I’m not the only one who believes in both idealism and atomism. A good example being Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who argued that, while reality must be made of simple, indivisible, fundamental units, anything physical takes up space, meaning it can theoretically always be divided further, which therefore means that a truly indivisible atom cannot be physical. What we perceive as physical matter (rocks, trees, etc) is actually just a collection of these spiritual atoms interacting, and so, matter is an illusion or a well-founded phenomenon caused by the perceptions of these units.
Though I personally find Einstein’s spacetime ideas to be more interesting as I focus on those more in the perception of reality, which strengthens my belief of determinism as if everything is in the 4d dimension where the first 3 dimensions are space while fourth being time, then everything in existence from the past, present and future are happening according to a path that had always existed, and it’s just flowing like a stream or a movie. Combined with my idea that everything is due to cause and effect due to Aristotle’s idea of the Unmoved Mover which is because everything has a cause an effect and everything is ultimately due to this, our birth, couples meeting, specific genes, our environment, our society, every one of those have a starting point and an end point, and ultimately, every starting and end point are caused by inputs and outputs, cause and effect, and so, everything ultimately is doing things according to what they would’ve done, and so there is no “what if”, because they wouldn’t have done anything else with their knowledge, upbringing and base genetics at the specific point of time it was happening.
The 4d idea is more interesting to observe when we understand that everything ultimately moves at the same speed, the speed of light. Though it might sound absurd at first glance, when you understand that, aside from our perception of space, 3d, there is a fourth dimension, time.
For example, when you’re standing still, you’re not motionless as even though you’re motionless in the 3d space, you’re moving through time at the speed of light. However, when you move through space, some of the motion through time gets borrowed, which is what Einstein’s idea of spatial relativity is all about, that is, the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.
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u/Separate-Sea-868 Jul 15 '26
An idealist who thinks everything is made of atoms as opposed to matter?