Physical vs. Non-physical
Per some discussions going on, some people seem to think that this is a meaningful distinction to be made. What I don't get is the distinction being made. Some people seem to refer to the mind as non-physical, and everything else and physical, but that doesn't get at what the distinction really is as it is just begging the question.
There are some that say that everything is mental/non-physical (idealists) and others that say everything is physical (Materialists). So these groups seem to agree that there isn't a distinction either, as everything is either one or the other. Is it just dualists that believe in this distinction, and if so, then that makes them non-idealists and non-materialists, no?
There are some that say that everything is mental/non-physical (idealists) and others that say everything is physical (Materialists). So these groups seem to agree that there isn't a distinction either, as everything is either one or the other. Is it just dualists that believe in this distinction, and if so, then that makes them non-idealists and non-materialists, no?
Comments (177)
Idealists argue that everything is ultimately composed of ideas. This is a vastly different ontological commitment. For example, ideas might act on each other from the top down. The stuff you find in Hegel is very different from the stuff you will find in Dennett/Dawkins/Krauss.
To me the problem is in what we ask of distinctions like physical and non-physical. We have vague but functional idea of the meaning of this distinction. But the tendency is to push it too far, ask too much of it. My heartbreak is 'non-physical,' at least compared to the kitchen cabinet door that I don't want to hit my head on. Whatever the hell 'meaning' is is non-physical compared to the ink on the page of the book. But it's not clear what the various -isms are really up to when they feature this or that concept or pair of concepts as a sort of safely static entity on which to build some dry picture of reality.
This is very confused. Physicalists believe that all that exists is the fundamental entities disclosed by physics, whatever they turn out to be - it used to be ‘atoms’ but atoms themselves are now rather spooky kinds of things.
But ‘idealists’ may not be saying that the mind is a kind of fundamental substance in the sense that materialists use the world. Their argument might not be about what the world is ‘made of’ at all, but be based on the argument that everything we know, we know by way of the mind - including material or physical objects.
But in any case, the two broad types of philosophers don’t agree at all, in fact they generally define themselves in opposition to their opponents.
I think Locke's primary/secondary qualities captures it nicely.
One can also think of it in terms of the difficulty in reducing qualia, intentionality and indexicality to physical terms, while at the same time finding the idealist explanation for space, time, particles, etc to be unbelievable.
Or one can just say that the physical is mathemitizeable, while the mental is not. Meillassoux's version of speculative realism might fall into this, although he talks in terms of transcending Kant's correlationism to get at the mathematical reality.
On a more meta level, there is Nagel's subjective/objective split, with science being the view from nowhere, which is objective, and subjectivity being a view from somewhere.
That's not an entirely fair description. It's too reductionist, and commits physicalists to mereological nihilism. Chalmers defines physicalism as the fundamental entities plus whatever logically supervenes on those.
He just doesn't think that mind (qualia at least) logically supervenes, therefore he's a dualist.
I think this is kind of what I'm trying to get at - this ontological reduction to one "substance". What do we mean by the word, "substance"? It seems to me that we should define that word, to then go on an understand what it is the two camps are trying to make a distinction of, if any.
Are ideas physical or non-physical, and why? Do ideas have "substance"?
What does it mean for ideas to act on each other from the "top down"? Does it mean that there are large ideas, like a galaxy, that can act on it's constituent ideas, like stars, gases, and planets? To "act on each other" implies causation where there doesn't seem to be a top (cause?) down (effects?), rather a present (cause) and future (effect), or a past (cause) and present (effect). What kind of ideas are these ones at the "top", and where and when are they in relation to those that are "down"?
Isn't a "heartbreak" physical? Why do we call it a "heartbreak" if not for the feeling in the chest we get when we contemplate a negative event? Is a "heartbreak" a feeling that you get as a result of some state of your body (it occurs after some state of your body and the feeling is a representation of some state of your body), or is the feeling and the state of your body the same thing that occurs in the same space and at the same moment?
Isn't (most of) the meaning of the words on this forum the writer's ideas and intent to convey them? Isn't that causation?
Yes, it is a feeling. There are no instruments that can measure feelings or the nature of any experience for that matter. Feelings are an internal experiences which often confound the experiencers themselves.
I don't think so, as most (if not all) physicalists are realists, so there things that physics hasn't currently disclosed, that are real, and "physical", just not explained by any scientific theory at the moment. And physicists know that their current theories could be wrong, but would that make their new theories about "non-physical" things, or "physical" things? If not, then what is it about "non-physical" stuff that scientists will never be able to explain? Why can scientists explain "physical" stuff, but not a certain stuff (the "non-physical") if they both interact with each other? Why can we measure the effects of "physical" on "physical" events, but not measure the "non-physical" by it's effect on the "physical", and vice versa?
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't get that last part. Are you saying that idealist believe that the world, and what we know are the same thing? So, knowledge isn't about anything, but is anything? Isn't that solipsism? If not, what's the difference?
Quoting Wayfarer
But why?! That is the point I'm trying to make! They seem to me to be arguing over nothing.
Do they mean that the non-physical is forever and always unmeasureable? Are there things that are physical that haven't been measured?
I don't know what a view from nowhere is other than no view at all. It makes more sense to say that an objective view is a view from everywhere, not nowhere.
I asked several questions in that post that can't be answered by simply repeating what it is I'm questioning.
We cannot measure a physical thing by measuring its effects on another physical thing. That is, as it says, measuring the thing's effect, not measuring the thing itself. From that effect we can make some inferences about the physical thing which is causing the effect. Likewise, we cannot measure a non-physical thing by measuring its effect on a physical thing. But we can draw some inferences about the non-physical thing by measuring its effect on the physical thing
It's considered "nowhere" because it has been stripped of all subjective qualities. The world portrayed by science doesn't look, sound, taste, smell or feel like anything. And It's not from a particular vantage point.
There is an entirely other category of philosophy besides physicalists, idealists and dualists. This category is not well known among Americans because anglo-american analytic philosophy is dominant here.
Here is a summary by Jack Reynolds of the difference between recent continental philosophy and analytic philosophy of the issue of mind vs world:
"Having suggested that epistemology is central to the way that the problem of other
minds is traditionally formulated in analytic philosophy and to the background
concern to integrate (or cohere) with the knowledge claims from the various brain
sciences, we might note that both of these foci are comparatively absent from
continental reflections upon inter-subjectivity. Instead, philosophers like Hegel,
Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, sought to establish a new outlook on
the world and our (social) place within it, precisely through overturning the modern
conception of knowledge and the various paradoxes bound up with it, with the
problem of other minds being envisaged as an exemplary case. The problem for the
above philosophers is the focus on epistemology and the particular paradoxical
understanding of epistemology that we have inherited, which is roughly the
bifurcating one that Foucault in The Order of Things describes as the “empirico-transcendental
doublet of modern thought” (xiv) and that Merleau-Ponty calls
empiricism and intellectualism.
The worry seems to be that the modern conception of
knowledge might serve to disguise from the fly a way out of the bottle, and, in a
related vein, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature suggests that
epistemic scepticism about the external world or other minds depends upon the mirror
of nature conception of the mind, in which the mind is assumed to be ontologically
distinct from its environment. And based on the foregoing account of other minds
(which resembles the thing-in-itself), it seems fair to suggest that analytic
philosophy’s epistemic and justificatory focus concedes something to the sceptical
problematic. Things are very different in continental philosophy, however, where the
task is more to explicate our place in the world and there is an abiding attempt to
establish that the other is of a different ontological order to things. This is evinced in
the various discussion of intersubjectivity, alterity, the other, being-with (Mitsein),
etc., that have been central to continental philosophy, occurring in virtually all of the
canonical texts. The important question about the problem of other minds vis-à-vis
the ‘divide’ hence becomes the following: is it an epistemological problem that might
be solved (even if only probabilistically), or is it an ontological one that needs to be
dissolved and/or shown to be untenable via phenomenological descriptions and
transcendental arguments?
An aversion to epistemologically inflected accounts of the existence of the
other is manifest internally within continental philosophy. Heidegger criticises Kant
for suggesting that it is a scandal that the problem of other minds has not been solved,
and he instead insists that that scandal is actually the attempt to solve it (Heidegger,
Section 43)." Jack Reynolds
Good point. I vote that it's an ontological one that 'needs to be dissolved.' Or rather it's dissolved as soon as a thinker differently understands his goal as thinker. The 'problem' is pretty artificial to begin. The game is not questioned from a high and wide enough angle. It's as if there was a passionate argument about some basketball game on TV. Engrossed in the contest, we don't think the possibility of changing the channel. The method or theme is taken as a given. But that 'first wrong step' is perhaps precisely where we should be looking. That method is 'how' that hides from us in the 'what' that it conceals as much as it reveals.
Not only ‘the last part’. Honestly, you don't seem to understand the issue - then you ask for clarification about it, then argue against the suggestions that are made, without understanding them. You really need to do some homework on the whole subject.
How is this contrary to a materialist view, that everything we know, we know by way of the mind - including material or physical objects?
I hear you. But do you yourself consider the first-person experience of heartbreak to be physical in the same way that an electron is physical? For me the whole situation is far messier than we might want it to be. I think there's something like a continuum. But even this is a tidying up of the mess of ordinary language. We don't hold these categories fixed. We just learn how to interact with others. We feel ourselves into a language and a way of moving and acting in a shared world. And this separation of language and action already does violence to the situation.
This isn't to say that we never should do so. I just find it illuminating to go back and look again at non-theoretical life. Joyce tried to catch this steam-of-consciousness in Ulysses. I suggest the situation is loaded with a dim know-how, with foggy half-meanings. Metaphysicians want to play a game of chess, so they are motivated to shut out this dark know-how and these half-meanings. They need fixed, strict categories like chess players need 64 squares and pieces with eternally fixed moves.
But I don't think experience is like that.
Can you cite any examples of materialists who advocate such a view?
is at every moment in the process of undoing itself, expropriating itself, falling to pieces without ever collecting itself together in a signature... its consistency would be the repetition of not-collecting itself, its being the same differently or otherwise...Perhaps you will say that there is a way of not collecting oneself that is consistently recognizable, what used to be called a `style'(PT354).
I don't believe that I need to support the question with an example, for the simple reason that we require a mind to know anything. Material or physical objects are represented in the mind. These representation are not the objects themselves. This doesn't address the nature of the objects.
I am in complete agreement, but you said that materialists make that argument, whereas I don't believe they do.
This assumes the nature of the objects cannot be known via representations in the mind.
Here's a question. Why does the mind represent objects the way it does?
A materialist would argue that a mind isn't required to know things? How does that even begin to make sense?
Most basically, so that it can accomplish goals.
Heaven's sake. When I studied undergrad philosophy, the Professor was Armstrong, who is a leading exponent of materialist theory of mind. And he said nothing like
Quoting praxis
Neither does Daniel Dennett, who is the best-known materialist philosopher around. So what I'm criticizing, is *not* the fact that 'the mind' is required to know anything - which is perfectly true - but what you say that materialists say. They don't say anything like that. The kinds of philosophers that say that, are either idealists in the Berkeleyan mode, or some positivists. But materialists say that what we take to be 'the mind' is really just the activities of neural networks or whatever.
The pragmatic answer. Do you think the mind can accomplish goals without somewhat faithfully representing objects?
When I see a cliff and feel vertigo, is my mind representing accurately the danger to my body? Or is that just an illusion?
So to a materialist view, that everything we know, we know by way of the mind (activities of neural networks) - including material or physical objects.
You're saying this is somehow inconsistent?
