Why are materialism and total determinism so popular today?
There's obvious there's more to us than a bunch of atoms and that nature has also an abstract part, not only the concrete one, so why do philosophers like Harari, who simply ignore obvious facts and produce so much aberration are so popular nowadays? I don't want this to be a topic about denying or defending materialism, but rather the reasons behind its popularity.
Comments (57)
I'm not sure if a strict philosophical naturalism is popular with the American public. Most American are religious to the extent that they believe in a supernatural "higher power." This would seem to put them in the dualist camp although their dualism seems very restricted -- ie. yes to god and angels but no to fairies, pixes, unicorns or magic.
Probably because its adherents have figured out that insisting on imagined things is not a compelling argument for believing in them. When faced with one philosophy that explains nothing and concerns nothing apparently real, and another whose explanatory power is good enough to make it accurately predictive in the real world, spotting the fake isn't hard.
materialism and scientific determinism (~Fate or determinism) are really two different subjects.
I do reject materialism in the sense that some of the 11 forms of pan-psychism are quite plausible. Plato's version of pan-psychism is also fairly plausible.
As for fate, i feel people very often reject determinism because they want to feel superior to the guy who effed up his/her life. I believe embracing determinism allows us to live and let live. That being said if we do XYZ we should expect negative consequences to some extent. Even the most "sanctified" people are going to have negative reaction simply because to some extent or to the complete extent we are all robots.
The way i summarize my belief in pan-psychism and scientific determinism is that we are all figments of God's imagination. If he plays a scenario out in his head which includes particle physics (like a business planner or war planner), that scenario happens in reality and also it happens in his head.
We have to put up with his crap because he has nothing better to do than play out scenarios in his head. He is essentially alone and "we" are just along for the ride.
To get a more meaningful answer, I think we need a more meaningful question. In pursuit of this, can you explain why it's obvious to you that there's more to us than a bunch of atoms?
Quoting Eugen
This seems to imply your picture of materialism rejects the abstract... is that the case and, if so, could you explain your impression of materialism?
I have intelligence, thoughts, purposes, moral values, intentions, perception, feelings, and maybe a soul. In the worst case, I have an illusion that I possess all of these. All of them are immaterial.
Quoting InPitzotl
Materialism the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications. There's nothing abstract in this. Actually, there's nothing abstract in the name of materialism and in my view is just a philosophical current that claims to identify itself with pure science, but in reality is just a poor excuse to disprove God.
Materialism did not invent, but appropriated all the elements of science that do not actually belong to it and denies absolutely everything that science cannot prove. Materialism is not science, it is a philosophical current that self-identifies with science and claims that science can prove absolutely everything (a completely unscientific statement) and that everything that cannot be proved does not exist. And that leads to gross aberrations.
You confirm my belief: materialists are just atheists whose basic purpose is not science itself, but using science for disproving God. Why did you say dualism is about supernatural? I don't believe perception is supernatural, but I do believe the core of it is abstract and non-material.
Obvious to you perhaps. Why assume this must be obvious to everyone else as well?
But that isn't relevant. You are asking why materialism is popular today. The observation that dualist philosophy is useless and under-defined, while materialistic science is useful and meaningful, is sufficient, whichever one most influenced the other.
Not all scientists are materialists, and its interesting that, like in philosophy, the necessity of more than matter and energy to explain things like mind always comes down to taste. Everything that has been usefully and meaningfully explained has been explained materialistically. That is, dualism depends not on its power to describe, its own internal logic, or even that it defines its terms, rather dualism depends always on ignorance. If and when consciousness is fully understood materialistically, the effect on dualism will be to either insist on some new, mystical, ill-defined component that isn't evident, or to just stop mentioning consciousness when insisting that not everything is material and therefore materialism fails.
