh. It's starting to feel like the user is here to waste people's time, prodding others to jump through infinite hoops of explaining basic theory while brushing everything off by saying "it's a social construct", "it's perception", etc...
like an unstoppable force (hexbearian posters) meeting an immovable object (wrecker that says everything is imaginary and nothing is real)
Yeahh idk lol. I'm just having fun at least just vibing to some music and replying. It's good mental exercise at least! I really need to reread Capital though
Haha, that’s valid. If nothing else, a good reminder for me not to take it so seriously 🙏 And also to read more theory
Yeah, I feel bad about having to look at the user’s other posts, but I can see a lot more about its way of understanding itself and the world after doing that. It’s got a unique way of approaching things, which differ from and contradict what I know, have lived, and have studied about politics, psychology, etc. - so much so that the discussion is a bit frustrating, but I gotta remember not to become a bigger a stinker when I think I smell something afoul
It couldn't measurably cool the air, because there would be nobody to measure it. But that's beside the point. The real point is: there would be nobody to believe in those atoms, which would render then nonexistent, because atoms are a mental construct. Even a materialist would agree with me there, if they'd heard of protons and neutrons.
How do you explain matter existing before humans could conceive of it?
We didn't discover atoms in the sense of revealing some True Thing. We slowly built successive models of a set of phenomena we identify as atoms, which we continue to revise to make more reliable in descriptive and predictive applications and from there host of other applications.
From the best of our understanding it seems like matter exists independent of our belief or observation, which works well enough that we continue to use this understanding.
OP seems to reject this in favor of something like phenomena behaving in a way that's generated from our consciousness.
This is true. I didn't mean to imply atoms are the final, completely true, and perfectly-reflective-of-reality model of matter that will be developed.
I decided to edit the comment you replied to.