It's an odd question because physical objects are represented in accordance with goals. The representations need to be faithful to the goals. Without goals or purposes there's no way to determine how faithfully objects are represented.
Quoting Marchesk
Sounds like you're describing a maladaptive response to stimuli.
I'm curious to know the basis for saying that. If you think it's too tedious or whatever to walk me though it that's fine.
You're correct; this is perfectly consistent with the physicalist view. Of course according to that standpoint we know things via the mind; it's just that the mind itself is not understood to be non-physical.
From Wikipedia:
So what I am saying is that your suggestion:
Quoting praxis
mis-states the materialist view - actually gets it backwards. The materialist view (which I'm sure, incidentally, you don't hold) is something like: what we think we know of 'the mind' amounts to a 'folk psychology' which believes, fallaciously, that 'mind' is something real, when really it is simply an expression of the 'unconscious competence' (Dennett's term) of billions of neurons that have been shaped by evolution to perform in a certain way, creating the illusion of first-person consciousness.
If this seems a preposterous notion to you, you're not alone:
Thomas Nagel, review of Dennett, Is Consciousness an Illusion
David Bentley Hart, review of Dennett, The Illusionist
Great sketch. All those thinkers are great, and those are strong paraphrases. You left off Heidegger, I note.
For me the 'first wrong move' is 'wrong' with respect to a particular and ultimately personal purpose. I want to 'speak the truth' about life, be a poet who gets it righter if not right. But it's also a matter of style, of being more wakefully present in the non-theoretical aspects of life. The alternative is to force the mess of experience into nice little word machines, constraining the experience anxiously. So the 'first wrong move' is assuming a bookish theoretical approach toward existence, one might say. Or picking up the 'how' of research unquestioned. But lots of this is already in the thinkers you mentioned, and I don't claim to be telling you something you don't know in this post.
But on the boxes: We see various boxes from the outside. To recognize the box as box is to transcend it, to subject the box (category) to a new freedom. What we took for object turns out to be the malleable projection of a subject. In retrospect, we see that we were locked in a certain perspective. We interpreted (we realize) our tunnel vision mistakenly-in-retrospect as a tunnel. (We can ignore the limits of subject-object talk for the moment. We have to pick up this imperfect junk to say anything.)
At some point, we recognize this structure of perspective-transcending as such. We can even think of philosophy as the art of seeing the box and thereby making it optional. We might even call this process 'freedom,' since the apparently necessary is transformed into the merely optional. Then philosophy becomes a kind of acid that eats away not simply at fixed ideas but at otherwise fixed paradigms. But why should we do this? To some degree, I think there is just a raw pleasure in transgression and exploration. But it also allows for a wealth of perspectives we can use and also put down when not appropriate. If an individual can bear the dissonance, then he or she becomes a richer, more flexible personality. (I'm less interested in social questions. Life is short.)
MU, you really need to think a bit more before posting. It takes just a few seconds of thought to come up with real examples that show that what you say simply doesn't hold any water. We get at causes all the time by measuring the effects. Just think about what a police detective and prosecutor does.
What do subjective qualities mean in this instance if not the feeling of looking out from a particular location at a particular time? Stripped of those two qualities, it wouldn't be a view from nowhere, but a view from everywhere and every time.
If you are talking about the effect the emotions have on what it is we view, then that has no bearing on where our view is from, so to say that it is a view from nowhere when our emotional attachments are stripped doesn't make sense. It would simply be a view from somewhere with no emotional influences, or no goal in using the information the view is providing.
Which then leads me to ask, what is a view for? What is the purpose of having a view of any kind (from somewhere, from nowhere, and from everywhere)?
Science describes waves, spheres, angles, (geometry) etc.
No, the problem is that I understand it perfectly. It is you that simply fails to ask simple question of your own beliefs that you delude yourself into believing. I'm asking questions that everyone else, including you, should be asking of themselves, and their own understanding of what the distinction between physical and non-physical is. Doesn't the fact that so many people are having such a hard time getting at the distinction mean something? Go ahead and turn a blind eye, Wayfarer, and keep yourself in the dark light of ignorance.
I don't know. What does it mean to be physical? This is the whole point.
What are people really saying when they say that what is physical is described by science and what isn't is non-physical? Before science explained atoms, the causes of diseases, the stars, etc., were they non-physical? Are there things that exist right now that are physical that science hasn't yet explained?
Can we not get at someone's intent (non-physical) by observing their behavior (physical)? Can we not get at someone's ideas (non-physical) by reading their words (physical)?
What is the barrier between these different realms, substances, or whatever distinction is being made? The only barrier is the one in our understanding, not one out there. History has shown that when we have a gap in our understanding we tend to fill it with all sorts of self-important ideas, like believing that our minds are special, souls even, and are part of something even greater, and will continue to exist forever, etc.,. This is why the distinction is still used - to keep the mind sacred and out of the hands of science.
Sure, we make inferences about the cause by examining the effect, that's exactly what I said. What I said is that we cannot "measure" the cause by examining the effect. The detective and prosecutor make a judgement which is not based on measurement of the cause. If it were a measurement of the cause, we wouldn't need a trial, a judge, nor jury, we could just refer to the measurement to see if the person measured up as guilty or not guilty.
Of course. For example, maybe the most notable and dramatic instance these days is the acceleration of the recession-rate of the more distant galaxies. But a lot of other things too, of course, such as the observed system of particles, etc.
...because physics isn't completed, and probably never will be.
For that matter, ball-lightning hasn't been given an explanation satisfactory to all who study it.
Michael Ossiopff
Can we make the way a word functions in the world totally explicit? I don't think so. At best you can sharpen the meaning as much as possible for a particular purpose within a local conversation, it seems to me.
In general, knowing what 'physical' means is (IMV) a dimly understood knowing-how to get along with others in the world. Perhaps every use of 'physical' is unique, albeit with a family resemblance. Just because we have this fixed sequence of letters from a fixed alphabet P H Y S I C A L doesn't, in my view, indicate that the 'meaning' has the same kind of quasi-mathematical static, definite presence as the mark. The foundation of our making sense of things seems to lie mostly in darkness.
I don't know why you bothered to start another thread on this when there is already a recent one that asks just the question you are asking here.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/2442/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-something-is-physical-or-not/p1
I listened to a short interview with Dennett that I found when searching for the term 'unconscious competence'. Discussing his new book, he seems to think that consciousness is not as mysterious as many people believe. I tend to agree.
I read Mind & Cosmos, by the way, and though most of it was wasted on me I appreciate the gist: that we haven't figured it all out yet and need to keep searching for answers.
Incidentally, Dennett thinks as I do that consciousness is not necessary, or unnecessary dangerous, for AI. Although working within the 'black box' an AI may eventually develop consciousness in order to accomplish a goal that its been tasked with, and the black box could turn into a pandora's box.
So is it a real expression of "billions of neurons..."? What would an illusory expression of "billions of neurons.." look like? :s In any case wouldn't 'function' be more apt than "expression"?
A function is not reducible to the individual interactions that constitute it. For example a global economy is a function of billions of monetary interactions, but it is not reducible even to the totality of those interactions. It has developed its own trends, tendencies, effects and dynamics which transcend the individual interactions. Why should a mind not be the same in relation to neuronal activities and interactions?
Yes the possibility of consciousness being mysterious does disturb a lot of people.
Yes, and it pacifies others.
The second statement contradicts the first.
No it doesn't; the very idea of searching for answers presupposes that consciousness is not mysterious. If consciousness were assumed to be ineliminably mysterious, then there would be no point searching for answers.
I think Janus strikes at the heart of the matter.
It might be the case that it's forever mysterious.
Alternatively, we might be obliged to understand that knowledge has intrinsic limits, even regarding the nature of something very near to us, namely, ourselves. When you look at the knots and tangles in current cosmology and philosophy-of-matter, then it's not necessarily surprising that this might be the case.
SEP article on Michel Henry.
I already mentioned that possibility in the post you responded to. But if we assume it is then that would rule out the use of any inquiry.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think we should think that knowledge has its limits, but we are not obliged to think that those limits are on account of some "ultimate mystery" (in the sense of something supernatural): it is more likely on account of the fact that the "map is never the territory" and also on account of our limited intelligences and capabilities. We cannot sense brain activity at all for example, not even to the degree that we can sense digestive processes or muscular functions; probably because there are no nerves in the brain. Probably there are no nerves in the brain because they would be maladaptive: if we could sense brain activity it would likely just confuse us.
"The knots and tangles in current cosmology and philosophy of matter" firstly may not be what you think they are, since you are by no means expert in those subjects (as I am not), and secondly they may be released and untangled in the future. You have no way of knowing whether they will be or not; but would you prefer to think that they will not? If so, why would you prefer to think that? Isn't the advancement of knowledge in itself a good thing; whatever we might think about its potential for abuse or its implications for our preferred metaphysics?
Quoting Wayfarer
I think this is an absolutely egregious strawman. Perhaps you feel menaced by scientific ideas, so you assume on account of that sense of threat, that those who are your opponents likewise feel menaced by mystery. Your position would be more respectable, I think, if you simply admitted you have no genuine interest in science and focused instead on the side of life you are interested in. You always seem to want to indulge in polemics. Is it a moral crusade? Or else, why is it necessary? If Dawkins and Dennett, or whoever else, are polemical in regard to science and religion; why do you need to lower yourself to their level? Wouldn't the world be better if each of us stuck to prescribing and proscribing only for ourselves, and refrained from dictating as to what it would be "best" that others should think and believe (unless of course we are prescribing that they should not think and believe that they should prescribe what others should think and believe ;) )? You vowed a month or so ago that you would never mention Dennett again on forums, but it seems you just cannot help yourself.
I agree that scientism is barbaric. (Perhaps scientists should be referred to as 'sciencers' and the terms 'scientist' reserved for those who think it has all the answers, and that it is more than merely one of the diversity of human activities and discourses.
Quoting Wayfarer
I would be more impressed if you quoted Henry. It's true, though, that Henry does think that modern philosophy (in fact the whole movement of philosophy from the Presocratics on (including of course Plato and Aristotle) have objectified the human spirit. It is not merely a problem that has arisen since the Enlightenment for Henry; although obviously it has gained momentum since then. What I think is needed as a corrective is the relinquishing of the very notion that science or materialistic thought in general is intrinsically a threat to attitudes that foster spirituality, or that religious thought is a threat to science. To think this is to be impaled on the twin horns of an illusory fundamentalist dilemma.
Your typical Cartesian empiricist will say,"See, that's the power of science. Regardless of ones ideological biases, everyone can agree on the truths of science thanks to the objective nature of the physical world.
I will counter, "See, the logico-mathematical formulations of physics represent a conceptual language so generic as to mask the different ways in which the physicists in that room are understanding the meaning of the supposedly universal concepts of their science ".
These differences in interpretation of the meaning of their field and thus the 'evidence' shows up as arguments over proper vs improper analysis of what is supposed as the facts. By contrast, disputes among post-Cartesian philosophers are recognized as different ways of making a world
From this I form the heretical conclusion that such philosophical conceptualizations are in fact more precise than logic-mathematical empirical ones.
I don't think it is credible that different scientists would have different interpretations of the meanings,as such, of scientific theories (except insofar as their understanding of them might be limited or deficient); whereas as they will most likely have different interpretations of the practical, ethical or metaphysical significance of scientific theories.
'Love it or hate it, phenomena like this [i.e. organic molecules] exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.'
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life 202-3.