For some, this is attractive, that ignorance is seen as a gateway to introduce magical things: the God of the gaps, or some dualism of the gaps. I think for an increasing number of people, such scramblings reek of desperation. It's certainly not a compelling argument. I'd like to hear a genuinely compelling argument for dualism. As far as I've seen, they've always been assertions of taste, based on ignorance, based on personal anecdote, or contingent on the existence of hypothetical and often intrinsically contradictory things like p-zombies.
Quoting Kenosha Kid - Science, religion, or magic explain everything as well, I don't see the difference. Materialism is not science, it is just a belief that science is 100% materialist and that science can prove anything. Unfortunately for materialism, it hasn't been capable to prove that. Moreover, it is against the principle of science to argue everything is demonstrable through science.
Quoting Kenosha Kid - why are you keep bringing up dualism in this debate? If dualism says black magic is true and not everything is material, it doesn't mean it is 100% false just because it said black magic exists. Same goes for materialism, I truly believe it has lots of truth in it, the problem is that it hasn't proven its own base statements and it is not capable to do so, but instead insists on the fact they're right.
Quoting Kenosha Kid - science will only highlight the material translation of thoughts, perceptions, experiences, pain, happiness, etc. but it will never go at the core of these things, because the perception itself, the thought itself or even the notion of ''feeling good'' itself aren't material and it's silly to believe that (materialism thinks that, not science). Even if science will go into the deep abstract, materialism will be only scientifically denied, because science will show that there are some non-material aspects in this Universe.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'd like to hear a genuine argument that only what we can see and physically measure exists, or that everything non-material must be an illusion, and that illusion is also material.
Sure, there could be an immaterial monism, a tri-ism, a quadism... Whether materialism is likely right must be assessed on its own terms.Quoting Eugen
You will find that with anything. Proof is never forthcoming. One cannot disprove a fictitious, undetectable thing and therefore one cannot prove the absence of such a thing. When nature appears inconsistent with materialism, reasonable people will have to look to other than matter to explain it. Reasonable people have no problem with this. They do have a problem with insisting that one must believe in vague, malleable, or undefined things that cannot be proven or disproven.
Quoting Eugen
Yes it will, if the core of these things is found to be a material system (which it almost certainly will be). You are making the argument based on ignorance I described above: an anti-materialism of the gaps. You are seeking refuge for anti-materialism not in the materialist interpretation of explained things, but in the lack of materialist explanation for as-yet-unexplained things. It's kind of ironic, really, since it recognises materialism as the explainer. A more compelling argument might be for why a materialist interpretation of an explained thing must be wrong, which typically takes us into taste. If you can see why these sorts of arguments might be unattractive to people, you can deduce the answer to your question "Why is materialism so popular?"
Quoting Eugen
Because the universe behaves as if it were so, and because, until it behaves otherwise, the assumption of additional degrees of freedom in the universe is unjustified, unfalsifiable, arbitrary, and meaningless. This is not a proof that only matter exists, but rather a reason why the assumption is valid. The popularity of materialism does not depend on its being proven.
Quoting Kenosha Kid - so in your opinion, perception, or even the laws of nature are all fundamentally material. I just can't wait for those irrefutable proofs. But again, not to show me that thought produces a material effect, like an electric impulse, but that thought itself is material. Not to mention perception which is totally subjective an abstract. Again, I just can't wait to see these proofs.
Quoting Kenosha Kid - well, there aren't many elements that have purpose in this universe, but the reality shows that some of them have. I don't see how a bunch of atoms with 0 purpose have purpose. 0+0+0+........+0 = 0. This goes fairly well with the rest as well (free will, thoughts, maybe even soul).
Quoting Kenosha Kid - for a current that claims itself to be the same with science, this is very unscientific.
Could you be more specific about this statement? Science is science, it does not recognize philosophical notion as its basis. It's the same as saying religion is at the base of science, and you wouldn't be far from the truth if you said that.
Seeking refuge from something silly that denies all my obvious perceptions, feelings ang pure logic? This is the old excuse of materialists when they have no arguments, they accuse others of being too weak or stupid for accepting the reality. Again, very unscientific.
