I think the view that only matter and the immutable physical laws of the universe are real, is now the prevailing ideology of the west. I struggled to conceptualize some older ideas even in philosophy 101, because everything already seemed to have been settled by le science and you are conditioned by this view throughout primary and secondary school. It’s hard to think about things outside this framework.
My question is, do u think this is the case? Has science settled everything? Is this the best philosophy to arrive at the truth? What are its weaknesses? Do you think it will survive the end of this century?
What are some good books about this topic?
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Scientific materialism: my day be so fine
Quantum physics: I am about to ruin this man's whole career
Lol science just won out and magicgays still seethe over the non-existence of a heaven of pure consciousness and can't cope with eternal sleep after death.
Quantum physics is entirely based on empirical observations.
Physical laws themselves are metaphysical. Yes. But their efficacy is still supported by evidence. Something other metaphysical concepts don't have.
Well they did hand Galileo. Look where their respective legacies are now.
I don't think we can ever say for sure. But that's probably the case for consciousness. Its one of those things where everything you say is unfalsifiable. Another thing is question of after life. We can never confirm but its probably just eternal sleep.
Yeah it works when limited to its realm. That is study of physical reality. The problem occurs when other metaphysical concepts try to enroach over the territory (physical reality) which is thoroughly dominated by materialist throught.
Sigh
*hang
This pseud from yesterday who doesn't understand the limits of his precious material "scientific" worldview
>Le sigh
I understand its limit quite well. I just repeat the simple fact that materialism is still a perfect representation in the domain of physical reality.
Frankly the general widespread disdain for this evidence based worldview on this board confused me at first. But then I saw all the Evola magic threads, the guenon esotericism threads and the christianity threads and it all makes a whole lot more sense now lol
>Physical laws themselves are metaphysical. Yes. But their efficacy is still supported by evidence. Something other metaphysical concepts don't have.
Scientists who only do theory may never recover from this
Theory is always tied to observation. Something magicgay philosophers don't have
>Quantum physics is entirely based on empirical observations.
>Empirical observations
Scientific modeling requires little or no understanding of the underlying nature of reality in exactly the same way that a gamer needs little or no understanding of the computer's underlying architecture in order to win the game. It only requires an understanding of how the elements of the game, accessed empirically from within, unfold relative to one another.
You've conflated scientific advancement in "stuff" with philosophy and adopted a metaphysical material worldview (that's perpetuated by our culture in many different fashions). None of it gets at the nature of reality. You are just as bad as the magicgays. Some of your last comments are straight up laughable.
The presumption for the existence of an underlying architecture to reality is unfalsifiable. And hence meaningless.
And frankly from where I see its the immaterialist circular arguments like this one
or this one
which are straight up laughable. They think they can discern the true worldview of physical reality by arguing over meaning of words. Maybe ever see the inside of a lab lmao
Which part of my argument (
) do you disagree with? As far as I’m concerned, it is a purely a-priori logical argument demonstrating with certainty that materialism can never be true.
>logical argument
No its not. And I'm not gonna try to refute it because after years of arguments with spiritgays I've decided to expect a certain quality from discourse to engage with it. Take that as you will. Idc if in your head this nonsense is irrefutable
Don’t bother responding then. I’m interested in intellectual discourse, not puerile ego battles.
Why would I ever argue against positions of purely argumentative crap which make bold claims regarding the nature of reality without actually interacting with it in any meaningful form.
Especially when I'm aware of the source of motivation for this ruse. Must've been much easier back in the days when you could just point at lightning and say "Zeus did it"
If I'm understanding your argument correctly you're basically saying that I am limiting the scope of reality to what I can perceive either through my senses or through experiments (which again involve my sense perception) . But the issue is everything that is presumed outside this can never be confirmed. And yes, our senses evolved for survival and not representing reality as it is. But then we hit the same problem. Attributes pf the physical that are unknowable on principle can never be confirmed.
Copenhagen interpretation
yeah the copenhagen interpretation doesn't say anything about the nature of reality at all. It's epistemic not ontological... Why even have philosophical discussion then?
You asked me how quantum physics deals with the problem of non-locality. Well that's how.
