How would literal materialism work? The Lego Hypothesis

[Steve3007]

What recording or measuring instruments do is registration rather than observation.

It doesn't really matter. Anything that can (in the case that was being discussed) detect and record the changes in position and shape of the bouncing ball.

To put this into the context of the wider topic:

I was aware before starting this topic that Terrapin Station is a literal materialist. That means he takes the monistic view that the only real existent is matter and the properties and inter-relations of matter. So, on that view, energy (for example) exists insofar as it is part of that relationship between bits of matter, but not in any other way. So, on that view, it would be incoherent to talk of energy existing sans matter. That's relatively easy to see in the case of kinetic energy. Clearly we can see kinetic energy as the relative velocities of different bits of matter. We can propose that it's only coherent to see kinetic energy as existing to the extent that the matter of which it is a property exists. But I brought up the subject of potential energy. TS's view was that potentials generally are not real existents, and that potential energy specifically is not a real existent. (I think I've remembered that right). I challenged that idea, and that's how we came down to considering such physical systems as a bouncing ball in which (physics says) there is a continuous back and forth conversion going on between kinetic and potential energy. A swinging pendulum would also have worked as an example.

[Steve3007]

One of the consequences of this literal materialist view is that notions such as massless particles are considered to be incoherent - to make no sense. So, for example, the idea that a photon of electromagnetic radiation consists of mutually induced electric and magnetic fields moving through space without any matter/mass being involved would be considered non-sensical. The literal materialist view would be that any such phenomenon would have to consist of lumps of matter with non-zero mass moving through space.

This literal materialist view is very much an ontological position, so it doesn't deny that, instrumentally, it may be useful to think of photons being like that, so long as the instrumentalist physicist who thinks that isn't claiming that that is what is really the case. This literal materialist view very much separates ontology from epistemology. It's concerned with what is really the case, not with what it's useful to instrumentally regard as being the case in order to make predictions of future observations.