It is interesting that 'materialize' is often used in ordinary English as an intransitive verb to mean: come to be real. "Rain clouds materialized on the horizon." "The Hezbollah counterattack never materialized." A thing or state of affairs is real if and only if it exists independently of (finite) mind. To be real is to exist outside the mind and outside its causes. The last two sentences may need some tweaking and some commentary, but let's move on to the question of the relation of materiality and existence. Is the following true?
1) Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff x is a material thing.
(1) formulates a version of materialism: everything that exists is a material thing, and everything that is material exists. If true, (1) necessarily true. We surely don't want to say that (1) just happens to be true. The type of necessity? Not analytic and not narrowly logical. And of course not nomological: (1) is not a law of nature given that the laws of nature are logically contingent. (1), if true, formulates a law of metaphysics. So I'll say it is metaphysically necessary.
Are there counterexamples to (1)? Are there existing things that are not material? Are there material things that do not exist?
Wanted are nice clean counterexamples that are not as questionable as (1) itself. I want to refute (1) if I can. Bear in mind that 'refute' is a verb of success. So angels won't do. How about numbers? Numbers are more credible than angels; numbers presumably exist; numbers are so-called 'abstract' objects outside of space and time and thus not material. Hartry Field and other nominalists, however, will argue with some plausibility that numbers and other abstracta either do not exist or that there is no good reason to posit them. Field wrote a book entitled Science Without Numbers. (And of course he was not proposing that one could do physics without mathematics.)
What is left by way of counterexamples to (1) if we exclude spiritual substances (God, gods, angels, demons, unembodied and disembodied souls) and so-called abstract objects (numbers, mathematical sets, Fregean-Bolzanian propositions, Chisholmian-Plantingian states of affairs, etc.)?
Well, consider my present occurrent visual awareness of my lamp. (Better yet: you consider your present occurrent awareness of anything .) This awareness of the lamp (genitivus obiectivus) is not the lamp; it exists, and it cannot be material in nature. The awareness is not a state of my body or brain, even if correlated with some such state. If it were a state of my body or brain, it would be material which is precisely what it cannot be. Why not? Because the awareness is an intentional or object-directed state and no material/physical state can exhibit intentionality.
This is as clean a counterexample as I can muster. The awareness of material things is not itself a material thing. Less clean, but still a contender, is the subject of (genitivus subiectivus) the object-directed state , the mind, ego, self that is in the state. If there is a self along the lines of a Cartesian res cogitans that is aware of a lamp when BV is aware of his lamp, then that self exists but is not material.
Have these considerations refuted (1)? You tell me. What I will say is that they make the rejection of (1) reasonable.
The other class of putative counterexamples to (1) are items that are material but do not exist. Unicorns and flying horses come to mind. Suppose that there are four categories of entity item: (i) immaterial minds, (ii) occurrent and dispositional states of minds, whether intentional or non-intentional; (iii) so-called 'abstract' objects; (iv) material things. Where do such Meinongian nonentities as unicorns belong? Obviously they belong in the fourth category. They are material things even though they don't exist!
Has this second set of considerations refuted (1)? You tell me.
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