Actually I'm a bit confused about how you think non-locality btfos materialism. Maybe elaborate on that.
Lol no. I asked you how materialism / physical realism deal with non-locality, not quantum mechanics which doesn't say anything about the nature of things in reality, at least not conclusively.
You're so entrenched in materialism that what you're basically saying is that there is no point to discussing or philosophizing about anything that doesn't impact your physical reality directly. Is that right? In that case there's nothing to say I guess, lol
I think you're either strawmanning or misunderstanding the argument - nobody is saying "Zeus did it" or even arguing for any specific belief system or religion. The point is that the ultimate nature of reality can't be empirically arrived at under a purely "scientifically" (it's not a problem with science, just the current culture or system of science) material world view. There are many idealist proposed solutions that could well come under the purview of science if it wasn't so deeply rooted to reject things of that nature.
>expect a certain quality from discourse
>constantly lowers the quality of discourse with insults and slurs
>outright refuses to continue or even take part in arguments he doesnt like
This is what we're dealing with.
Materialism denies a priori logicism you pseud homosexual. I'm not even a hard materialist but your argument is tautologous horseshit.
Materialism by definition does not allow for the possibility of any logic at all.
No need to be angry. That is a fact.
Firstly, not every thought necessarily expresses a true/false proposition. And true/false propositions are not exclusively the only meaningful statements. Logic when applied to natural language is ultimately a useful heuristic, like occam's razor. The point also, is to make sound arguments, and soundness requires evidence, something logic can never provide.
Secondly, you're making the greek mistake of assuming thought is some sort of "stuff" to be imbued into a real thing. You think that just because "thought" is material, therefore any INDIVIDUAL THOUGHT like truth or falsity also has to be materially in the world, like some floating object or some essence that can be imbued.
It should be fairly obvious that thoughts are way higher up the chain than a movement of atoms or a mere chemical reaction. It's not even decided in chemistry whether it is 100% explainable by physics or whether there are "emergent chemical properties". Emergent properties could explain stuff like the mind. But even those aside, it's enough to say that the mind is possibly materially constructed in such a way as to give rise to thoughts, thoughts which should be analyzed on a higher level. A boat is made of steel, and it floats. Yet, steel sinks. We can talk about boat configurations and determine whether those sink or float. But, to talk about whether a chemical reaction "floats/sinks" or atoms "float/sink" doesn't make any sense - it's not the right level of analysis.
That said, the only reason you can even make such an argument is because there isn't any great explanation for how exactly the mind comes about from matter, or how exactly thoughts relate to the material world. When we look at animal brains, a lot of the same chemical reactions are going on there, and they don't seem to have any thought. So maybe it has something to do with a very specific brain configuration, which, when arranged correctly, it will create thoughts within itself rather than not.
However, all this aside, I think the most powerful argument for physicalism is that we don't know of anything that doesn't obey physical laws. Thought/mind is opaque enough to be a candidate for a "maybe this doesn't", but given how people's minds and thoughts are physically affected all the time, it's hard to imagine something that is physically affected and is somehow not itself physical
Strong emergence as you're describing isn't really functionally distinguishable from fricking magic in the long run
Higher principles just springing from an unseen aether when things that completely lack any semblance of them interact leaves a lot to be desired as an explanation
They're the product of the dialectical.
The whole concept of physical laws that are somehow exist "out there" governing matter is nonsense. All physical laws are is an assumption about future behavior based on the past, and nothing more. They are backed by theories as to why that behavior might have occurred consistently, but these can only ever be theories and not confirmed facts (and often get proven wrong with the advance of science).
> Firstly, not every thought necessarily expresses a true/false proposition. And true/false propositions are not exclusively the only meaningful statements.
Yes but in the very limited context I was using “meaningful” to mean “possessing a truth value”. This was obvious from the context, so focusing on the definition of “meaningful” is just fallacious. Words are arbitrary, I could have used any configuration of letters to express what I meant, but I chose “meaningful” because that’s the common word for “possessing a truth value” in philosophy and logic.
> It should be fairly obvious that thoughts are way higher up the chain than a movement of atoms or a mere chemical reaction.
