this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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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.