ABSTRACT
Mind and Matter Among the many philosophical dichotomies is the one between materialism and
idealism. It is of importance to philosophers because it is a battle between two
contending images of what is “really real” and of the origins of that reality (mind from
matter, or matter from mind?). Materialism is a realist position asserting that the world
exists independently of our thoughts about it. Extreme materialism holds that the only
thing that exists is matter, and that the human mind is the result of the complex inter-
action of things physical. Psychological phenomena depend on physical phenomena, but
they occur as something additional to the electrochemical activity of the brain, and
although they are emergent and epiphenomenal, they cannot exist without their physical
substrates. Most materialists simply assert the primacy of matter and do not deny the
reality of abstract entities such as societies and institutions, because at bottom they are
composed of individual material people.