Then you’re not a materialist. A materialist holds to the position that nothing exists except matter and its movements. My argument was against materialism, not whatever you believe.
> Emergent properties could explain stuff like the mind.
Again, emergent properties are non-material. If you believe in them you are a dualist. The only difference is you idiotically believe that movements of matter can produce something immaterial. That is just as idiotic as materialism, but it’s not materialism, which is the only thing my argument tried to refute.
You have not dealt with the argument, which is that no mere movement of matter possesses a truth value. If thoughts are reducible to movements of matter, and no movement of matter possesses a truth value, then thoughts do not possess truth values. If thoughts do not possess truth values, it is impossible to suppose that materialism is true. Hence, materialism is false. This is a very simple argument in my estimation.
Materialism in a metaphysical sense is self-defeating. The materialist worldview is the result of an internal model of reality whose unreliability is an inescapable implication of that very model. Even scientific empirical measurements are done with instruments that have been designed around this, they are just as constrained to the 'copy of the world' as you are. If materialism in a metaphysical sense is true, then that means that ALL of science and philosophy are limited to this very view that only exists in your brain. It's like you're sitting in a room trying to explain the entire universe through a peephole.It also then becomes obvious that evolution favors physical survival over accurately representing reality as it is. Most would probably agree that it has to be somewhat accurate, but I think we are overestimating the usefulness of accurate internal representations. Often it is precisely useful for organisms to distort, cut, or add things to their worldview for physical survival. This includes external stimuli, senses, etc. So now what you have is an incomplete, distorted view, a 'copy' of the world, that you are saying is a perfect representation of reality. If materialism is right, then it also cannot be trusted. It's completely absurd to suggest that you can infer something about the nature of reality with this view.
The belief that
>unfalsifiable = meaningless
is, ironically, pretty anti-scientific. Many of the more interesting questions in science are questions about unfalsifiable things.
Care to add anything concrete?
I'm literally arguing with people who believe that if I see a chair and I know its real and there with my senses then its not a justification for the chair's existence
Do you understand how logic works?
Do you know what the branch of philosophy known as epistemology is?
If someone asks you how you know that empirical data is true, saying "Because I looked at the empirical data" is not a valid answer.
If I see a chair in my room. Is that not justification enough for the chair's existence?
It doesn't justify it in any objective way because you could be a schizophrenic or hallucinating. This also brings up the interesting question of how subjective experience maps onto an external reality.
Its actually funny that since immaterial doesn't exist in reality and you are set to justify its existence so you have to forego objective experience of reality altogether to make it work. And of course the stuff about subjective experience mapping onto reality which then leads to ghosts are real because I subjectively experienced them.
This is basically saying that my experience of a chair in my room holds the same value as some spiritual charlatan who thinks he can see and talk to dead spirits. Because according to you the spirits are as real to him as the chair is to me. Of course the empirical method can be applied to the former and not to the later but that hurts your feelings so you question the idea that empirically falsifiable objects aren't real because the empirical method itself doesn't describe reality. When it clearly does in the case of things that are actually real. Like the chair
I simply told you something they will tell you in any philosophy class and you went on a tirade about ghosts and spirits. I suggest starting with the Greeks.
>I simply told you something they will tell you in any philosophy class
>unfalsifiable conjecture
Why shouldn't I talk about ghosts and spirits? This is an ease consequence of your flawed worldview. I can see the line of reasoning that would lead from here to God and magic from a mile away.
How did you get any of that from me telling you that your personal experience of the world isn’t objective and needs to be justified epistemologically?
Read Berkeley moron
Meaning is dependent on choice and personal feelings. I can't tell you what holds meaning for you because you're responsible for what you find meaningful. I am, however, criticizing your belief that unfalsifiable things are meaningless because of the meaning I derive from them. Unfalsifiable matters such as whether an omnipotent god exists or what may exist outside of the observable universe act both as fuel for creativity, which strengthens critical thinking, and inspiration for curiosity, which is a predominant driving force for science. I'd even go as far as saying science wouldn't even exist in the first place without curiosity and, because of that, all things that inspire curiosity are meaningful.
