The meaning of materialism
As a concept materialism meaningfully begins as the conception of that which is solid, extended in space. The concept of the void, the medium, or simply the lack of resistance to matter’s movement, is seen as ontologically different to matter. This is the standard natural intuitive conception of matter, simply as the solidity which is the substance of reality.
If one reflects, however, upon what this conception of matter as pure solidity says about what matter ontologically is, one finds some immediate problems. Matter and space both exist as spatial extension and are indistinguishable on this mere extensionality. Matter, if it were purely solid and ontologically different from space, would find itself completely collapsed in extensionality, the atom would be a point particle with no spatial dimensions. In order for matter to exist in spatial extension it requires that space divide it and push its substance away from collapsing into a point singularity, however, if space is what keeps matter extended, what then is matter? All such points of matter, even if held apart by space, would just be other non-spatial points unextended and all that would be is space.
Matter, then, can only be conceived meaningfully as space itself, indistinguishable from empty space other than its clear spatial apparent persistence: matter is space differentiated in-itself by the instability of being that is motion and resisting itself. That matter appears to us as a visible/sensinble spatial form is only a subjective experiential aspect just as air is almost invisible and transparent to us though rocks are opaque. Space itself is conceptually indistinguishable from matter other than that it does not appear to us due to its apparently negligible effects on us. Certain paths of reasoning and logic lead one, if they wish to maintain some aspect of localism in material causation, to believe that space must be material, the finest/smallest yet densest and most ubiquitous form of matter in order to explain the connection of otherwise incomprehensible connections of material entities interacting with each other faster than the speed of light and beyond our strongest physical barriers attempting to isolate these material bodies. --(recall Borchardt’s aether)
What is a meaningful conception of matter?
The conception of matter as solidity died in the quantum revolution in which the ever penetrating analysis of matter revealed its ever increasing vacuity and ever more apparent reality of unsolidity. Matter lost its conception as solidity and became replaced by mystical conceptions of energy as the new non-solid substance of reality as understood as “physicality”, i.e. reality is ascribed only to that which interacts in the locus of interactions as described and understood by empirical-rational physics. To explain the apparent solidity of matter at our level of being new conceptions and developments had to be made, fields were introduced as new ontological entities pervading and filling space, immaterial in the sense that they were not solid, but physical in that they interacted in the locus of understood “scientific” reality. It is no longer matter that interacts in the modern world, but mathematically and geometrically described fields and the ontological concepts known as physical laws which pervade space and mold it in its temporal being. In the classical sense of the word materialism no longer is tenable. In any modern sense of the word materialism as a metaphysical theory means nothing other than what science says matter, or better put, substance, is. Philosophically the term materialism has become phased out and a phantom term, physicalism, has taken its place to show philosophy’s acknowledgement of the complete loss of solidity as substance in the modern understanding of the physical world, that is, the world as interpreted by non-philosophical empirical physics. Calling oneself a materialist in any sense, whether classical or in some Marxist dialectical sense, does not really mean anything other than abdicating that the knowledge of whatever physical reality IS, is something left to empirical physics along its path towards systematic completion which is assumed to culminate sometime in the future in a so-called theory of everything, everything, that is, except the ontological orders above mechanism such as chemistry, life, and conscious beings like humans who comprehend the world and themselves.
Matter, as a concept, thus, truly remains meaningful only to the philosopher who understands its nature as space differentiated from itself. Matter is the apparent substance of nature, spatial extension, res extensa as Descartes called it. It is what we immediately posit as not thought. It is merely meaningful in its status as self-differentiated, self-moving, self-resisting space.