It gets really crazy though when you think that mass and therefore matter, is just a property of a particular set of fields of elementary particles. So materialism is just one aspect of monism. The quest for a vindication of monism is the scientific search for a unified theory of gravitational and quantum fields. But to believe that our consciousness does not ultimately consist of these energy fields, would be a quite unsubstantiable view of the natural reality.
A good argument to me is the absence of any posited immaterial realm that makes any difference. A more thorough argument might go like this:
If an immaterial component of the universe exists, it must either interact with the material component or not.
If it interacts, then there exists some coupling between the material and immaterial worlds, and the material world must have some property such that this coupling is possible.
The success of science depends on the material world behaving in a predictable, deterministic or probabilistic way such that any effect in the material world can be understood to have a material cause, irrespective of whether it has a material or immaterial mediator.
Whether that mediator is material or immaterial, we can construct a theoretical model of it and give it a name, such as the "Piggs field", and use this model to make predictions of mediated material effects from material causes. If the model is good, then belief in something in nature, whether material or immaterial, corresponding to that model is justified.
If the Pigg's field, or whatever we called it, helps to explain the nature of the material world, it is by definition a physical thing, that is, it falls under the definition of the physical or material universe.
If the immaterial world does not mediate cause and effect within the material world then, whether it exists or not, belief in it is unjustified.
Materialism, as in belief in no immaterial worlds, is then justified.
Quoting Kenosha Kid - this is why it is so unscientific to say science can explain everything.
Science looks at the brain and say there's matter acting as an effect of a sort of an informational entity or something that science cannot grasp yet. Materialism look at the brain and say there's matter acting and nothing else exists simply because science can't explain it. That's the fundamental error of materialism. Science doesn't have to be 100% successful. I am not saying it can't be 100% successful, but that will be the case only when it will explain everything abstract or deny the abstract irrefutably.
Quoting Kenosha Kid - absolutely not! Science's role is that to discover the things how they are, not how we want them to be in order to confirm our theories. Matter acts under the rule of laws which are immaterial. Even if you don't believe in free will, you should admit atoms in your brain act in certain ways not because an immaterial law or laws of biology demand so, oftenly being in contradiction with physical or chemical laws for example.
Pigg's field can only get a grasp of material world, not the world as a whole, let alone proving that the world is just material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67XvFZj8Kjw&t=494s
PS: I hope I'll soon find the video where he actually says that there's no evidence for matter.
None that I've heard, but go for it!
Quoting Eugen
That's not what I said. It is unnecessary for science to explain everything. Either:
1. the immaterial world does not interact with the material world
2. the immaterial world does interact with the material world as a statistically predictable mediator of material causes;
3. the immaterial world does interact with the material world, but not as a statistically precitable mediator of material causes.
Those are complete and mutually exclusive.
If (1), belief in the world is unjustified -> materialism.
If (2), the "immaterial" world is in fact of the same nature as the material -> materialism.
If (3), there can be no science. God-of-the-gaps--type arguments aside, science breaks down if unpredictable effects can appear in the material world.
I'm not sure you took the vital point of this, which is (2): if one posits an immaterial substance -- the Piggs field -- and that substance interacts with our material world in such a way that it can mediate material cause and effect, it would be material. Materialism could rightly plant its flag in it and say: the Piggs field is amenable to physical enquiry, therefore is physical. By definition.
So an immaterial world that wants to keep its spots will need to define itself by the limits of expanding physical understanding (God of the gaps) or else give rise to uncaused material effects (killing science), or else do nothing at all. Not very compelling.
4. There is an immaterial abstract part of the world that actually governs the material world, by laws of physics or chemistry, biology (we don't know to what extent measurable) and maybe intelligence (my intuition says that it isn't going to be measurable, especially if free will exists, but we could definitely have a science of free will).
So the world doesn't have to limit itself and physics doesn't exclude chemistry, nor biology the free will. That's how it really works.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Gravity (not material) governs matter. Hunger (non-material) makes your physical body to move in order to eat food (purpose - abstract). I could go on for hours.
