by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: May 02, 2007   Last Updated: October 07, 2009

Materialism is a theory about matter. Matter is the stuff of which everything appears to be made of; theories about what that is began at least with the ancient Greeks (pre-Socratic philosophers generally). Matter could be made of earth, air, fire and water in various combinations it was hypothesised, and later Democratis speculated it was made of tiny atoms, while eventually a unified field theory would let it be considered to be one force field that pluralizes itself in to all the forms and shapes encountered by human experience interacting and living in it.

Materialism is a word that is subject to the meaning limitations implicit in any language; words meanings are determined by the context and intentional use in a traditional meaning matrix generally. Quine's ontological relativity criteria is a kind of set theory for words and meaning groups a little like mathematical group or set theory. We find the word 'materialism' within a particular philosophical and historical context ripe with definitions-to stray too far from those and perhaps provide our own definition might make the concept incomprehensible.

We would not stipulate that materialism is nothingness because as a word it is something of an axiom basically unchallengable. Everyone commonly knows that materialism refers to everything that already exists objectively and how we appreciate those objects above all other rival values. Materialism is simultaneously a non-idealist value theory as well as a point of view about what the Universe and all experience is made of.

Fundamental axioms are largely unchallenged. Without accepting some given boundary conditions theoretical accounts that seek to have credibility must build upon pre-existing language and philosophical foundations. Materialism is a philosophy built upon language and history as well as a contemporary belief of some people. Materialism has a paradoxical challenge to explain how it originally arose from absolutely nothing or from something else like Spirit, alternatively materialists may say that the material universe or precursors have existed throughout all of eternity. Because those that study the world know little else than the matter-energy of things of experience, conjectur about things other than matter or mass-energy are improbable, yet so too was Einsteins paradigm changing view of the nature of space-time of Universe1.

If pre-big bang theorists are correct perhaps they may shed light on the problem of what fundamental mass units

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