Why the World Does Not Exist

The second quite devastating problem for materialism consists in the idea that materialism itself is not material. Materialism is a theory according to which everything consists of material objects (elementary particles or whatever) without exception. If this were true, then the truth of the theory of materialism would also be a configuration of elementary particles, manifest, for example, in the form of neural states of the brain of the materialist. Certainly, for an idea to be true, it is not sufficient that it is a brain state.

materialism must recognize the existence of representations in order for it to be able to deny them at the next step. This is a contradiction.

One cannot verify the claim that the thought “Only material conditions exist” is true by inspecting and checking whether all objects (and therewith all thoughts) are material. Still, how does the materialist then know that all objects are material? If he cannot tell us this, we have no reason to follow materialism. Materialism is only a metaphysical assumption

Materialists assume that memories or images are as material as brain states, although the objects about which one remembers, or which one imagines, need not be material. Admittedly, that is quite remarkable. How can one explain, for example, that, although brain states are material, they are able to refer to non-material objects in the form of images?

While PHYSICALISM claims that all existing things are located in the universe, and can for that reason be investigated physically, MATERIALISM claims that all existing things are made up of matter.

In principle all normal coffee tables in all normal living rooms consist of matter. However, dreamed-up coffee tables and dreamed-up living rooms, for example, do not consist of matter, just as little as imagined $100 bills consist of matter.

A first conclusion from this is that there are many objects which do not exist in the universe, a conclusion to which one must presumably first get accustomed. Thus, the universe is smaller than one might assume, and that is the case even though it consists of at least hundreds of billions of galaxies and an outrageous number of subatomic particles. It goes without saying that it is laden with energy and facts that have not yet been fully investigated and … still it is only a province among others, an ontological province among others. The universe on that account is simply provincial, because much exists that is not found in the universe. There are many object domains besides the universe. This does not mean that the other object domains exist entirely outside of the universe, which would be a completely different (and false) theory. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or the Republic of Germany do not exist in a place other than the universe, behind or above the galaxies, as it were, and so are not “hyper”- or “meta”-galactic.

If one is of the opinion that all existing entities are found in the universe, or that all events take place in the universe, one commits the error of mistaking one object domain among others for the whole. It would be exactly as if one were to think that there are only plants because one studies botany.

When we place all life and all meaning in the universe, the meaning of life turns easily into the illusion, so to speak, of ants, who, despite it all, take themselves to be important. From a cosmic perspective, it looks very much as if, in the interests of pure survival, we cling to an arrogant fantasy, namely the idea that humanity and its life world are something special. But in the universe our meaning plays no central role.

universe is not everything, for it is just the domain of objects or the domain of investigation of physics. Because physics, just as every other science, is blind to everything that it does not investigate, the universe is smaller than the whole. The universe is only a part of the whole and not the whole itself