YOUTUBE: Noam Chomsky Mind-body Problem II
For me it's a clear proof of his view.
That's (2) by definition.
Quoting Eugen
Gravity is the mediator between the mass of one material body and the action on another. That is also (2). The curvature of space-time is typically considered to fall into the material world, which is precisely what I meant by (2): anything discovered that mediates cause and effect in the material world is co-opted into the material world. In short, over time, the notion of "matter" has evolved from hard, massive stuff to anything in the physical description of nature.
A justification, post hoc:
[i]All such mediating force fields are consistent with a particulate description of them. An electric field, for instance, is a medium both composed of photons and in which photons are excitations. The same is true of the strong force, and is supposed to be true of gravity, a current gap in which the immaterialist gods may still reside.
There does seem to be a dualism here: we have, on the one hand, massive particles like electrons, protons, skyscrapers; we have, on the other hand, these mediating fields like gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear field, the Higgs field. Surely this is a duality at least: material massive things and energetic fields.
But the elements of these massive things are also fields comprised of, and hosting excitations in the form of, massive, particulate matter. Really, the differences between them are whether they interact with the Higgs field or not, itself comprised of and hosting excitations in the form of, massive, particulate matter which rather ruins the massive/massless symmetry.
There are other differences, but those other differences don't split down the massive-body/massless-body divide either. Spin, for instance, or charge. The differences between fields are too numerous to select one arbitrarily and say, "Everything like this is one thing; everything not like it is another."[/i]
These are, of course, just models, albeit models with unparalleled predictive success. Whether there is a real distinction between {whatever mediates light, whatever mediates gravity, whatever mediates mass, etc.} and {massive thing, charged thing, etc.} or some other arbitrary-seeming dichotomy is (1) again: the immateriality of the supposed immaterial world does not enter into anything.
Quoting Eugen
But that is also mediated. Hunger does not directly cause me to walk to the kitchen. There are a great number of steps in between. This isn't qualitatively different from saying that Oppenheimer's parents having sex causes cancer in Japan. Causal chains are not inconsistent with materialism.
Quoting Eugen
No need, I have spotted the error already.
No, it isn't. Regarding the forces that govern the matter, I actually almost agree with you, except 2 things:
1. You've mentioned space matter curvature, which I believe to be utterly dementia, but hey... welcome to modern science! I do not believe in modern physics, simply because everything is considered to fall under our observation, and that's subjective. Science must be objective. Still, irrelevant to our discussion.
2. I am pretty sure the laws of physics are connected with matter, but I am not sure if matter determines the laws, viceversa, or it's something inbetween. You seem to be pretty sure matter determines the laws and there's absolutely no proof in this sense. But again, irrelevant to our debate.
The thing is that this is indeed connected with (2), but all similarities between (2) and (4) end here.
So, biology (deterministic or not), has a clear purpose, evolution has a purpose and life beings have all sorts of purposes. The rest of the Universe doesn't seem to have, it's just lifeless pointless and purposeleess matter (that if you ignore the fine tuning argument, which scares the hell out of materialists). So there are two dimensions - purposless and purpose-driven and they actually do not exclude each other, as materialists suggest.
Intelligence and consciousness - atoms aren't conscious and they have no purpose nor intelligence. 0 all the way. If you combine 0 with 0 you get 0. Not on this one, because a certain combination of atoms brings self-awareness, purpose and intelligence, not to mention perception, thoughts or the sensation of happiness. In the worst case, it brings the illusion of all mentioned, but anyway, as I've said, immaterial.
So if the universe has (and it has) both lifeless, pointless matter and purpose-driven matter, I don't see why the universe cannot have a huge deterministic part, a quantum part (don't believe in this one either) and a free will part. I am just so surprised when materialists ask us to choose between those. It's just silly.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Just enlighten my mind with that one please. Give me more details. And please be free to spot all my other errors.
the video is very short, please watch it, because he mentions in different parts. If you don't want to, please trust my word hehe.
