Janus

These words accord very well with my own experience and views, including that I also once rejected physicalism as being beyond credibility, incoherent...

I don't think this follows, because all the documents we have point to nature behaving in the past as it does now. For example, if we have documents s...

Yes, I think this is pretty much the right picture.

I don't think science needs to claim that what appear to be the invariances of nature must of necessity forever remain invariant. As far as science kn...

If that goes only one way; that is if there can be a B-difference without and A-difference then A could be said to be dependent on B. If the object is...

Right, we may generally feel our thoughts to be centered in our heads, but we don't, without being told or seeing someone's head opened up, even know ...

What about 'energy' or 'force'? In physics it is energy or force which is understood to cause change, which would mean that wherever you have talk of ...

:cool:

I think your dismissal of the idea of causation as being relevant in physics is overly simplistic. One of the issues with thinking in terms of local e...

If the laws of nature have evolved then we might understand that as a kind of universal tendency towards habit-forming, just as things seems to have a...

Yes, it's a matter of perspective—I see it more as a case of those being better understood as physical, material or natural processes than as being "r...

Yes, I agree. All those 'mental' things are not independent of the physical, whereas there seem to be many physical things which are independent of th...

My point was only that it does not logically follow. We are well outside of anything that could be empirically tested with this topic. Consequently, I...

Yes, I think that's right—the idea is that the Universe was not planned or intentionally created and that mind emerged much later in the picture.

So what? It certainly doesn't follow from that obvious truism that nothing existed prior to the advent of mind. It might follow that nothing was exper...

The alternative is to avoid holding to substance ontologies altogether, which is my way of dealing with the issue.

As I said earlier, I don't believe there is a coherent distinction. And I received no answer from @"Wayfarer" in the way of an attempt to explain it. ...

It's very simple: anyone who believes the universe existed before it contained any minds is a physicalist, as long as they don't posit a transcendent ...

I think that very much depends on what you would count as "doing philosophy".

It doesn't seem as though any reductive physical explanation could account for the obvious semantic/ semiotic aspects of things. It doesn't follow tha...

O right, sorry—I've merged two discussions here, so it's a case of 'half-wrong thread'. That said, the topics are closely related; "mind-created world...

Yes, I understand that, but such silence does not constitute a philosophical position. That said, bear in mind that I am no advocate of holding philos...

The latter are probably even rarer than albino ravens, so they should be worth even more than a mint. Is the OP question regarding the metaphysical/ o...

Albino ravens are apparently a thing.

What do you mean by "objective reality"? A mind at large in the 'God' or 'universal mind' sense is not an object, but if we want to say it is real, th...

In case you failed to notice this: That said, human behavior may be explainable in neuronal, that is physical, terms, but it does not follow that neur...

So, you're not asking about the physical workings of traffic lights but about human behavior. Of course, people don't always stop at red lights, so th...

From the essay: I can't see any distinction between this idea of a collective consciousness and the idea of "mind at large". What would you say is the...

What is the alternative to physicalism? The only alternative I can think of is idealism. What are the differences between them? The former says that t...

:up:

Yes, but a particular acorn and the oak tree it becomes (if indeed it does so, of course) are linked, and hence their identities are linked, in a way ...

We can reflect on the general nature of experience or perception and derive the ineliminable attributes. For example, perception of objects is unimagi...

I tend to think that anywhere a valid distinction can be drawn then it should be drawn, while keeping in mind that in some contexts the distinction pr...

Cheers ND, you never know...

I have no doubt @"Hanover" often comes in handy. That said, I've run out of time and most likely won't be submitting anything in this round.

If something is a creation of something physical, it would seem to follow that it is physical. What is the problem with saying that the physical has b...

The law of the excluded middle is just a formulation of the fact that two things cannot occupy the same space and time (for us at least). In other wor...

It is very unlikely to be pure H2O. You could make an argument that because water commonly contains all sorts of solutes and is yet still referred to ...

The chess rules could be changed, just as we might think the laws of nature that determine that the Sun rises in the east could change. In fact it is ...

Good analysis!

Citation please. I searched and could find no clear answer to this question. They are obviously not bonded as they are in either liquid water or in ic...

Are there lone molecules of H2O?

I think this is right as far as it goes, but on the other hand biological organisms can generally be identified by their DNA, and this would seem to b...

The lone molecule of H2O is equally understood to be a lone molecule of water, so I don't think this argument stands up.

People may argue that we don't know how the brain produces consciousness, but this applies to other emergent phenomena as well. We don't know how agit...

This was not addressed. I think all this thread helps to demonstrate is the absurdity of the notion that there could be moral facts in any sense analo...

Yes, but being English in the sense you've described is a matter of fact, not a quality of "Englishness" manifested in behavior. Right, but there is n...

Thanks for the explanation—it seems I misunderstood your point, failing to realize you were being ironic with "fake physicists".

I did say "if Englishness exists". We know humans are biological organisms; do we have any evidence that they are more than that?

No, that's right, it would be observed in behavior, also a physical phenomenon.