Such a boring question is untenable in front of science. It's just a teasing question. Materialism and idealism are ontologies, that is, what is the origin of the world. Materialism holds that the essence of the world is matter, and consciousness is the objective reflection of matter in the human brain; Materialism holds that the essence of the world is consciousness, and matter is the collection of all sensory information that the human brain lives through feeling. Materialism holds that matter exists, so people can perceive the existence of matter; Idealism holds that only when I have a sense of matter can I judge the existence of matter. ) Both of them are well-founded in their own circles. But because the two are opposites, we have to say that the other is wrong and we are right. Dialectics and Metaphysics Dialectics and Metaphysics are both methodologies. It can be said that there are only two methodologies in the world, one is dialectics and the other is metaphysics. Both theories sprouted in ancient Greece and were "pure" at first, so there is no need to oppose them. I can't say it directly. Let me give you an example first. An old question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? The idea of dialectics is: in this world, chickens are not always like this, and they are not always like this. But in the long process of biological evolution, this form has gradually formed. This jumps out of the thinking cycle of either/or, completes a "unity of opposites" and solves this problem. For example, a ruler is inserted into the water, and your eyes see that the ruler is bent. However, your knowledge about rulers and your optical knowledge tell you that rulers are not curved, but straight. You see it is curved because of the refraction of light. This is where you see the essence through the phenomenon. Dialectics: In ancient Greek thinkers, dialectics has a wide range of meanings, from a rebuttal skill in debate to a method of systematically evaluating definitions, and then to studying and dividing the relationship between special concepts and general concepts. Heraclitus is one of the founders of simple materialist dialectics in ancient Greece. He is famous for his philosophical view that "everything flows and everything does not die". He has two famous sayings: "One cannot step into the same river twice" and "The sun is new every day". Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and so on. It is also the representative of ancient dialectics. Most of them are based on idealism and contain many reasonable dialectical cores. For example, they believe that truth is always concrete and relative, and can be transformed into opposites under certain conditions. The famous electronic double-slit interference experiment is an example. It makes sense to say that electrons are particles. After passing through the double slit, two bright lines should be produced on the baffle, but the experimental result is the same interference fringe as light. This is not difficult to explain, because electrons are still unstable. Then if the electrons are emitted one by one and the interaction between the electrons is excluded, two bright lines should be obtained. However, the result is surprising. A single electron will not hit the baffle through the slit in a straight line, but will randomly land on a position of the baffle after passing through the slit. After one night, interference fringes were still formed on the baffle. So scientists decided to use instruments to observe the walking path of electrons, and the observation results were even more surprising. Electrons actually hit two bright lines on the baffle instead of interference fringes, and immediately changed from fluctuations to particles. It seems that he is deliberately hiding his mystery. Will the observer have an influence on the experiment? This needs further study. There is also a water crystallization experiment in Jiang Bensheng. Human consciousness can change the crystal shape of water. The conclusion is that human consciousness is also a part of the universe and will also have an impact on the objective world. (Excerpted from the American quantum mechanics science and education film "How much do we know? It is easy to find in Baidu video. If you are interested, you can go and have a look. In fact, we have believed in materialism for so long, but we have never known what matter is. What's the matter? We have been asking: What is the world made of? The atom has long been disassembled, almost empty, and its mass is almost in the nucleus. Nuclei are protons and electrons (neutrons = protons+electrons). Electrons are hardly matter, but are generally considered waves. Protons are made up of quarks. What happened to quarks is still a mystery. Only indirect evidence can prove its existence, but it can't be the basic particle that constitutes the universe. Some scientists think that the space inside a quark is infinite, which means it is empty. Is the matter we know fundamentally empty or nonexistent? As for the cosmological ontology of the universe, the best scientific explanation now is string theory. String is the origin of the universe. Everything is a string vibration phenomenon. A string is not a substance, so it has no concepts such as size and weight. Matter is its vibration phenomenon. When the vibration stops, the matter disappears. Scientists want to use this theory to explain all known and unknown phenomena. It can be seen that idealism and materialism are a relative way of distinguishing in a specific degree of understanding. It is accompanied by the rise of science now, and its definition will inevitably change because of the progress of science and the understanding of the world. Traditional materialism and idealism are obviously unscientific. We need to re-examine all this.