Quoting Janus
Not at all. I think one aspect of philosophy, and a crucial aspect, is to 'take you to the border', as it were. You understand by it, what are the limits to knowledge, because of the way knowledge works, and what knowledge is. That requires an epistemic humility, the paradigmatic example of which is Socrates. 'Knowing what you don't know' is a crucial aspect of philosophy, and then philosophical theology points towards 'the unknowable', which underlies all experience. Very few people will get that idea, but it's no less true on that account.
Quoting Janus
Well, in relation to this topic, Dennett is undoubtedly the best-known materialist philosopher, so it is relevant, and I can't be accused of 'attacking a straw man' when I use him as an example. I won't start another thread about Dennett, but I will comment from time to time.
Quoting Janus
All I mean by that remark was response to Dennett's hubristic claim to have 'explained consciousness'. So what I'm saying is, hang on, there are many deep issues in fundamental physics and cosmology, which really are the turf of natural science - so why be so confident that science can 'explain' the mystery of consciousness, which is strictly speaking not even its concern? Don't you think it is just amazingly hubristic? I thought you were a critic of scientism, or is that only when Apokrisis says something you don't like?
Quoting Janus
And I think it's 100% accurate. And furthermore, I've got plenty of arguments to support it.
Quoting Janus
Agree with 'science' but not at all with 'materialistic thought'. That's why I will never cease from repeating that scientific materialism is parasitic on the actual tradition of Western philosophy. I'm not saying that of science, or scientific method, but the misapplication of scientific method to philosophical questions, of which Dennett is am=n undoubted doyen, but which is widespread all throughout current Western philosophy.
Understanding the limits of your own knowledge, and prescribing what are the limits of all knowledge are two very different acts.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am a critic of scientism, and I do find apo to be a 'scientist' on account of his rejection of religious thought; and his position that philosophy must be based solely on science. And this despite his protestations that his philosophy is non-reductionistic. And I don't agree with what seems to be Dennett's eliminative physicalism for the same reasons (with the caveat that I have not actually read any of his works). But Dennett is not by any means representative of all materialist thought. For example Michel Henry produce a "material phenomenology". I don't want to characterize philosophical thought in simplistic ways. I have no doubt that even Dennett is a complex and subtle thinker, and I certainly would not want to characterize his ideas as incoherent. I have no doubt they are coherent enough given their starting presuppositions; and that is all you can ask of a thinker. It doesn't mean that you will share their starting assumptions.
Quoting Wayfarer
I prefer to keep an open mind as to whether science can explain consciousness. But it also depends on what you mean by "explains consciousness". Science may be able to explain the world in terms of material process, but there will always be more to explain; and no explanation will ever answer that silly old question "Why is there something rather than nothing". ( I like that question if it taken to represent the feeling of mystery; but remember the southern hemisphere held that feeling of mystery for Europeans before it was explored).
Quoting Wayfarer
I think philosophy is broader and deeper than you want to characterize it as being. I celebrate the fact that we have phenomenological, idealist and materialist thinkers, and all I ask of any of them is that they give good reasons for claiming whatever they do, and that what they do claim is consistent both with itself and with my own experience and with what I understand general human experience; in its broadest possible scope, to be).
.
Meaning as such is simply whatever a theory claims; as distinct from whatever might be claimed about a theory's practical or metaphysical significance(s).
I don't think philosophical materialism is something to be celebrated. Technology and science, and the marvellous inventions, medicines, means of transport, and the countless other amazing advances are to be celebrated, for sure. But scientific materialism is actually anti-humanistic, it reduces humans to 'gene carriers' or 'selfish robots'. Those people will sometimes call themselves 'humanist philosophers', but the actual humanists were those like Erasmus, Pico Della Mirandola, and Ficino - they're worlds, civilizations, apart from the likes of Dennett.
It was consistent with 1st generation cognitive psychological metaphors of the mind as information processor operating on incoming data. You could also call this the 'mind in a vat' approach, given the way it ignored emotions and the body in the determination of meaning.
There have been philosophical changes since then in how meaning and the mind are conceived, and these changes are reflected in new subpersonal architectures.
1st generation cognitivism was criticized as too Cartesian, too dualistic an approach. The new congitivism is embodied, meaning it recognizes that the mind doesn't just process passively given data from a world, but actively interacts to co-create meaning. The whole body is considered to participate holistically in what it means to be a mind, and this includes affect as an indissociable part of meaning making.
Embodied approaches also jettison formal logic in favor
of parallel distributed connnectionist architectures, as well as dynamical systems approaches. This gets rid of the homonculus, the little man who interprets the results of processing, in favor of the dynamically relational self-organizing activity of myriad bits of dumb elements.
Notice what this developmental trajectory has involved. It is simultaneously a shift from one philosophical stance to another, and the replacement of one form of materialist reductionism by another.
If you want to claim Dennett's embrace of this newer architecture as anti-humanist, at least appreciate a couple of things. Fransisco Varela wrote a series of papers proposing a naturalizing of phenomenology. He drew upon a careful reading of Huserl to create his model, and the response from Dan Zahavi, one of the foremost phenomenological writers today was positive overall, asserting that such naturalistic attempts hcould inform phenomenological theory, and vice versatile. Merleau-Ponty no doubt would also endorse such attempts, being simultaneously an empiricist and a phenomenologist.
And Richard Rorty, who is hardly a materialist, wrote a complimentary review of Dennett's 'Explaining Consciousness", complimenting it along with the work of Andy Clark for helping to get philosophy past objectivist dualism.
So maybe your beef with Dennet has less to do with his naturalism and more to do with your rejection of philosophies that claim to dissolve the subject object split , and argue that the hard problem is only a problem If you buy into those dualisms, as Nagel, Searle, Fodor and others do.
Quoting Joshs
Right - I read up on embodied cognition and it makes a lot of sense to me.
A side note - Varela and Maturana's book drew on abhidharma, which is the philosophical psychology of Buddhism. The basic constituents of being in abhidharma are called (confusingly) 'dharmas', which are sometimes mis-translated as 'atoms', but are really moments or constituents of experience. In abhidharma analysis, every momentary element of experience arises and passes away practically instantaneously in accordance with the '12 links of dependent origination'. You can see how that lends itself to a kind of systems-style of thinking, and as I'm a longtime student of Buddhism, it makes perfect sense to me. (Incidentally, do you know that before his untimely death, Varela ordained in a Tibetan order, and was also one of the principles of Mind and Life, which is an organisation aimed at facilitating discussion between Tibetan Buddhism and scientists?)
Quoting Joshs
Well, speaking of 'dissolving dualisms' - that is a subject that another aspect of Buddhism has some lessons on, in the form of non-dualism. Non-dualism is an elusive or even esoteric philosohy and is really kind of mysticism based on the overcoming of the perception of there being a separate 'me and mine' around which one's life and thought is centred. It's not really an intellectual philosophy, in the contemporary meaning of the word, and is generally associated with religious or spiritual philosophies in Eastern culture, although somewhat different from ecclesiastical religion, being based more on spiritual practice and personal culture. There are some touch-points between Asian non-dualist philosophies and Western philosophy (e.g. here) but it's strictly speaking a pretty alternative and counter-cultural movement.
No, my beef with Dennett is that his philosophical materialism seems plainly false and also pernicious.
Thomas Nagel, I like and respect. I have read The Last Word and Mind and Cosmos, and I'm meaning to get around to The View from Nowhere.
I didn't say I celebrate scientific materialism, though, but the diversity of philosophical standpoints. As I have said many times, and as you should well know by now, I am not a materialist, at least not in the caricatured sense that you have been reacting against. Dennett might make hyperbolic statements such as "moist robots", but I have no doubt that is just for rhetorical effect; I can't see why you are apparently so incensed about it.
To say that humans are "gene carriers" is to express a particular perspective and the characterization is accurate enough within that context; and does not imply that they are "selfish robots" but actually implies the opposite; that their imperative is towards the species and not towards themselves.
A person is a "humanist" if she or he manifests a humane disposition; actions count more than words; and by all accounts Dennett is a very nice, humane man.
Speaking of Eastern Nondualism, the concept ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form’ from the Heart Sutra keeps coming to mind in this topic.
Beautiful. Exactly. Pure math is also a good example. No one has to know what is being talked about --not as long as the standards of what constitutes productivity are fixed. Normal discourses are cozy. There's the 'guilt' or 'risk' of personality in abnormal discourse. It's uncanny. Someone might actually believe you and act on that belief. It's safer inside the lab coat, being lived by the one.
Quoting Joshs
Interesting perspective. I agree, where 'precision' is understood in an eccentric but important sense. After all, philosophy 'places' the quantitative precision. It lands it in the total context.
" the actual humanists were those like Erasmus, Pico Della Mirandola, and Ficino - they're worlds, civilizations, apart from the likes of Dennett."
They're also worlds and civilizations apart from the likes of Darwin, Nietzsche, James, Dewey and Freud, whose influence one can clearly see in Dennett'a ideas. I am fine with leaving Dennett out of the discussion and instead using Nietzsche and Darwin as proxies, because most of what's important to me in philosophy depends on their overturning of prior philosophical assumptions. I'm trying to get to the bottom of what you're objecting to in Dennett. Is it something he has in common with these other thinkers or something idiosyncratic to his writing?
I dont particularly care for Dennett's style. He likes he language of a machine, and I think for that reason he often doesn't do justice to the implications of his thought. Take the idea of the subpersonal space of mind, or the elements of an organism, as a bunch of meaningless bits in interaction. Well, they can't be purely meaningless, because you don't get something from nothing.( Dennett wants to argue that you get the illusion of a central self out of no self, and he's right about that). They are in fact , increments of change or otherness. With just this minor tweek of Dennett's language, you arrive at a point of overlap with phenomenology. After all , the thrownness of Heidegger's DaSein isn't the moment to moment disclosure of rich content dripping with prepackaged humanistic profundity. It's just shifting perspectical aspects, unfolding bits of experiencing whose ongoing
temporalizing forms the changing senses of meaning.
If humans are just carriers of memes and self-rearranging bits of insignificant stuff to Dennett, this content that makes its way through a person's life has its power in its transformative potential for persons. For Nietzsche, too, human values have no moral profundity, but are meanings attached to drives with no teleological directness.
No, it's because he's the best-known representative of scientific materialism applied to philosophy of mind. So he's representative of the overall position of scientific materialism, which I say is obviously and radically mistaken. Read the quotations again I provided in this post - 'so preposterous as to verge on the deranged.'
Quoting Joshs
Well, I think Nietzsche is over-rated, but then he's something of a sacred cow in Western culture, which is ironic in the extreme. Darwin was not a philosopher at all, but a scientist. But as it happens, his theory came along just when Europe was throwing off the shackles of ecclesiastical dogma, and so evolutionary biology became something like a secular religion - not in content, but in its place in overall culture, as being the guide to what educated people ought to think. That became the basis of neo-darwinian materialism, of which Dennett and others are vociferous advocates, and of which Thomas Nagel has become a critic (somewhat reluctantly, one suspects, but someone has to do it).
As for 'overturning of prior philosophical assumptions' - us moderns think the world was born yesterday. That everyone who lived before the last century were intellectually blighted and believed that thunder was the gods being angry. So overturning everything they thought was true is the meaning of progress.
