Uber

I'm going to make a few remarks addressing some of the arguments in play, then I'm out of this thread. I have more productive things to do than waste ...

I think there are some plausible points in your arguments. But I need to consider them more carefully before I can fully make a coherent judgment. Som...

They are very much the product of the brain interacting with the world. You are just playing semantics now. The last refuge of the defeated.

Not really interested in that debate Marcus, sorry. But you should look up a few things on entropy, for fun if nothing else.

Apokrisis, if understanding Forms requires tying them to some kind of "energetic change," wouldn't that make them physical in some way?

Wayfarer, the law of identity and all logical principles were discovered by human minds, and after being so discovered were remembered and written dow...

Wayfarer, the capacity for abstract thinking develops from the physical structure of our brains, especially the high density of neurons in the cortex....

Wayfarer, the article you cited does not actually solve the problem. We already know why we can know truths and proofs: because of the physical struct...

Furthermore, reason about what it means to exist cannot develop except through empirical experience. Our "rational operations" in the brain, to quote ...

Undercover: I actually have read part of Aristotle's physics. I have it in my library. So which part of Aristotle's physics and cosmology are we throw...

So, this was all a bunch of nonsense that means virtually nothing and did not substantially address any of the points raised against your original arg...

Wayfarer, your attempted refutation of the epistemological problem was a bunch of rambling hogwash about how neurobiology cannot explain mathematical ...

I wasn't suggesting that science only works that way. Sometimes you're right it does take theory to illuminate the path of experimentation. Other time...

Wayfarer, your argument no longer has a "respectable pedigree." It's a gigantic red herring, because it addressed a version of reason that does not ex...

I apologize for my harsh language, Undercover. The words I used were inappropriate and should have been avoided. But I do not apologize for the genera...

Wayfarer, the point I was making was that it's possible to take any property of the mind (intellect, emotion, sensation), give it a ridiculous metaphy...

Wayfarer, the examples I provided showed that you can use unrestricted metaphysics, of the kind you seem to be enamored with, to say a lot of stupid t...

So let me get something straight: would you be ok with this definition if constraints were non-physical? If they lived in your magical realm with the ...

Incidentally my favorite version of the 2nd law does not involve entropy at all, largely because entropy is one of the most abused and misunderstood c...

The existence of life does not contradict the 2nd law, which in one of its many (many) variations states that the combined entropy of the system and t...

No obviously they do not contain the same problem, for the reasons that apokrisis explained and for the reasons that I mentioned: namely that we know ...

To Undercover: You sound like a broken record. I have already admitted that we don't always know what does the constraining. I certainly don't think i...

In a normal world, the assertion that reason permeates the "rational operations of the mind" would be considered circular nonsense, equivalent to sayi...

I suppose we can live with "a bit" of magic. There are structuralists who believe in some kind of modified Platonism (you actually sound like one), bu...

Cool but that automatically deflates the canonical versions of Platonism, including the fairy tale varieties on offer from Wayfarer, where universal r...

To M Undercover: I mentioned the epistemological problem in an earlier post in this thread. It is an argument against Platonic realism by Paul Benacer...

Good point about motion. Now I never really said what I meant by motion, which is probably why you don't know what I meant! I suppose I wanted the "ch...

All great points. I identified some of these problems myself when I asked where do constraints come from and mentioned how in many cases we don't know...

Let me address Wayfarer first and then I will get to some of the others. There's a lot going on in this thread right now and it's not easy to cover ev...

That's an interpretation of GR among some physicists. Lawrence Krauss frequently mentions it. Sean Carroll has mentioned variations of the same idea. ...

Sustainable methods of animal husbandry might be possible in principle and in practice on a limited basis, but they are not going to happen under capi...

I agree that correlation is not causation, and that having neural correlates alone is not enough to solve the problem. But I also remain convinced tha...

That must be it then. I'm sure only your immaculate mind can grasp what it means.

Just so my position isn't bastardized by people who have a hard time reading: I do not think the hard problem has been solved, and I do not think we a...

The way we gain knowledge about emergence, in our context, is by learning how small groups of neurons form certain networks in response to interaction...

A problem with the view that the physical is whatever has spatiotemporal location is that physicists increasingly believe time and space are themselve...

You only think there has been no progress because you assume the whole puzzle will come fully formed, without any intervening steps. But the way we ge...

Steve: Today we know that conscious experience cannot exist separately from brain activity. That is a realization of fundamental importance. What we d...

Wayfarer: Let's be clear about the subject of the debate. The subject of the debate is whether the argument from reason is sound and logically valid. ...

I never claimed that the hard problem was solved. In fact I have been very explicit that it has not been solved. But only deliberate ignorance can be ...

I apologize if this has already been mentioned, but there was a major new study that came out in Science today about the global environmental impact o...

Let me first say that I like that you made this thread. Here's how I think about it: On issues where the philosophical disputes are sharp, it can cert...

David Johnson had a great takedown: Naturalism Undefeated: A Refutation of the Argument from Reason As you implied yourself, there is never a "last wo...

I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the canonical versions of the argument from reason, as proposed by Lewis, have been completely refuted. Sure...

I think your opening question is the most important one: can science demonstrate in principle that only physical things exist? No I don't think it can...

I have not read it entirely, but I am familiar with the gist of the argument. If everything is just physical causes, then humans cannot have intention...

As for science and metaphysics: I do think it's necessary and important for science to use some level of metaphysics in its analysis of the world. Oth...

Wayfarer: I contend that the predictive capacities of logic and math are entirely explainable by seeing them as emergent properties of human cognition...

Yawn. You and I rehashing this debate on another thread is pointless. Mathematical ideas are mental constructs in the brain. They are physical mental ...

Oh yeah Tom is wrong. I just gave an example above of a purely deterministic differential equation that is not invariant under time-reversal, and this...