The video is 5 mins. I will send you the link
It's 4 mins and it clearly says what I said
Empirically and independently verified dementia... probably isn't dementia. Or do you think science is some kind of mass hallucination? :rofl:
Quoting Eugen
That's fair enough. As Neil deGrasse Tyson said, the great thing about facts is that their true whether you believe them or not.
Now, irrespective of your personal dementia (I mean your mad beliefs :joke: ), you have surely noticed that modern physics is widely accepted by other people. You're asking the question: why is materialism so popular. As we've both noted, modern philosophical materialism and science have a mutual understanding. The most successfully tested models of our reality are controversial to you; they are not controversial to the mainstream. Is is therefore really a surprise materialism and determinism are so popular, even if you think they are wrong? And let me remind you of your stated scope for this discussion:
Quoting Eugen
So "evqerything is immaterial" is a materialistic view. Interesting...
Apologies, you mentioned this before and I meant to respond but didn't. Your 0 + 0 + 0 + ... = 0 representation is that of yay many independent, non-interacting atoms. You're right: that will not yield a conscious system. In fact, it will not yield a system at all.
For the purposes of finishing this in a finite amount of time, let's just ask whether it is possible for a system of two atoms to exhibit behaviour that two independent atoms cannot. The answer is yes. Some examples, you ask! Sure! Rigidity: two independent atoms of carbon are easy to separate; two interacting (via the action of photons) atoms of carbon are not. Carbon is a rigid material (ask diamonds), but there is no carbon rigidity in a single carbon atom. Thus rigidity is a quality of a system of atoms not present in each atom.
This does not explain every single emergent phenomenon (I could go on just about C2), but it does not rely on modern physics (good old fashioned chemistry is fine) and it does do away with the idea that emergent properties cannot occur. A better, perhaps more specific argument is required for consciousness.
Btw, you don't need to go down to the atomic level to find the mystery of consciousness. For the most part, one would expect the phenomena to emerge, if it could emerge (and it does) at biochemical levels. The answer to consciousness is not going to take an atomistic form, though some parts of that answer might rely on atomic theory. It is not necessary to give a complete bottom-up depiction starting from fundamental particles. It is sufficient to understand how chemistry is a good approximation to quantum mechanics for chemical substances, how biology is a good approximation for chemistry in biological substances, etc. If one can derive the laws of biology from chemistry, and of chemistry from quantum mechanics, and demonstrate a biochemical explanation for consciousness, an atomic explanation is redundant.
They just validate their own theories and it's really not that hard to do that. Again, science has to be objective and there are many scientists who do not agree with today's way of doing science. Again, irrelevant to our debate even if I am wrong.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Torture, rape or magic were accepted and popular among societies. I am sure future scientists will laugh at today's science.
Quoting Kenosha Kid no need, you fonally agree with me. So you admit that a combination of atoms can change the paradigm: from fluid to rigid, or from consciousless to conscious. Why don't extrapolate and say from pure matter to information or from deterministic to non-deterministic?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
No need to, I just couldn't resist. Determinism...
More like a conspiracy theory?
Quoting Eugen
Inevitably. It is, I suspect unlike your belief system, a self-correcting system.
Quoting Eugen
Because no transition is necessary. Materialism has accounted for information well. If you can send me a video link that is not encoded materially, please do.
Quoting Eugen
This genuinely surprised me. I get that you seek immaterial mediators everywhere, but I struggle to get my head around how you can believe that "I feel hungry" -> "I am walking into the kitchen" has no intermediate stages. Even, "I push down on the sofa and my torso rises" is an intermediate stage. It seems that you not only believe in immaterial forces, you believe that even physical human actions are atomistic, i.e. cannot be broken down into a series of smaller actions.
But I'll be less sad if you explain me how "...everything is immaterial" is consistent to materialism. And by the way, Chomsky is considered to be a materialistic agnostic and he actually said he identifies himself neither with materialism nor with idealism.