ON that note, there's a quote about a well-known economist, E F Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful) who became a philosopher and ultimately converted to Catholicism. He gave a radio lecture to the BBC, in which he said:
You see, Dennett and his ilk believe that anything 'religious' is ancient, bronze-aged superstition, best understood in terms of adaptive necessity, the doings of the selfish gene. But there is a dimension that they don't see. I think it's embodied in the various kinds of post-secular spiritual movements which are flourishing throughout Western culture. Actually that is starting to become manifest in some of the new approaches to 'systems theory' inspired by the likes of Varela and others. But it's hardly apparent in mainstream Western academic philosophy as such, which is basically materialist in orientation (although that's not to say that there aren't many dissenting voices in the academy, of which Nagel is one.)
I mean, don't we understand something like a theory in the context of our totality of other undersatndings, such that we bring this background to bear as a whole implicitly in determining what we mean when we think about a theory? If this is the case, isnt a person's understanding of the claims of physics as such already framed via a personal metatheoretic perspective that brings into play a myriad of other cultural presuppositions? And if those metatheoretic understandings are to an extent unique to individuals, then it would follow that it is impossible to tease out something called a theory's 'claims as such' from this larger whole.
I'm actually pretty anti-modern. I have studied Freud at undergraduate level, read something of the others.
Quoting Joshs
Tnankyou, and I return the compliment. Kierkegaard, I also haven't read - so much to read - but the title of his 'concluding unscientific postscript' makes me want to like him.
Perfect, then you finally agree with me for what I've been saying for months now - that effects inform us of the cause.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So we aren't measuring someone's guilt or innocence (the cause) based on the evidence left behind (the effect)? Just like how scientists use other scientists to check their results in order to minimize subjective mistakes, prosecutors take the evidence to multiple people (the judge and jury) and show the causal connection between the evidence and someone's guilt or innocence.
So then the words, "physical" and "non-physical" don't refer to any real state of affairs outside of one's own skull. That seems to support what I've been saying. Thanks.
Mysteries are evidence of our ignorance.
Wasn't it Socrates - you know, that Greek dude that you "philosophers" like to quote so much - that said:
"There is only one good - knowledge, and one evil - ignorance."
It seems to me that the possibility of consciousness being explained as something not-so-special and non-eternal is disturbing to a lot of people.
Thank you, Michael, for answering the question that needed to be answered so that this discussion can finally move toward it's conclusion.
IF "physical" is defined as what science has explained.
THEN what is "non-physical" is what science hasn't explained.
Then how can there be "physical" stuff that science hasn't yet explained? How is it that the mind, and it's relationship with the world, isn't just one of those "physical" things that science hasn't yet explained?
So nice for Schumacher that he has "progressed" to a higher plane of development, which the poor, recalcitrant scientific materialists are powerless to understand. Just more of that humility inherent in the religious, eh? So much better than the "arrogance" espoused by the "New Atheists."
No, we may measure the evidence (the effect), and make certain inferences concerning the cause, and then we make a judgement concerning the person's guilt or innocence. It is important to recognize that these are inferences, because "inference" implies that certain principles, premises are applied for a logical proceeding.
So we have first our measurement, by which we apply certain measurement practises. Then we apply specific premises, such as conditionals (if... then ...), and make some conclusions to assist our judgement. It is important to recognize that these logical proceedings, with the application of such premises, are not measurement practises.
Also, you should recognize that these logical proceedings, which apply premises, and rules of logic to produce conclusions employ non-physical principles. A measurement may be carried out by comparing two physical things, but logical process employs non-physical principles. So we only judge the cause from the effect through the application of non-physical principles.
Trans-rational isn’t necessarily religious, in fact it may necessarily be non-religious.
And therefore lacks the power to dissolve the disparity between mind and matter?
You’re concluding rhetorical question relies on a circular argument, as far as I can currently see.
Just as can be the case with any other stance regarding, basically, philosophy of mind—idealisms (in plural since these can take many forms), Cartesian substance dualism, pluralism, and (my now personal favorite) dual-aspect neutral monism—so too can physicalism be a circular argument in search of some justification for not merely being a “because I say/believe/will so” argument.
Hence: P1) because I/we/they so assert, everything discoverable by science is physical (even though science might have no clue as to what it is; e.g. dark matter and dark energy (maybe over 90% of the known universe and of what we ourselves consist of as physical beings, this in the colloquial sense of physical); P2) because I/we/they so assert, everything shall be discovered by science at some future point in time (including all aspects of being and its becoming involved in consciousness); C) therefore, everything is physical (this due to the cause of me/us/them so saying it is—as explicitly affirmed in the two former premises).
This, as presented, is then a circular argument (where the conclusion is implicitly upheld in the premises) that does not demonstrate any stance to be true at expense of any other stance being erroneous.
What you say here about the implicit background of pre-critical assumptions against which our understandings of everything are framed is really stating the obvious, and so I obviously would agree with it. But from that it does not follow that there is no distinction between what a theory asserts, and what is asserted about the theory's significance for human life in various contexts; whether ethical, practical, aesthetic, or whatever. We can clearly state what any theory asserts, just as we can clearly state potentially infinitely many ideas; the logical conclusion of what you seem to be saying would be that there is no real difference between any of our ideas, simply because they are all framed against the same background of assumptions. It seems to me that to say that would be to think simplistically and support an absurdity.
I think Buddhist philosophy can indeed overcome many of the dichotomies and dualities in Western philosophy, but it's not that easy a matter to apply it. In some ways it requires learning to be less 'Western' in regards to some things, one of which is the 'religion v science' dichotomy which is writ large in many of the debates here.
But to answer your question, I think Buddhism certainly can dissolve that duality, but that it's not guaranteed to do so. Right now in Western Buddhist movements, there's a split emerging between so-called 'secular Buddhism' (clustered around scholar-practitioner Stephen Bachelor) and other Buddhists of various stripes who maintain a traditionalist view. The fault line is belief in the reality of re-birth which is depicted by secular Buddhism as something which was absorbed by Buddhism from the surrounding culture but is not intrinsic to the Buddha's teaching. The 'traditionalists' disagree. I don't think this forum is the place for that debate but I attribute it to the effect of secularisation on the tradition - indeed Bachelor's recent book is called 'Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist'. (He has a non-secular counterpart by the name of David Brazier, whose riposte to Bachelor was titled 'Buddhism is a Religion: You can Believe It.')
Quoting praxis
Interesting observation! One thing I remember reading when I first encountered Advaita (decades ago now) was that the Indian sages tended to make fun of conventional religion. Believers were often depicted in very unflattering terms as dupes or made fun of in various ways. The sage was depicted as utterly unbound by convention, whether religious or social, a tendency which became especially evident in Tantric traditions (of which I have little knowledge) and also in Taoism (where the Taoist sage was often a vagabond or beggar, unlike the upright and uptight Confucian scholar).
My (provisional) understanding is (1) that religious rules, rituals and symbols are of the nature of the 'vehicle', not the destination. And (2) there is an important and forgotten distinction between believers (pistics), on the one hand, and the spiritually mature (gnostics, small-g) on the other. Due to the vagaries of history, I think Western religion got over-taken by believers, at the expense of the real sages, who were often persecuted as heretics. (It's a fine line.)
But my main interest in the context of Western philosophy is the history of ideas, and how it was that materialism became predominant in the Western tradition.
He might have said that, but that doesn't mean the explanation is going to be what we now understand as a scientific one, for reasons that I won't begin to try to explain to you.
Yes, and no one here writes it larger than you do, it seems to me.
Can you explain why you think Stephen Bachelor's separation of the practical aspects of Buddhist teaching and practice from its unfounded, superstitious elements is a bad idea? I believe Gautama is reputed to have said that we should believe nothing on account of authority or tradition, but should just practice and see for ourselves. To anticipate a possible objection you might have, this relates to the OP because there is no physical evidence for reincarnation; so the question is whether we should believe in the non-physical 'whatever' (soul? emptiness?) that is purported to reincarnate, and if so, how, and on the basis of what, could we make sense of it ?
I think that's a very good idea. Unfortunately it would require someone to read some philosophy. Not going to happen I suspect.
What other kind of explanation would it be? How would we test the veracity of the explanation?
Your "unwillingness" to explain is evidence for my case - that you can't explain the distinction between "physical" and "non-physical". To hold back information that you are unequivocally correct, would be like holding back information of your innocence and the guilt of another just to spite the prosecutor who you think doesn't deserve to be "educated". Give me a break. You don't explain, not because you won't, but because you can't.
That's really a discussion for Dharmawheel. Suffice to say, I have met Stephen Bachelor, and heard him speak, he's a very nice guy, and I think he plays an important role in the introduction of Buddhism to the West. When the subject of re-birth comes up at the Buddhist library, the advice I give is that it is perfectly fine to remain agnostic on such questions. However arguing against the possibility is another thing altogether, and Bachelor is becoming an anti-religious ideologue, unfortunately. (I have a pile of references, should you be interested.)
Quoting Janus
The researcher Ian Stevenson published a two-volume study on reincarnation and biology. You may choose to disregard or disbelieve it, but you can't say there's no evidence.
Quoting Janus
There's a statement on reincarnation by H H The Dalai Lama here which addresses many of those points.
Physical things are those things that obey the laws of physics.
Which laws? Certainly the conservation laws and principles.
I started a thread on it [url=https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/2294/nagels-mind-and-cosmos/p1] some weeks back.
Sure, but who argues against the possibility? There are other positions apart form mere agnosticism; one could argue that there is no good evidence for reincarnation, and that it is therefore implausible, and ought not be entertained. One could argue that it is most likely merely a device used to control the masses through fear, or a cultural artifact from a pre-scientific era, and so on. One could even argue that belief in it is attractive because of ego-attachment, and that it thus should be relinquished.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's not physical evidence; but anecdotal.
Quoting Wayfarer
None of this is scientific evidence, though, which is necessary if we are going to make empirical claims about what actually happens.
I have read somewhere that the Dalai Lama has acknowledged that some of the tenets of Buddhism might need to be revised if they do not accord with modern science, and particularly, neuroscience. If that report is accurate it leaves me wondering if he was genuine about that.
You plainly didn't read any of it. I've actually taken the book out of the library.
He was genuine about it. It's in his book The Universe in a Single Atom.
The problem with the idea of re-birth is that it's doubly taboo in Western culture. First, because the Church anathematized it in the 4th Century AD. Second because it undermines scientific materialism. So it pushes a lot of buttons.
Thank you for this. I'm not sure if you noticed, but I put "physical" (and "non-physical") in quotes because the whole basis of this thread is questioning the validity of the distinction between the two. I keep asking for a explanation of the distinction, but thankfully I haven't been holding my breath.
Now that I think about it, this distinction seems to be related to the distinction between philosophy and science. In this case, the distinction seems to be in the manner we seek truth.
In my mind, there is only one way to seek truth - logic and reason. If all schools of truth-seeking are really trying to get at the way things really are, and not how they would like it to be, then it seems to me that they all will come to the same truth. In that case, there would be no distinction between them.
Philosophy is a science. Philosophy can't sit on it's own just questioning everything with it's skepticism. It needs the answers science provides, in the manner science provides, because science is the most skeptical of them all - always testing past and current theories.
Science requires falsification. Anyone with an ounce of wisdom knows that a person's account isn't proof of anything. We need more evidence, like more people performing experiments, and even then only holding the explanation as a place-holder for the next best explanation because history has shown that even a majority believing something doesn't equal proof (appeal to popularity).
Most of the great discoveries have come from looking at things from a different vantage point (Newton's theories of gravity, Einstein's theory of relativity, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, etc.) - a more objective vantage point, and that is what I try to in my thinking of things. It is how I have come to see that many of these distinctions seem unnecessary, harmful even, to getting at the truth, or the way things are.
When you say, "laws of physics", do you mean the explanations science currently provides, which even science admits could be wrong, or do you mean the way things are?