Meaningful fiction is still fiction
> sigh
not an argument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect%27s_experiment
How does materialism / physical realism deal with non-locality, etc.?
More recent sources corroborating the results:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.250401
https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.250402
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15759
Not even to mention that the original quantum physicists were a pretty religious / mystical bunch: Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Bohm... Most of them have written about it. It's deeply rooted in the very science you are so attached to, and the heated debate over materialism has only recently degenerated into what it is now (defending the "religion" of materialism as it's become).
Their personal beliefs do not concern me. Their theories are born from a need to explain discrepancies between data and the classical model, not from their personal conviction in the existence of the mystical.
I do understand though that mysticism of one kind or another has a certain allure to the human psyche. I myself was a believer for the longest time until I just couldn't fool myself anymore
Actually you are fooling yourself now.
>Quantum physics is entirely based on empirical observations.
Waveforms that collapse when observed. Thank you for playing, try again
The existence of waveforms can be inferred from experiments. Like electron diffraction. Their nature studied.
>Its unjustified because I said so
Lol k
Inferences text evidence and background knowledge not empirical observation.
At which point you gotta wonder what can you even call "observation" and "evidence".If a diffraction pattern is not proof of underlying wave characteristics I don't know what is. Its still the material and it still exists. Unlike the metaphysical which is argued entirely through induction
The scientific method relies on induction and other immaterial categories.
We have been saying this over and over and you still don't get it. Even Quine said it.
And I've been saying again and again that those are thoughts in the head to rationalize the nature of reality. You won't convince anyone by treating abstract idea as your example of immaterial things that exist
>empirical observation
Pure unjustified dogma
>Physical laws themselves are metaphysical
care to elaborate on this? seems kinda contradictory at first, but you may have a good point
Galileo getting btfo'd by the church was a good thing
>Lol science just won out and magicgays
Metaphysics =/= magic
Magic is everything that goes against physical laws. Metaphysics describes how physical laws are contingent
"Believing" in physical laws is a mega atheist-nihilist cope. In a decade there will be someone to replace Einstein, just how we replaced Newtons laws and Netwon replaced the mechanic laws before him
physical "laws" are just a way to make phenomena understandable to us
>contradictions out of the ass
>non arguments with fancy words that the user does not understand
>active attempts to sound smug
you're a redditor
>non arguments with fancy words that the user does not understand
Such irony. The only non-arguments with fancy words here are coming from metaphysicsdroids. Circular bullshit which has zero touch with reality.
>there is no empirical evidence for empirical method
Le science epicly owned lmao. Lets burn all books and read new age spirituality instead.
Quantum mechanics are part of materialism
>Scientific materialism
What?
>physical laws
Lmao. Materialists still can't escape from metaphysical language
DO you have anything worth while to say?
He's right you know
>gets BTFO'd time and time again
>makes the thread every day still
I understand now why back in the day that decided what the truth was ("heresy" comes from the greek for "taking an choice over what facts YOU want rather than changing your facts to accomodate the Truth") were actually dealt with by physical removal (from existence). These people are obstinate in their dellusions and intellectually dishonest.
those that decided*
Dude what? This is the first time I’m making this thread and I’m not taking sides. In fact, I don’t like materialism but my distaste for it isn’t good enough to overcome it. I’m asking for book recs and maybe some babby tier explanations to get me started. I’m not whoever you’ve mistaken me to be.
>taking an choice over what facts YOU want rather than changing your facts to accomodate the Truth
This doesn't make any fricking sense.
I hope you still don’t believe in dark matter.
>because everything already seemed to have been settled by le science
>My question is, do u think this is the case?
Completely false, there are new discoveries made all the time.
>Has science settled everything?
By definition it can't settle everything. It's a process of creating models that describe the world. I highly recommend you look into complexity theory and complex dynamic systems, it's not physically possible to model the universe in perfect accuracy.
The video associated with this course is really good.
https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/136-nonlinear-dynamics-mathematical-and-computational-approaches/materials
>Is this the best philosophy to arrive at the truth? What are its weaknesses?
It is the best way to come to "truth" if you define truth as models that make predictions about the world.