Regarding Kenosha Kid, I think we actually starting to agree on many things, particularly because I do not see his arguments in favor of what I understand to be materialism, but rather with what Chomsky says, as you interestingly noticed.
So the only thing remained to be seen is that actually Noam is indeed materialist. If he is, than I have simply no arguments left.
So please bombard me with arguments.
More like a Schrodinger's cat is either dead or alive makes more sense than to say it's a combination of the two just because you, as an observer, no not have this information. But again, these are abstract things and you hate them.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You are totally right: loys of information (maybe all of it) is inside matter. Wait, what? Did I say information? Damn it, that's not material, therefore it does not exist.
As for the hunger argument, I have nothing more to say. You've totally convinced me that hunger has nothing to do with going to kitchen. I already feel I got smarter and soon I'll become a true materialist.
I actually agree with that. There is little evidence that macroscopic bodies can be in superposition. Most physicists would agree with the above.
Quoting Eugen
As you just demonstrated yourself, it quite clearly is material, so problem there.
Quoting Eugen
It certainly doesn't have "nothing to do with going to kitchen". Can I characterise your position as this: there is either nothing causally relating two things, or the relation must be direct and unmediated? I'm not even sure this is an existing philosophy.
Than just try to laugh yourself at today's science. Seriously, future scientists will laugh their abstract asses at how we "curve" space and time by running faster.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The video itself is material. I think the image itself is made up of photons and other material stuff. But the information itself, the message of it is something abstract and immaterial and it does influence. The meaning of what you say made me write this, not the photons. That transcends matter.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Nop, I didn't say that, but it's not relevant either. If hunger (immaterial) contribute to the chain of causes, than materialism is kind of f***ed.
By the way, I am starting to think that you're more a rational person than a materialist.
I guess you were fooled by my harsh statements regarding materialism, therefore you thought I was automatically a mad christian mad at this view. You probably hate mad christians, therefore you started to defend materialism. But I am not a mad christian and another aspect of today's people is that they use science to prove or disprove God, and you arguments, even if they are intended to defend materialism, many of them do not.
On the contrary, I can appreciate the successes of scientific achievement to date while recognising that current paradigms will almost certainly be overthrown. It is an iterative process, but a win-win one. If our current models accord with new observation, we learn something. If they do not, we learn something better.
Quoting Eugen
So seeing my message was not a cause of you responding to it? The photons are an incidental material fact of a transmission of meaning?
Quoting Eugen
But again that's begging the question.
Quoting Eugen
I am both, I hope. And a modern physicist to boot (doctorate in quantum mechanics).
It's possible. I once heard Chomsky speak on moral relativism and I dismissed him as an idiot, so I never gave much care for his views after that. Probably a bit harsh.
Quoting Eugen
I wasn't assuming you were a mad Christian, I just needed an example of an immaterial world for sake of illustration and analogy. I did assume you were a dualist, since materialism rather defined itself in opposition to dualism, but it wasn't terminal.
Anyway, it was an enlightening conversation. It can be difficult sometimes getting your head around other points of view. You are the second person today to attest to an experience of the world I hadn't ever considered before. I'm not sure I'll ever quite get it, less sure I could ever quite communicate mine to you, but something to chew over is always good.
The sense in most common colloquial use today is the one that means the denial of things that aren’t ontologically made of the same kind of stuff as rocks and trees and so on. That seems to be the kind you’re principally against. The kind that denies that there is more than just one kind of stuff, the same kind of stuff that ordinary things we’re familiar with are made of.
Another sense, typically only understood by philosophers today, means a specific subtype of the first type, one that holds that that one kind of stuff is some kind of material substance that is in principle separable from its apparent attributes, a solid, extended stuff that only interacts with other stuff by banging into it and pushing it around.