So, you're saying that he was genuine about dropping the idea of re-birth because it does not accord with science, or it does not accord with Christianity, or because "it pushes a lot of buttons"?
[The Dalai Lama] often remarked to my Buddhist colleagues that the empirically verified insights of modern cosmology and astronomy must compel us now to modify, or in some cases reject, many aspects of traditional cosmology as found in ancient Buddhist texts.' However he is also averse to scientific materialism, saying that 'The danger...is that human beings may be reduced to nothing more than biological machines, the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative of reproduction.'
But he never suggested 'dropping the idea of re-birth'. He was referring to traditional cosmological ideas, like the idea that Mount Meru is at the middle of the Cosmos. But as I said, there is evidence for children with memories of their past lives which has been gathered with the same kind of methodology that would be used for epidemiological studies. Stevenson was a psychiatrist by training and quite meticulous in his methods.
What I meant by 'pushing buttons' is that the notion of re-birth is taboo in Western culture, on the grounds that I mentioned. Generally there is a lot of hostility towards the idea.
(I say "trust/faith/belief" because they in at least one sense all signify the same thing.)
Without any modesty intended or implied, why is there a logical contradiction between neuroscience and reincarnations. Would one hold a naïve physicalist mindset in which solid atoms are supposed to disassemble and the reassemble back into the same object/body? Such assumption, if at all held, would be specious.
Without claiming this to be a fail-proof argument: you neurologically are more similar—in innate and context-relevant-acquisition of affinities, interests, aptitudes, etc.—to one human in the history of all mankind than to any other. Same self, but dwelling at a different time (especially if we entertain Buddhist “neither is there or is there not a self”). Project this into the future and you obtain the same results, that of reincarnation of the self.
Yes, there’s a bunch of additional things that could be here inquired into and debated. Still, here you have both neurological presence and the concept of reincarnation in manners that are not logically contradictory.
I think a line in the sand has to be drawn. Physicalists can't constantly retreat into yet to be discovered physics. Of course, new physics has to be admitted, but the line says that all new things will adhere to the fundamental principles of physics.
We have a set of principles, which are laws about laws. A physicalist seems compelled to draw the line there. There may be new principles, but the old ones must survive.
So, according to physicalism, mental activity obeys the laws of thermodynamics; it requires energy and increases entropy.
It's the leap from the second paragraph to the third that I take issue with.
The mind deals with meaning and symbolic logic, which is not inherently physical; this is reflected in the distinction between semantic content and physical representation. Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and other physical phenomena, are devoid of inherent meaning (as physicalists never tire of telling us). By themselves they are simply patterns of electrochemical activity.
Yet ideas do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart meaning to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc, and also how we are able, as humans, to communicate.
In short: Thoughts and ideas possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and ideas cannot be identified with brain processes, as they are of a different order to the physical.
The physicalist relies on the possibility that things not now understood by physical principles will in the future be understood by physics. Therefore the onus is on the non-physicalist to demonstrate that there are aspects of reality which are impossible to understand with the principles of physics. There are a number of ways which this can be done, all of which are usually rejected by physicalists as unintelligible, indicating that the average physicalist is not really interested in understanding the nature of reality.
The acceleration of the recession-rate of the more distant galaxies is a physical observation of physical things, and so it's physical, though physics hasn't explained it.
Most likely, if human (or AI?) physicists proceed far enough with physics, then, at least in principle, that acceleration of recession-rate could be consistently physically explained.
Likewise ball-lightning.
But there might be a limit to how far physics can proceed. Maybe it will be limited by the amount of energy needed by particle-colliders, etc. Or, as some have suggested, maybe physics (which has been getting more and more complicated as it advances), will get so complicated that no human can understand it. Maybe AI will be able to take over.
Story:
A robot is working in a field, building some apparatus. A human physicist walks up and asks the robot what it's building. The robot replies, "It's an experimental-apparatus to measure a physical quantity that couldn't possibly be explained to a human."
By the way, I said that physics has been getting more compicated as it advances. I meant modern physics, including general relativity, particle physics, quantum mechanics. More unintuitive, and more mathematically complicated.
But it wouldn't be true to say that classical mechanics doesn't get complicated too. Calculus is required even in lower-division classical mechanics physics courses for science and engineering, And planetary orbits are a bit of work.
And, like general relativity, the study of the stresses and strains in solid materials can involve tensors.
Wanting an easy brief derivation of conservation of angular momentum, i looked up Lagrangian dynamics, and, via it, found that easy and brief derivation of conservation of angular momentum.
Its derivation by Newtonian dynamics is a bit more lengthy, and I wanted something really brief.
Then I read read about Hamiltonian dynamics, a chapter that presumably didn't have any prerequisites other than the chapter on Lagrangian dynamics. I couldn't understand Hamiltonian dynamics.
Hamilton worked it out around 1830 or so. Picture him getting out of a horse-drawn carriage, with his papers rolled up and tied with ribbon. But in 1980, I couldn't understand it, even when I (presumably) had studied what is prerequisite to it.
Even in those days, it sometimes seems unbelievable how advanced and clever some people were.
I had no idea what he was talking about. And it was just classical mechanics.
Michael Ossipoff
Mind is not abstract; abstracts may be contingent on mind.
Mind could be experiences themselves, qualia, dreams, feelings, etc, as contrasted with whatever perceived extra-self, others, processes, objects, all that.
Abstracts are generalizations, not concrete, perhaps universals, acausal.
Some occasionally use non-quantifiable to contrast physical.
Anything else typically contrasted by physical?
Whether minds and abstracts are (contingent on) physicalities is up for debate I guess.
If you think that is what the mind does, then computers are capable of that now, and in many tasks easily defeat minds.
Quoting Wayfarer
You CLAIM that physical processes are devoid of meaning, yet we have biodiversity and libraries.
"Just classical mechanics"? Hamilton was within a whisker of discovering quantum mechanics, if he had only taken his equations seriously.
They’re the instrument of minds. Were there no mind, there would be no computers.
Quoting tom
Which, I am saying, cannot be accounted for with reference to only physical laws.
I haven't claimed that; there is no logical contradiction between neuroscience and any belief as far as I can tell.
...because it conflicts with Materialism, the official metaphysics. But Materialism is unsupportable, and reincarnation is metaphysically implied, or even metaphysically predicted.
So, as I've said, though it can't be proven, I suggest that there's good reason to say there probably is reincarnation.
But what would be a metaphysics by which there could be reincarnation in which people can remember a past life?
Michael Ossipoff
--Janus
You're right, Janus, reincarnation is incompatible with Materialism. ...you know, Materialism, that disregards (when it doesn't deny) "nonphysical whatever".
Some people claim to not be able to "make sense of " anything but Materialism.
You're looking at it in terms of a thing, like a soul, or emptiness (??!) that reincarnates. A noun-subject to go with the verb.
I don't believe in a soul separate from the body. But I've amply described how the person, unconscious at some stage of death-shutdown, but still retaining his/her subconscious wants, needs, predispositions and attributes, thereby remains someone who is the protagonist of a life-experience possibility-story. There is a life-experience possibility-story about that person.
Another thing that s/he retains is an orientation toward the future and life.
If that sounds fantastic, I remind you that it's also fantastic that you're in a life now. Why are you? Why did it start?
You don't know? Then it isn't justified to draw convinced-conclusion about it.
Then is it so implausible that, if the reason why it started remains at the end of this life, then the same reason will have the same result?
As I've said, I don't have proof of reincarnation. I doubt that proof is possible. But it is implied or predicted from a plausible, reasonable explanation for this life, and by an uncontroversial metaphysics.
Michael Ossipoff
Thoughts, ideas, feelings, wants, fears, aversions, can all be identified with the person's (or other animal's) physical body.
A person, or any other animal is a purposefully-responsive device.
Your thoughts and ideas are part of your purposeful responsiveness. Their evolutionary, natural-selection purpose has to do with causing you to act to fulfill your built-in purposes.
Yes, a human is more complex than other purposefully-responsive devices such as mousetraps, thermostats and referigerator-light switches. That's why your thoughts, ideas and feelings aren't always simply and directly identifiable with an immediate action.
An purposefully-responsive device's experience is it surroundings and surrounding events, in the context of the purposes of its purposeful-responsiveness.
There's no distinct Soul and body. A person's thoughts, ideas, feelings, wants, fears aversions, etc. don't require a Soul.
If you say that there must be a soul because we have thoughts, and thoughts aren't physical. A Roomba has responsiveness, and a program, and preferences for some choices and actions. Does it have a Soul too then?
Michael Ossipoff
That's not the point I am trying to make, although the point I'm trying to make is a difficult one.
Physicalists will generally insist that 'mind is what the brain does'; that what is experienced as 'thought' is in reality a physical process which is being carried out by the brain. The example I was responding to was this one:
Quoting tom
So to counter that, I gave the example of the difference between the semantic and physical aspects of language - language is represented physically, but the semantic content requires interpretation of the meaning and relationships of words. So I am arguing that the semantic cannot be reduced to the physical as it comprises a different type of order to the physical. It is suggestive of at least some form of dualism, (although I certainly didn't introduce the idea of 'the soul')
But just because your thoughts, and the program-logic and preferences of a Roomba, aren't physical doesn't mean that you and the Roomba have souls. It doesn't require a Dualism.
(Say that the Roomba was programmed in a high-level language that's far-removed from transistor-switching and machine-instructions.)
My metaphysics is an Idealism, based on inevitable abstract if-thens about hypotheticals, but I suppose that, though I'm a metaphysical Idealist, and NOT a metaphysical Physicalist, I could maybe be called a philosophy-of-mind Physicalist. ...because I claim that there's no reason to believe in a Soul, or a basis or identity for us other than the body.
(But I'm not an Eliminative science-of-mind Physicalist.)
Michael Ossipoff
That is simply false. The universal computer first evolved through natural selection.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's a Straw Man. That everything that exists is subject to the laws of physics, does not mean they alone are required to account for everything.
Does a universal computer exist? Is it something found in nature? When you say it ‘evolved through natural selection’, are you saying it’s an organism? If it’s not an organism, then what does it mean to say that it evolved?
Quoting tom
The laws of physics are not themselves physical.
A language without semantics is not a language. There are robots that can interpret human language already. One is even a citizen of Saudi Arabia, though strangely she is not required to wear a burqa.
Computers and robots are perfectly capable of semantics.
The human brain is a computationally universal device.
Quoting Wayfarer
If the laws of physics are not physical, then why are you obeying them?
But it’s neither a computer nor a device.
Quoting tom
As they have been programmed to do by humans.
The laws of physics are mathematical descriptions of the behaviour of phenomena. As such, they are created on the basis of abstractions. The whole terminology of ‘laws’ and ‘obedience’ was after all a product of the belief that the ‘laws’ were the expression of the ‘divine will’. But whatever their ontological status is, they’re not actually physical, as the act of prediction and measurement which validates the so-called ‘laws’ are entirely intellectual in nature.
If an object is computationally universal, in what sense is it not a computer?
Quoting Wayfarer
And human brains are programmed by natural selection and culture.
Quoting Wayfarer
The laws of physics operate in Reality. The fact that we can discover mathematical expressions of them (or at least approximations to them) is proof that our brains are computationally universal.
Brains are not objects as such. The human brain only operates in the context of being an embodied organ in the human nervous system, in the environment.
You continually confuse metaphors with real things. The mind is not software, brains are not computers, humans are not devices. Done arguing.