>What are some good books about this topic?
Rather than books to start I highly recommend you learn about current AI research then use that to find books to learn more about the topics.
AI at a high level is like applying philosophy to conduct experiments on data. This talk is really good, if you look into the free energy principle in depth I think you'll like the philosophical side of the theory.
#67 Prof. KARL FRISTON 2.0 [Unplugged]
>look at pick thumbnail
>FIME WIME
>do u think this is the case?
no because the problem of consciousness remains, but one of the pillars of the old metaphysical systems, that is, the problem of extention, how space can be finite and infinite at the same time, has been resolved thanks to non-euclidian geometry, so now the idea that this existence is just an illusion, a representation of the mind or god, which was the fundament of western and eastern theology doesn't have the same grip anymore, materialism won a huge battle
Don’t they just say that consciousness is a purely material phenomenon happening inside the brain?
yeah but they can't prove it, you can only show correlations with consciousness, but not it's source
The "radio receiver" analogy is a good way of thinking about this--if you took apart an operating radio, you'd find all the parts, including the signal, necessary to make it produce music
But you would be missing the most important part--the broadcast--we know that, within our bodies, "the brain produces thought," but this is to ignore the possibility that what we're observing is only the local hardware, while some important aspect of the process exists elsewhere, just as the most important part of what makes a radio produce music is the radio-tower, which couldn't be deduced from the radio itself
This is such a fun picture. Really so much about our culture to unpack from this character.
>unpack
Why do liberals use this word all the time
it doesn’t solve the hard problem of conciousness, it doesn’t explain how something material (the brain) produces something immaterial (experience)
The frick you on that’s making your experiences immaterial? And where can I get some?
Can you stop talking like a redditor
Now, what is an experience? How much does it weigh? Is it a liquid?
These sound like nonsensical questions, right? Yes exactly. Because an experience is not a material object.
> What is a particle? How much does it weight? Is it a liquid?
An experience is an interaction. An interaction is when a system is changed by another system. Frick all about that is (inherently) immaterial.
There is nothing about the particles in your brain that allows you to deduce the properties of subjective experience ("I", not the feelings or thoughts that the I experiences. I am experiencing the mind) from the mass, momentum, spin, charge, or whatever. Your computer has also structure, "processes", behaviors but they don't seem to be accompanied by any inner experience. How can you explain it as an emergent phenomenon when there is nothing about the parts that implies such a thing? Is it a fundamental property of matter that we haven't discovered?
Not the materialist, but I'll help out the other guy a bit. Look up Autopoiesis. A self organizing system that describes physical process in which emergence of "self" arises. This also applies to our consciousness system as well. As well as host of other systems which can be described as such. There are quite a few researchers working in this direction in AI research today, which is being influenced by modern consciousness studies which utilizes the model.
No - autopoiesis doesn't have a solid claim to explain such a phenomenon only the same method of handwaving their way there by claiming that awareness is somehow a requirement but not explaining how that arises in a satisfactory manner. Also there are many things which could be described as autopoiedic (? lol) which aren't complex systems at all.
Autopoiesis is a model that bridge the gap closer. Its not so the final answer as that hasn't been answered yet. Finding such systems anywhere in the world isn't that strange, its a model. It scales from simplest of systems to the most complex of systems. Thats the power of this self-generating model.
There’s two ways we can go from here:
> (You) don’t have an inner experience, or a sense of self. Nothing implies that you do.
> Computers have an inner experience, and a sense of self. This is as self-evident as your own sovereignty (“I have an inner experience!” <-> “Windows startup sound”)
Pick whichever you find more palatable.
yes, I do have a Self. It's the only thing that is for sure in this "world" at all. Every feeling, smell, thought, concept, etc. is what follows "I". If there was no "I" or subject to experience those things we wouldn't be having this conversation. Is what you're telling me that you're not aware? It's clearly not option one. Option two is technically possible, except for the fact that there is nothing which appears in the computer as consciousness. It doesn't decide to play the windows startup sound, it's something that we trigger with knowable patterns. Do you claim to have a 1:1 mapping of which particles / arrangements in your brain correspond to you having the awareness or "I"? This is the very problem itself...