Modern physicalism is an evolution of “materialism” in the first sense, but a rejection of “materialism” in the second sense. It says that there’s only one kind of stuff, the stuff that rocks and trees and tables and chairs are made of, but that stuff isn’t the hard billiard balls that Descartes thought it was. Rather, physical stuff as we understand it today is made of force fields embedded in a malleable spacetime, interacting with each other and with spacetime in ways that give rise to what macroscopically seem like hard little billiard balls, but also all kinds of other things, like gravity and electromagnetism and many much much weirder phenomena. But it’s still all understood to be the same kind of stuff, manifesting in different ways.
So far as I can tell Chomsky is a modern physicalist like that, as am I, and Kenosha it seems. Chomsky and I are also panpsychists, who hold that all of that physical stuff has a mindlike aspect to it; but it’s still all the same physical stuff, no ghosts or gods or other weird woo.
Super-nice. I really hope you will be objective. My father won the 1st place in physics in my country several times and I believe he was also no1 in Balkans at a time. He was a member of the international nuclear physicists (I forgot the name of the organisation, but I believe it has the headquarters in Viena). I can also say I was lucky to be friends with a guy who won no1 place in the world in physics. Well, I don't know much about physics, but I know how the things work there at the human level, and trust me when I am saying there's pure personal interest. Quantum mechanics gets in contradiction with relativity? No problem, we'll invent the quantum gravity. When that is proven to be wrong, no problem! We'll find something else, maybe a constant or some shit. Not to mention the aberrations in both relativity and quantum that you don't have to be a genious in order to spot them. As a citizen of this planet, please be an objective scientist and forget you're atheist, religious, or that you might have invested your entire time in something that is probably false.
Quoting Kenosha Kid it was definitely one of the causes. The material part is there, of course, but the abstract message was also a determinant factor.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don't get it: the feeling, perception, you name it of hunger is one of the causes and it isn't material.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'd love to communicate with you and with people like you. All my friends are busy with their corporate materialistic world and basically don't give a damn about these topics. On the other hand, I am a teacher with plenty of free time and curiosities alike. So I might text you sometimes.
I think Chomsky is saying forget about the material, it is actually the opposite, meaning fields, forces, maybe even intelligence and free will. I tend to believe he actually believes in free will, but not as a consciouss process. I am also sure he definitely does not disprove it.
I do believe he actually stated that this universal ghost can be intelligent as a whole, but I am not sure about that. I am pretty sure about the rest though.
Are you thinking of tennis? In what sense did your father win physics?
Quoting Eugen
But you understand there's no quantum gravity theory accepted by the scientific community, yes? It's reasonable to make hypotheses. They're not saying it's true.
I have worked in academic physics and the quality control is brutal. You say you don't know much about it, but you act like you can dismiss theory on grounds of taste. There is an abundance of scientists who give up huge amounts of their free time to dismiss theory on grounds that it's bullshit. While I can see you think there'd be benefit to science in getting your input early doors, trust me: we have actual experts trying to destroy our work continuously.
The other problem you raise is quite common: that science changes its mind when nature calls out its errors. You're not alone in characterizing that as a lack of integrity, and I doubt I can convince you otherwise other than to say we see no integrity in sticking to a stupid idea. Self-correction is precisely why science has succeeded as much as it has.
Chomsky is also clearly arguing against Cartesian substance dualism in those videos, saying the mind-body problem is a non-problem once we understand “bodies” to be made of “mind” in the metaphysical sense Descartes meant. And he certainly believes in both consciousness and free will, but that doesn’t exclude minds in our ordinary sense from being made of matter in the ordinary sense either. It’s all one kind of stuff, that doesn’t fit neatly into either of Descartes’ boxes.
I don’t know for certain, but given the rest of his views I expect Chomsky probably also endorses functionalism about mind and compatibilism about will.
))) If that were the case, I would be the rich son of a tennis player. Unfortunately, I was talking about the National Physics Olympiad, and Balkan almost sure. Anyway, my bad!
Well, now we 100% agree! But I don't think Dawkins or Sam Harris would agree with us, although the latter one is beginning to become less and less sure about his initial ideas, or at least that's my impression.
I was talking about these materialists.