You forgot the cosmos! I think you are jumping the shark here. You claimed the brain is not a device, now it's not an object! How about an organ? If you accept that it's an organ, then it is also by definition an object, and a device.
Quoting Wayfarer
You don't understand computational universality or its implications. These are not metaphors.
I believe that the true nature of the relationship between mind and world will be answered via the investigation of natural processes using a different vantage point than what we are using now. Like I said, most of the great discoveries that provide great predictive explanations of new experiences are the ones we acquired by taking a different look at the data.
There's a quote by someone (I can't seem to remember or be able to find it in a quick Google search) that goes something like this:
"The essence of discovery is seeing what everyone else seen, but thinking what no one else has thought."
This basically sums up the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Darwin.
Personally, I don't like the term, "law", applied to how things are. It implies that there is some intent in the way things are, which would then require an explanation I don't think we can get to without contradicting current "laws".
I tend to think that the way things are are simply the way things are, and then there are our very accurate explanations (laws) which are used in predicting the way things will turn out. Scientific laws are really rules for making predictions, not the fundamental nature of reality, so I take issue with your "laws about laws" statement.
It seems that most people using the terms, "physical" and "non-physical", imply that there are two different fundamental natures of reality. Science, it is said, gets at the physical, while only religion, or "spiritual" experiences get at the non-physical. It seems to me that those that try to defend this distinction are really trying to defend their religious, or "spiritual", presumptions. What they can't seem to get past is the intimate causal relationship that exists between both.
Meaning, like information, is related to the relationship between cause and effect. Meaning is the same as information.
The meaning of some ink mark is the relationship between some ink mark and it's cause, which is either someone's ideas and their intent to convey them, or some accidental blob of ink, which was unintentional but still informs us of something - namely an unintentional release of ink from a pen. To say that that ink mark means nothing is to say that that ink mark doesn't have a causal relationship with some intent, but it does provide information about something.
This shows that intent can be, but doesn't have to be the meaning, or cause of some ink mark. Intent is not required for the existence of meaning. All that is required is causal relationships.
This also means that ink marks have meaning long after all life is extinct, because they were caused. It doesn't matter if some organism comes along and tries to make heads or tails of the ink marks. In fact, if any organism did come along and did try to make heads or tail of it, and wanted to get at what the ink marks really mean, they'd have to get at the cause, which is what the writer intended. If the organism just arbitrarily applied some meaning to the marks, are they really getting at the meaning of the marks?
Meh. The word "law" implies no such thing.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The Principles of physics are laws about laws. The Principle of the conservation of energy, for example, tells us that all laws of physics must respect that principle. CofE doesn't tell us what will happen, or even how to measure energy! That laws of motion such as Schrödinger equation or the classical Hamiltonian for a system of particles obeys the CofE is not immediately obvious, but we know that if they don't, they are wrong. The laws of physics, as we express them, are constrained to respect CofE!
Most of the Principles of physics are to do with symmetry. One particular symmetry is time reversal. That the laws must work just as well forwards in time as backwards in time is an extremely surprising and profound statement about Reality and an extreme constraint on the form the laws can take.
The Principles cannot be used alone to predict anything, and are not in themselves even testable for that reason. They can only be tested indirectly via the Laws that respect the Principles.
If you think science is just rules for predictions, you are quite simply ignoring the history of scientific progress, its success, and the aspirations and motivation of scientists.
I don't think reincarnation or resurrection, for that matter, are logically incompatible with materialism. But they are both incompatible with present human understanding of the physical; there is no conceivable mechanism by which they could be actualities. So, I don't say that it is definitive that they are not actualities, or that there could not possibly be an immaterial soul or non-physical mental tendencies or whatever that is reborn; all I am saying is that I cannot see any reliable evidence that would compel me to believe in such things.
What you are describing just sounds like somewhat wildly imaginative speculation to me. I haven't seen you provide any evidence to support it. From the fact that it might be "fantastic" that I'm "in a life" now, it does not seem to follow that some other fantastic story is therefore true. I wouldn't put it that way, in any case' I would say that life is mysterious because we don't know how it originated. It's also possible that it will remain a mystery. When faced with that mystery we can be drawn to religious faith or we can sustain a hopeful faith that science will one day explain it all. I tend more towards the former; but for me faith is more of a feeling for the indeterminate than a set of determinate fundamentalistic propositions which take forms like 'we are reincarnated' or 'we are resurrected' or 'we repeat the same life over and over' (some form of "eternal recurrence" with or without variations) and so on.
That exactly right; so I don't draw convinced conclusions.
There doesn't have to be a "reason why it started", that demand may just reflect a human need to project beyond its relevant ambit a requirement for the kinds of explanations we need to navigate the empirical domain.
I haven't seen anything that convinces me that reincarnation is "implied or predicted from a plausible, reasonable explanation for this life" and I don't believe there is any "uncontroversial metaphysics", because all metaphysics start from unfounded assumptions, and the best they can hope for is to be consistent with those assumptions, and thus remain exactly as sound as those assumptions are. In the final analysis metaphysics is a matter of taste and any who claim that they do not start from their own (usually but perhaps not always culturally instilled) prejudices in these matters is being intellectually delusional or dishonest in my view.
Of course it does. Look it up in a dictionary. Laws are statements about things and statements are intentional.
Quoting tom
This is circular and therefore meaningless. You're basically saying, "The Principles of physics are a statement of an order or relation of phenomena that so far as is known is invariable under the given conditions about a statement of an order or relation of phenomena that so far as is known is invariable under the given conditions."
OK, what or where is the intent in the Schrödinger equation, the law of motion for all particles?
Quoting Harry Hindu
No idea what you are on about. The Principles of Physics are laws about laws, or if you prefer Meta-Laws. There is absolutely nothing circular in that.
So everything that exists is subject to the laws of physics?
Sure, if "existent" is taken as synonymous with "physical"
Materialism, in other words.
Michael Ossiopff
I think that is basically repeating what I typed, but replacing a full-stop with a question-mark, so yes!
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
You could transpose that statement into something like "nothing that is not subject to the laws of physics may exist" if you like.
Obviously, we are teetering on the edge of circularity, but I vaguely recall drawing a line-in-the-sand in a previous post to prevent this: The Principles of physics are obeyed by everything that can exist.
There is no hint that thought or feeling are not subject to the laws or principles of physics. In fact there exists a physical principle that states they are. It's called the "Church-Turing Principle" by its discoverer, but the "Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle" by the rest of us. Please do not confuse it with the Church-Turing Conjecture.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I have some recollection of explaining on this or another thread that Materialism refers to the 1st law of thermodynamics, and physicalism refers to the 1st and 2nd law. So no, it's physicalism.
They're a pretty shallow and toxic bunch though, don't you think?
Not much worse than their critics, or, especially, the target of their ridicule. I just wish they would stick to arguments and not reduce the discussion to name-calling.
Isn't that what you just did?
Anyway, I find their denial of certain consequences of evolution, such as the existence of races and racial differences hilarious. Also people like Hitchens and his supporters are blood-thirsty warmongers. Ask yourself why that is?
Physicalism has two meanings: science-of-mind Physicalism and metaphysical Physicalism..
Metaphysical Physicalism differs from Materialism by explicitly allowing the existence or reality of such non-material things as forces and fields.
Because Physicalism has two meanings, then, to avoid writing an additional word to distinguish between those two meanings, it's much easier to just say "Materialism", with the understanding that it's meant to allow the things like forces and fields allowed by metaphysical Physicalism.
So I say "Materialism", with that meaning, instead of saying "metaphysical Physicalism".
I've seen a number of definitions of Materialism and Physicalism, but I've never heard of either defined in terms of the laws of thermodynamics.
In general, metaphysicses aren't defined in terms of physical laws.
Michael Ossipoff
You are kidding me, right?
What has "forces and fields" got to do with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?
I didn't say anything about whether it does or not.
In the quoted passage, I relayed what I'd read about the difference between the definitions of Materialism and metaphysical Physicalism.
And, as i said, metaphysicses aren't defined in terms of physical laws.
Michael Ossipoff
Metaphysics is defined by the Principle of Demarcation, so yes Metaphysics is defined precisely by physical law.
That's a reply to something that i didn't say..
I said that metaphyicses aren't defined in terms of physical law.
It is, or should be, obvious, that "metaphysicses" refers to individual metaphysicses.
You evidently are referring to the definition of metaphysics itself, as an area of discussion.
...another topic.
The word "Metaphysics" has a lot of definitions, and is sometimes broadly extended to include Ontology and a lot of other areas. I've seen a fairly long list of definitions for "Metaphysics".
An old unabridged Merriam-Webster said that metaphysics is the topic of origins and ultimate-reality.
A more recent Merriam-Webster:
Mataphysics:
a(1): A division of philosophy that is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being and includes ontology, cosmology, and often epistemology.
a(2): Ontology 2.
b: Abstract philosophical studies; a study of what is outside objective experience.
Ontology:
1. A branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being.
2. A particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence.
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"Real" and "Existent" aren't metaphysically defined. Neither is "Is". But it can be said that there undeniably are things whose existence or reality is denied by some who agree that there are those things in the broadest sense of "are" and "is".
So I try to avoid arguments about what's real or existent, and speak more of thing that undeniably are, even if some don't call them real or existent.
Ontology seems to emphasize being or is-ness more, but it's included in a number of definitions of metaphysics. I usually call the topic metaphysics, because of that word's broader coverage, and because the real-ness or ultimate-reality issue sometimes comes up.
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As for definitions of metaphysics, I've never seen the definition by "the principle of demarcation". But I've only looked at modern definitions. Are you referring to an obsolete, unused ancient definition?
I'll look up the principle of demarcation, but if (as it sounds like), you're talking about a definition of metaphysics based on the difference(s) that demarcate it from physics, that would be a really silly way to define metaphysics.
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But, more relevantly, my comment was obviously about how particular metaphysicses are defined, and not about the definition of the subject of metaphysics.
Michael Ossipoff
I searched Google for Principle of Demarcation.
I didn't find it.
But I found Principles of Demarcation. (plural)
Those were stated to be some principles for demarcating science from pseudoscience. ...for evaluating the scientificness of a theory.
...not for demarcating metaphysics from physics. ...or, in any way or regard, for defining the subject of metaphysics.
At least some of those principles, like falsifiabililty, seem valid for evaluating a metaphysics, but they don't define metaphysics as a topic, as you implied they do.
Nor are they used as the basis for defining a particular metaphysics.
If they can be useful for evaluating a metaphysics, that doesn't support a claim that particular metaphysicses are defined in terms of "the principle of demarcation."
And no, the principle of demarcation isn't physical law.
Michael Ossipoff
At some point in that article, the author qualified that wish further, saying, "...falsifiable by a [physical] observation".
To be falsifiable by physical observation, a statement would have to be about physics. Metaphysicses don't usually make specifications or or stipulations about physics. So it isn't saying a whole lot, to say that you can demarcate between physics and metaphysics by falsifiability by physical observation, :D
And you can't define metaphysics that way, because, for example, the rules of word-games don't include statements that are falsifiable by physical experiment observations.
In any case, what I'd said was that metaphsysicses (implying particular ones) aren't defined in terms of physical laws.
I wasn't talking about the definition of the subject of metaphysics.
And even if the "principle of demarcation" defined the subject of metaphysics (but it doesn't), the fact remains that the principle of demarcation isn't a physical law.
So why do you make those sloppy statements?
By the way:
If several metaphysics are all consistent with the same physical world, regardless of physical observations, then a claim that one of those metaphysicses is right and the others are wrong can't be verified or falsified by physical observation either.