>is what follows "I"
the inverse could also be true tho, the "i" could be a way in which, the proccess of experiencing and abstraction all the data that happens in experience, creates a common denominator for all the different forms of experience, in that case the smelle is not what follows "I", but "i" is what follows smell, that is i don't know that "i am" because i smell, i know that i smell because i created the notion that "i am", you can't provethat epxerience iscontingent to a reflective self, sicne a reflective self can only happenin experience, so the reflective self is just as contingent if not more to experience, the self needs experience just as much as experience needs the self
>subject to experience those things we wouldn't be having this conversation.
a subject don't presupouse an absolute self, just a relative one, since every subject needs an object, and thus every self is relative to a world of objects in which exist
Gaps in our knowledge of how the brain conjures the self phenomena doesn't prove that its immaterial. The consciousness question is unsolved and its obvious that it is the unsolved which forms the breeding ground for religious/spiritualistic dogma.
Read up modern phenomenology lmao. There are various proposal solutions to the conscious generation, self generations systems. One of the self generation mode was mentioned earlier, the autopoiesis model. Its abundantly clear that the model is applicable to all forms of autonomous systems. That model is specifically used in modern consciousness study as a way to generate the self model.
It doesn't need to lead to a God nor anything special.
>It's the only thing that is for sure in this "world"
No it’s not. You (and me) could just be NPCs, philosophical zombies, and we’d never know it. Just a side note, not pertinent to the materialist argument.
Option two it is then
> there is nothing which appears in the computer as consciousness
Yes there is: see, windows startup.
> it doesn’t decide
Neither do you. Define “decide”. And “choice”, while you’re at it. Just so we’re on the same page.
> it’s something that we trigger with knowable patterns
Firstly, that’s inaccurate because my Mac has like a 25% chance /not/ to play it, for reasons well beyond me (although it may have arrived at that state by being semi-submerged on for years). Secondly, if we’re talking /predictable/ patterns instead of knowable ones, humans are super predictable. Like, holy frick. Maybe a lot of the minutiae appear random (as random as, say, the noise from a computer CPU used in RNG), but on the macro scale they’re super predictable. For example, I’m predicting that you’ll respond to this post - are you a soulless automaton because you’re /that/ predictable?
> Do you claim to have a 1:1 mapping of which particles / arrangements in your brain correspond to you having the awareness or "I"?
Not me. But for a worm, yes.
>Blacks cause crime
>Brain says avoid blacks
Not one gram of the universe's matter was changed.
For absolutely free I am safer. No equivalent exchange happened.
I mean, you burned some calories to form that thought..
A thought that otherwise would have been filled with videogame music that runs 24/7.
Equal calories, unequal results.
You’re right, the video game tracks would have been a much better waste of time.
The hand waving thing happens here for materialists. Phenomenologists/Neurophenomenologists are the link here, but even that doesn't lead to materialism but a weird space where either you go pansychism(religious)/monism(nonreligious) or a reality that is structurally relational without any monistic or essence. The problem of essence (neutral monism) is that it brings problem of division. So relational structuralist seems to be the coherent but radically different view of reality than almost(buddhist lmao) anyone else had imagined, whether people were pushing for god/physical/consciousness/etc.
>Has science settled everything?
>What are its weaknesses?
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/the-knowledge-of-wisdom-paradox/
"The more explicit knowledge we accumulate, the more we can environmentally intervene. The more we environmentally intervene, the more we change the taken-for-granted backgrounds. The more we change taken-for-granted backgrounds, the less reliable our implicit knowledge becomes."
>Is this the best philosophy to arrive at the truth?
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2017/04/05/the-point-being/
"Now consider the manifest absurdity:
*It is true that there is no such thing as truth.*
If *truth talk* belonged to system A, and *such thing talk* belonged to system X, then it really could be true that there’s no such thing as truth. But given conscious insensitivity to this, we would have no way of discerning the distinct cognitive ecologies involved, and so presume One Big Happy Cognition by default. If there is no such thing as truth, we would cry, then no statement could be true.
How does one argue against that? short knowledge of the heuristic, fractionate structure of human cognition."