That's why I emphasize that I don't say that it's definitely incorrect to claim that the objectively existent physical world that Materialists believe in superfluously exists alongside the inevitable complex system of inter-referring abstract if-then facts about hypotheticals that I describe.
But such a claim would be an unverifiable, unfalsifiable proposition of an unsupported brute-fact.
Michael Ossipoff
"metaphyicses" is almost a Google-Whack. Well done!
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Funny, I get lots of results.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
You are not a serious person. Thanks for clearing that up.
Quoting tom
Okay, so you mean something else with the second use of the term, "law", than you mean with the first use. Like I said, I dislike the use of the term, "law" when referring to the way things are. There is no underlying code, or rules for the way things are. There is simply the way things are and our representation of the way things are with language and math (laws).
I see, you pretend that somehow Schrödinger's desire to express quantum mechanics in differential equation form, has somehow infected the mathematical expression of the physical law discovered by Heisenberg.
You really are jumping the shark. The Schrödinger equation expresses the exact same law of physics as the Heisenberg equation, the exact same law as Dirac's equation (the interaction picture) and the exact same law as Feynman's path integral formulation.
But just so you know, the Schrödinger equation can be DERIVED from the most powerful formulation of classical mechanics - namely the Hamilton-Jacobi equation - by applying the extra constraint that the H-J equation must be globally deterministic.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No I don't. Principles are laws about laws. There is no direct way to use or test a principle.
Mathematical formulas are just representations of the way things are, just like any language.
You're welcome. Let me know any time you have a funny belief that you want checked.
Alright, I'll give you more help:
You said that Conservation of Energy isn't a law.
Is that why physicists call it the Law of Conservation of Energy? :D
You'd said:
Metaphysics is not defined by the principles of demarcation, and the principles of demarcation aren't physical law.
...and the statement to which you were replying wasn't about the subject called metaphysics. I'd merely said that metaphysicses (obviously meaning individual particular metaphysicses) aren't defined in terms of physical laws, contrary to what you'd said.
...,making your above-quoted mis-statement irrelevant even if it had been true.
As I was telling someone in another discussion, metaphysics shares some of the requirements and theory-evaluation standards of science.
A few examples:
Definitions should be explicit and consistent.
Statements should be supported.
A proposal that isn't inevitable and self-evident on principle should at least be falsifiable but not yet falsified, in order to be taken seriously at all.
Michael Ossipoff
You said that Conservation of Energy is a principle, not a law.
But there are ways to directly test Conservation of Energy.
Hint: Determine whether the energy of an (effectively) isolated system can be observed to change..
Michael Ossipoff
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Resurrection is a different topic.
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Reincarnation is incompatible with Materialism because within the beliefs of Materialists, there’s no way that it would or could happen.
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Incorrect. Only if you believe that “the physical” comprises all of reality. …if, in other words, you’re a Materialist.
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For example, the metaphysics that I’ve proposed here, and the suggestion about reincarnation, aren’t incompatible with “the physical”. My metaphysics just doesn’t recognize “the physical” as the ultimate, fundamental or primary reality, or all of reality. (…but only Materialism does.)
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You sound awfully assertive about your Materialism. Do you realize that not everyone here is a Materialist? You seem to feel that Materialism is the starting-premise. :D
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But I don’t want to make an issue about reincarnation. I don’t claim that it can be proved.
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What I do claim, though, is that the metaphysics that I’ve proposed is uncontroversial, saying nothing that anyone would disagree with.
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There’s no conceivable mechanism in the metaphysics of Materialism, or anointed by the religion of Science-Worship, in which reincarnation could happen. Of course. That’s why I said that reincarnation is incompatible with Materialism.
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Of course personal “tendencies” aren’t physical things. …just as a Roomba’s program-logic, tendencies and preferences aren’t physical things. That seems to cause a big unnecessary problem for Materialists philosophers. But their imaginary “Hard Problem of Consciousness” is a separate subject.
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In the reincarnation scenario that I described, I mentioned tendencies: Subconscious attributes, needs, wants, predispositions. None of those things are controversial. No one denies that there are those.
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There’s reliable evidence that you have wants, needs, and predispositions.
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Of course my reincarnation scenario depends on more than that. It depends on my metaphysics. Is there reliable evidence for that metaphysics, Sure. “Evidence” means “Support for the truth of a claim.” Of course there’s that. It’s part of the description that I’ve posted of my metaphysics proposal.
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“Reliable”? I use the word “Uncontroversial”.
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Earlier, you said that I didn’t support some statement(s) in my proposal of my metaphysics. Regrettably, you forgot to say which statements(s) you were referring to, and why you think so. :D
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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So you say. Evidence is support for a claim.
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I asked you, specifically, which statement or conclusion in my metaphysics proposal, you disagree with. …or which statement or conclusion you think I didn’t support.
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Oops! You forgot to say.
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Maybe the fact that you couldn’t come up with a specific disagreement is something that you could take as evidence.
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As I said above, “evidence” means “support for a claim” (Evidence needn’t be proof, but sometimes its conclusion is inevitable or uncontroversial.)
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No, it means that other fantastic suggestions aren’t more fantastic than the fact that you’re in a life. I’ll add that my metaphysics, too, isn’t more fantastic than the various alternatives, including Materialism.
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But, fantastic or not, my metaphysics proposal doesn’t say anything that anyone would disagree with. If there’s some statement in that proposal that you disagree with, feel free to say which statement it is.
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But I’ve been asking you to specify that, and you haven’t come up with anything.
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Hardly. Life started on this planet via some physical mechanism. Period. No mystery.
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Sure, that mechanism isn’t known in detail. So what.
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Some biologists have said that it was vanishingly improbable. Ok, fine.
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(Yes, there are theories that life started somewhere else, and somehow got here. Again, so what if it did?)
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It’s a physical question that science might very well someday explain, in physical terms.
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But, when I said you don’t know why your life started, I wasn’t talking about why life began on the Earth.
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I, too, don’t claim that metaphysics has all the answers, or that metaphysics describes or covers all of Reality. When I say that my metaphysics explains a “why”, I’m only referring to a metaphysical answer to a metaphysical “why”.
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Nonsense. “Fundamentalist” implies in belief in a religion’s scriptural statements, where the scriptures are the source of information, justification and reason, for that belief. So you’re suggesting that I suggested that there’s likely reincarnation because the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures say so.
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As I said, reincarnation is implied, or even predicted, by the completely uncontroversial metaphysics that I propose.
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I’ve already said that, and I haven’t referred to scriptures to support the suggestion of reincarnation.
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So much for “fundamentalist”
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We’re likely reincarnated, but, as I’ve been saying, I don’t claim to have proof. I said that reincarnation is predicted or implied by my metaphysics. If it’s only implied, then it isn’t certain.
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…a suggestion that hasn’t been made here. There’s no reason to expect that subsequent lives would be the same, though they might well be a bit similar, in some regards, and be in similar worlds.
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(I don’t agree that successive incarnations must be in the same world.)
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I’d said:
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Whether there has to be or not, there’s a good metaphysical explanation. And why is there a life-experience possibility story with someone just like you (you, actually) as its protagonist? Because uncontroversially there are infinitely many life-experience possibility-stories. …as complex systems of inter-referring abstract if-then facts about hypotheticals.
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Claims about the motivation of someone you disagree with is, of course, one of the most common desperate Internet argument tactics.
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If there’s an explanation, then it can be said, with or without whatever motives you imagine.
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I don’t claim that metaphysics has all the answers, including all the “why” answers. I don’t claim that metaphysics describes Reality—It describes only what can be described and discussed.
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Fine. Whether or not my metaphysics implies reincarnation isn’t meaningful for this discussion if you clam that my metaphysics proposal (including my comments about the metaphysical cause of our lives) wasn’t uncontroversial. So then, which statement in that proposal do you disagree with?
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But there’s one with which you can’t express a specific disagreement. :D
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Yes, Materialism does.
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No, my metaphysics doesn’t. It’s based on abstract logical facts. No one denies that there are abstract logical facts.
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As I’ve been saying from the start here, my metaphysics doesn’t make or need any assumptions.
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But, if you think that my metaphysics makes or needs an assumption…Oops! You forgot to specify it.
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Can you prove the truth of that statement? … or is it a speculation, or a faith-based belief?
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As I said above, claims about the motives of someone you disagree with is one of the most common desperate Internet argument tactics.
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But yes, I’ll admit that your Materialism is cultural. It’s the metaphysics taught in schools, and in science-books. …or, when not specifically stated, at least, strongly implied there.
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[quote[
…in these matters is being intellectually delusional or dishonest in my view.
[/quote]
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I don’t criticize you for having strong beliefs. I don’t even criticize you if your beliefs are so strong that they lead you to believe that anyone who doesn’t share them must be “delusional or dishonest”.
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But name-calling isn’t permitted here. If you’re unable to abide by this forum’s guidelines for conduct, then it would be better if you didn’t post.
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Michael Ossipoff
But if we can leave out the silly "fundamentalist" charge, I agree that of course Reality is indeterminate, and not described or explained by Metaphysics, which is a fairly determinate subject.
An example of where metaphysics lacks determinacy is the fact that I admit that I can't prove that the Materialist's fundamentally, objectively existent physical world doesn't superflously exist alongside of the uncontroversially existing inevitable complex system of abstract if-then facts about hypotheticals, whose events and relations it duplicates.
...as an unverifiable, unfalsifiable proposition of a brute-fact.
Michael Ossipoff
You've obviously put a lot of effort into this. So I read it, but you don't seem to be saying anything that I can get hold of sufficiently to respond to. Also you seem to be misinterpreted me freely. For one thing I am not a materialist. I think it's best if we just leave it there; I'm not up for a bout of "talking past" each other.
Hint: That's WHY conservation of energy is a Principle.
Quoting tom
Then I said:
Quoting tom
???! :D
Michael829
...whatever you mean by "get hold of sufficiently".
When you said something like that before, I invited you to specify, in particular, which word, term, phrase or statement you didn't understand the meaning of.
Your answer was that I hadn't supported my statements.
So I invited you to specify which statement I didn't support.
Alright, you're unable to specify which statement I didn't support, or which statement you disagree with, or which statement, word, term or phrase you don't know the meaning of.
Michael Ossipoff
How does the Principle of Conservation of Energy help you in measuring the energy of an isolated system?
I misread your post, because one does not expect such nonsense.
No, I don't find any of what you say compelling enough to either agree or disagree with. Can't we just leave it at that?
Not compelling enough to disagree with? :D
That's a rather self-contradictory statement to leave it with. What's wrong with leaving it with the factual summary in my previous post?
Ok, here's a more objective summary:
When I asked you what you specifically which statement(s) in my metaphysical proposal you disagree with, you said you didn't understand it.
When I asked specifically which statement(s), word(s), term(s) or Phrase(s) you didn't understand, you said that I hadn't supported my statements.
When I asked you specifically which statement(s) I didn't support, and why you think so, you didn't answer.
So it's objectively fair to summarize the discussion by saying the following:
You didn't specify which statement(s) in my metaphysical proposal you disagree with.
You didn't specify which statement(s), word(s), term(s) or phrase(s) you didn't understand in my metaphysical proposal.
You didn't specify which statement(s) in my metaphysical proposal i didn't support.
But yes, you've said or implied that you don't disagree with it. Yes, I've been saying that it doesn't say anything that anyone would disagree with.
Michael Ossipoff.
You said that Conservation of Energy is a principle. You said that a principle can't be directly tested or used..
Measuring for change in the energy of an isolated system tests Conservation of Energy.
Your two abovequoted statements, together, say that Conservation of Energy can't be tested.
Conservation of energy can be tested by observing whether an isolated system is ever observed to experience a change in its energy.
Your statement before, wasn't about using Conservation of Energy to measure the energy of an isolated system.
Physicists call Conservation of Energy a law.
Michael Ossipoff
So, how are you going to do that, using the Conservation of Energy alone. Go ahead, give it a try!
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
None of the principles of physics can be directly tested, only their subsidiary theories can.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
How?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
And I'm certain that many physicists think it can be tested, because they haven't thought about it. Once they appreciate it can't, which they will discover very quickly, they will better appreciate the distinction between the Principles and Laws of physics.
Anyway, you were going to provide a method of testing CofE, weren't you.
I’d said:
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You replied:
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Hello? You didn’t only say that Conservation can’t be directly tested using Conservation of Energy alone.
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You said that Conservation of Energy can’t be directly tested.
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To claim that your earlier statement was true, you’re trying to change what it was. But it’s right there in these archives. Feel free to edit it out if you want to.
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Conservation of Energy can be directly tested by determining the energy of an effectively isolated system at two different time, to determine whether its energy can be observed to change in isolation.
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But I’ve already said that.
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I’d said:
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You’d said:
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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By determining the energy of an effectively-isolated system at two different times, to determine whether its energy can be observed to change in isolation.
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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So if physicists don’t know what they’re talking about, then you should set them straight, because you’re better qualified in physics than they are, right?
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See above.
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Michael Ossipoff
At least we have established that you are neither a physicist nor know one.
Let's break it down to the simplest possible system. Consider a particle of mass m moving with a velocity v in the positive x direction.
Now your job is to devise a test for the Principle of Conservation of Energy on that system. If you use any subsidiary theory, you have lost the argument, whether you realise it or not.
We are probably getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but you might find it helpful to also read sections 31 and 35 of your copy of "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper.
This article, by the famous philosopher and physicist who invented the quantum computer might help clear things up for you:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/david_deutsch-constructor-theory
Maybe a single particle in motion isn't the most feasible system for successive measurements of the energy of an effectively-isolated system. :D
There are ample effectively-isolated systems whose energy can be measured at successive times.
You think? :D
What you've said in the post that I'm replying to, and in your previous ones, indicate thorough cluelessness about physics.
Why do some people here feel a psychological need to expound on physics?
Maybe it would be better for you to leave physics to physicists.
Didn't Wittgenstein say something about remaining silent on things that you're clueless about?
Michael Ossipoff
I would never commit such a crime, that is why you are given magnitude and direction.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
It is literally the simplest system though. You are free to make perfect measurements if you wish, under whatever laws of motion you choose. And you HAVE to choose.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Choose one of these systems, and describe how measurements of the total energy might be made. Or concede the argument and admit you have been enlightened.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I know!
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
We get triggered by B.S'ers
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
My PhD was in Computational Quantum Mechanics. Most of my friends are physicists (I know what they think, and why. We received the same education and training). My wife if a highly successful physicist. I am surrounded by them. I can't get away from them!
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I think he was referring to you.
Sure :D
Not if what you've been posting is any indication.
I'd said:
You replied:
No, I don' think so, because I'm not the one expounding on physics, or trying to bring it into a philosophical discussion.
I'd said:
You replied:
Have a piece of solid matter in an insulated vacuum container, supported from the top by strings, so that it has as little contact with anything as possible.
The container's inner surface is completely reflective, or maybe the piece of matter is at thermal equilibrium with the thin inside layer of the wall when both temperature-measurements are made.. The piece of matter is of a material that won't undergo a reaction or decay (to any degree that would affect the temperature-readings).
Measure its temperature by infrared sensing, or any temperature-measurement that won't significantly affect the object's temperature, at two successive times.
If its temperature changes, when it's effectively-isolated, then Conservation of Energy is falsified.
Depending on how sensitive you want the experiment to be, the isolation could be made more elaborate.
Michael Ossipoff
By the way, I've encountered "physicists" on forums before.
One of them (what a coincidence) said that he, too, had a PhD. ...but he miss-spelled PhD.
Another said that his PhD was in physics. But later, when he said something so ridiculous that that pretense wouldn't work, he suddenly changed into a population-ecology scientist.
Michael Ossipoff
I'm not posting this to advocate that there's reincarnation, but just to answer the above-quoted comment.
Certainly reincarnation is incompatible with your present human understanding of the physical, if you believe that the physical world comprises all of Reality.
Not in Materialism :D
But, as I said before, reincarnation is implied by an inevitable, uncontroversial metaphysics--the one that I've been proposing.
Michael Ossipoff
It's not a question of whether the physical "comprises all of reality"; different answers to that question will be given depending on different interpretations of the terms. It is really a more or less meaningless question. In any case reincarnation is incompatible with any testable understanding of the 'how' of the actual world; the world we find ourselves in, the world we sense, feel and attempt to explain. It is also incompatible with my own personal experience, as I have no sense whatsoever that I have lived prior to this life. If someone remembers, or believes they remember, a past life, then obviously they will not feel or think reincarnation to be incompatible with their experience.
I don't believe this kind of experience is common, though; although I don't doubt quite a few people may mistake their fantasies for experiences that actually indicate something about reality; humans can be gullible. In any case, if you reincarnate but don't remember your previous lives; then I can't see what relevance it could have to you, now, in this life.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
You may think the metaphysics you propose is "inevitable and uncontroversial", but I don't share that assessment; and I doubt many others would, since belief in reincarnation, at least in the modern West, is very much a minority viewpoint; and would seem to be extremely rare among philosophers.
Time for a reality check, dude. >:O
In one posting, Janus said:
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Alright, Janus should feel free to name an unfounded assumption in the metaphysics that I’ve been proposing.
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Earlier, he said that there were unsupported statements in that my proposal of that metaphysics, but, when invited to specify one, he was unable to.
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In the reincarnation discussion, I’d said:
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Janus replied:
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He’s saying that reincarnation doesn’t have a physical mechanism, doesn’t have a mechanism in terms of the beliefs of a Materialist. I’ve already agreed to that.
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First he says “It’s not a question of whether the physical ‘comprises all of reality’ “, but then he says that his point is that reincarnation is incompatible with any “testable understanding of the ‘how’ of the actual (physical) world; the world we find ourselves in, the world we sense, feel, and attempt to [physically] explain.”
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Janus’s objection, quoted above, to reincarnation, amounts to an objection that reincarnation isn’t compatible with Materialism. But Janus, in an earlier post, claimed to not be a Materialist.
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He’s saying that there isn’t a physical mechanism for reincarnation, a mechanism compatible with Materialism. As I said, I’ve already agreed to that. I said that reincarnation is implied by a different metaphysics. I didn’t say that it’s implied by, or compatible with, Materialism.
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But if that physical world doesn’t comprise all of reality, then a suggestion isn’t at all discredited by the fact that isn’t observed and reported by physical science?
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But, in no way is reincarnation incompatible with physical science. Physical science is about the events within this physical universe, the interactions of its parts. That topic doesn’t bear on the question of reincarnation.
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Incorrect.
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I’ve said that there’s no reason to expect someone to remember a previous life.
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What Janus means is that his own personal experience neither confirms nor refutes reincarnation.
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Actually, it isn’t just that we don’t remember a past life, or know if there was one. I suggest that the matter of whether or not there was one is indeterminate in principle.
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This life is the result of your inclinations and predispositions—your perspective, in the words of another poster.
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This life began because, among the infinitely-many timeless life-experience possibility-stories, there’s one with a protagonist who has the inclinations and predispositions—the same perspective—that are your inclinations and predispositions, your perspective. …because that hypothetical protagonist in that hypothetical story is you.
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…regardless of whether or not you lived a life before this one.
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…regardless of whether there’s reincarnation.
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It isn’t true that there was a past life for you, or that there wasn’t.
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Don’t forget hoax.
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That wasn’t the topic. As I said, not only is it unknowable whether or not you lived a life before, it’s also indeterminate. It isn’t true that you did, or that you didn’t.
I'd said:
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You replied:
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Yes, that’s why I asked you which statement in the proposal you disagree with (or which one you don’t agree with, or which one I needs support that I didn’t supply, or is an "unfounded assumption"). You haven’t specified one.
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All we hear from you is the usual grumbling, grunting noises.
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Though the metaphysics that I propose implies, or at least plausibly implies, reincarnation, it’s uncontroverial-ness doesn’t depend on whether you think there’s reincarnation.
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Maybe you don’t like its implications, conclusions, or consequences. But the metaphysics is still uncontroversial if there’s nothing in the statement of that metaphysics that you can specify that don’t agree with, or that is unjustifiably assumed, or that needs support that I didn’t supply.
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…and your census-estimate regarding the beliefs of Western philosophers isn’t relevant to the matter.
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The reality of this discussion is that, in spite of your grunting noises, you haven’t specified a statement in my metaphysical proposal that you don’t agree with, or that needs support that I didn’t supply.
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As for reincarnation, though it’s at least plausibly implied by my metaphysics, I don’t claim that there is, or even could be, observable evidence or proof about reincarnation.
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Michael Ossipoff
Angry grunting noises, instead of specific objections.
Evasive? I've been repeatedly inviting you to give a specific objection to a specific statement in the proposal. You've been evading, via vague angry-noises, and the typical Internet-abuser's resort to namecalling as an "argument".
I offered all of it for assessment and critique. If I haven't named a "central statement", it's because I honestly don't know what you by that. All of it is equally essential to the statement of the metaphysics.
But I can guess at what might qualify as the most "central" statement. Something that best summarizes the overall point that distinguishes the metaphysics from other ones?
How about the statement that there's inevitably a complex system of inter-referring abstract if-then facts about hypotheticals, whose events and relations are those of your experience? ...and that there's no reason to believe that our world is other than that? That summarizes what characterizes this metaphysics.
...or the statement that any fact about this physical world can be said as an if-then fact. And the statement that any statement can be one of the hypotheticals of an if-then fact. ...either all or part of an if-then fact's "if " premise, or all or part of its "then" conclusion.
...or the statement that, because anything said about our world can be said as an if-then fact, then conditional grammar describes our world. That alone is enough to justify the statement that there's a complex system of inter-referring abstract if-then facts about hypotheticals, whose events and relations are those of your experience.
I don't refuse to name the most central statement, but I don't know exactly what you mean by that. A number of statements are all equally necessary parts of this metaphysical exposition.
There seems to be a popular misconception that metaphysics has to be speculative, and that it's a matter for relativism. No, as I've said, definite things can be said about metaphysics. It has things in common with science.
Definitions should be well-specified and consistently-applied. Statements should be supported. Unverifiable and unfalsifiable propositions are suspect. Assumptions and brute-facts are to be avoided if possible.
I've proposed a metaphysics without assumptions or brute-facts. ...unlike "Naturalism."
I've invited suggestions about what can be disagreed with. Someone expressed disagreement with a statement, and I've told my justification for that statement.
Michael Ossipoff
Physics, the study of "the physical", is only about the workings of this physical world, and the inter-relations and interactions among its parts. For example, it describes the events observable in your life-experience. But it says nothing, one way or the other, about reincarnation, the matter of what world or experience-story you're in.
Reincarnation is metaphysically supported, but isn't incompatible with physics, because physics says nothing about it, one way or the other.
Science-Worship, the religion whose devotees want to apply science outside its legitimate area of applicability, is a form of pseudoscience.
Michael Ossipoff