>no because the problem of consciousness remains
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/lamps-instead-of-ladies-the-hard-problem-explained/
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/cognition-obscura-reprise/
The problem of hallucinating a person due to perception errors, you mean?
Wow, didn't know Bakker was a dumb charlatan.
> scientific materialism says matter is all that exists
> how do you scientific materialism is reliable?
> why I just use this whole set of presuppositions which are fundamentally at odds with scientific materialism of course
What presuppositions
The existence of a theory-independent, external world, the orderly nature of the external world, the knowability of the external world, the existence of truth, laws of logic, the reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth-gatherers and as a source of justified beliefs in our intellectual environment, the adequacy of language to describe the world, the existence of values used in science, uniformity of nature and induction, the existence of numbers, etc.
this and materialistgays think that they can handwave away all of this as a "leap of faith" yet they don't act at all as if it was a faith, they act as if it was truth (because even they know deep down that things like numbers, geometrical laws, logical laws etc simply are)
>they handwave away all of this as a "leap of faith" yet they act as if it was truth
So, exactly like a religidiot, lol
like abrahamogroids
Except they can at least claim to have an account for these things. That’s not possible for a scientific materialist. They can’t give an account for how they know anything at all.
> source: I made it up
> how do you know the empirical method works
> why the empirical evidence of course
Exactly.
Who knows.
Imo the shift away from pre-scientific thinking to scientific materialism is the only true paradigm shift that’s ever occurred in the history of human thought. Everything else is just details.
So will there be another paradigm shift or are we done? Who knows. Hard to do induction on a sample size of one.
>Has science settled everything?
No, there's still many questions for philosophy, the problems of language, the problems of consciousness, the problems of morality, ect. Hell, the fundamental tenets of science and logic relay on philosophy.
>Hell
We are in a polite environment of discussion. You know there are other alternatives to use words like that (heck, hesh, holly molly if you are a boomer etc). Refrain yourself from saying this is ressit advice.
Frick, you’re right. It’s my c**ting lowbrow upbringing coming back to bugger me in the shitter.
this is IQfy what do you expect gay
It's the best framework we've been able to develop for the kinds of problems (most of) our culture thinks need to be solved
Those problems usually relate to production of material/consumer goods and prolongation of life
Because we've applied this framework to everything including and beyond these two problems, we have more shit than ever before, we live longer than ever before, and we suffer from a culturally pervasive ennui that threatens to topple the entirety of our cultural system
That is because this framework is terrible at resolving the problem of how and why life is actually worth living--we're comfortable, but why is "comfort as such" a good thing? Is it inherently desirable? What do we sacrifice when we prioritize it?
Because scientific materialism has become so pervasive, most people now don't have the apparatus to answer questions that this materialism doesn't address itself to--we've internalized the framework as "the way things are"
Try reading Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn if you're looking for a way out of this worldview from within, or The Order of Things by Foucault if you're sympathetic to continental theory
>Because scientific materialism has become so pervasive, most people now don't have the apparatus to answer questions that this materialism doesn't address itself to--we've internalized the framework as "the way things are"
>Try reading Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn if you're looking for a way out of this worldview from within, or The Order of Things by Foucault if you're sympathetic to continental theory
thanks man, op here. this is what i was trying to ask. ill check em out.
No. In fact as you pointed out we have regressed philosophically to the point that few people have any grasp at all on basic good reasoning and awareness. It is not new or definitive or in the casual form even coherent or understood. It's a vague impression of what science came from in the first place. You've got it backwards.
The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger)
If you put a dvd inside an old cd player, it would read "no disc" but we know there is a disc inside the cd player. Scientific materialism is a cd player, if it can't see something it will simply say it does not exist.
Easy refutation of all materialisms:
1. Suppose materialism is true.
2. Then, our thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions in our brains.
3. But chemical reactions cannot be true or false. A firework, when it explodes, is neither true nor false. It is simply a movement of atoms. Similarly, no chemical reaction may be imbued with truth or falsity, for it is a mere movement of atoms.
3. Hence, our thoughts are neither true nor false; that is, they are meaningless.
4. But there is a contradiction between 1. and 3., because in order to suppose anything as true one must presuppose the meaningfulness of one's own thoughts.
5. So it is logically impossible to suppose materialism is true.
6. Hence, materialism is false.
This is an airtight argument; it cannot be refuted.
> Suppose materialism is true
Okay, I’m supposing that. I’m picturing a reality where materialism is true.
> Our thoughts are nothing but chemical reactions
Got it - in this reality, people’s thoughts are chemical reactions.
> Hence, thoughts are neither true nor false
What do you mean by this? Do you mean that these thoughts are incapable of being in accordance with reality? (I.E., person thinks 1+1=2, but numbers don’t exist)
Supposing I’m reading you correctly; It’s perfectly plausible for someone in that reality to presuppose that their thoughts have meaning, even if they’re incorrect in that presupposition. So there’s no logical inconsistency.
Under materialism thoughts are identical to movements of atoms in the brain. Movements of atoms are not able to be true or false, just like a firework exploding is neither true nor false. That’s just an obvious property of chemical reactions/movements of particles: they hold no truth-value. You cannot dispute this.
Could you give an example of something that would have a truth value? It doesn’t seem obvious to me what you’re trying to describe.
For example, you say that movements of atoms are not able to be true or false, but that’s just obviously not true, because
> it is true in this theoretical reality that the atom is moving
What am I missing here?
but cant the thoughts created by the interactions of atoms hold truth-value?
Belief is a model, a model can literally be a single atom on its own (if you suspend your disbelief enough). No “thoughts” required.
You guys seem to simply fail to comprehend the idea that human mind is capable of thoughts and ideas. The idea that 2+2=4 exists inside my head as a chemical reaction. And the value of "truth" that I may assign to this idea is another chemical reaction. Infact there would be no need for brain chemical reactions to exists in the first place if thoughts were things on their own
Abstract ideas are not the secret golden ticket to mysticism that you think they are.
Just how many times will I encounter this pseud argument pretending that it somehow btfos materialism. Not to mention how none of this justifies any of the immaterial beliefs.
I never said that anything that is not physically real(on first glance that is) is not worth discussing. Physical phenomena can lead to complex results , that could very well be irreducible but still have their basis in physical reality. I just reject things that don't exist at all. And I'm not entrenched in this thinking. I'm willing to accept anything that presents evidence for itself in reality. I'm aware that in modern era when science has creeped up on so many avenues of our understanding of the world some people need to come up with ever more convoluted rhetoric to justify their beliefs.
Lol. Even as a spiritual believer I knew for some time that my beliefs are based entirely on faith and they couldn't be argued for. I'm not arrogent enough to justify the logically absurd. Maybe that's why I eventually had to grow up and let them go. Believe me, I want the spiritual to be real more than anyone here. But once you forego your dogma you can only fight the truth for so long.
You see, the issue with this proposition is, if science, as it is practiced in current form was incomplete then we would see discrepancies in how we model reality and how things actually work. And though I don't agree that I am strawmanning here about many of these arguments being prompted by an intention to justify religion or spirituality I'll like to see some of these idealist solutions that could help the scientific method.
>But once you forego your dogma
Why haven't you grown out of your materialist dogma?
Its not a dogma tbh if its real and can be empirically confirmed
>Empirical data is true.
>Scientific method is true
>My interpretation of data is true
Total dogma
>thinks empirical data is untrue.
Maybe blind yourself because clearly you don't need senses
Atheists don't understand nuance.
I didn't say it's untrue. I said that your materialist paradigm can't justify it.
most of spirituality is not just blind faith but direct experience of the only fundamental reality for you which is your awareness (yet to be explained)
>The idea that 2+2=4 exists inside my head as a chemical reaction.
curiously there is zero empirical evidence for this assertion.
>We can't map one on one how brain forms certain thoughts therefore immaterial exists
You know this argument could've probably worked 700 years ago. Ignorance is the breeding ground for dogma indeed.
That is not an argument I made.
>Ignorance is the breeding ground for dogma indeed.
tasteful irony indeed.
>anon spirit beings are not real we can't perceive them, can't deduce them and its literally made up
>N-n-n-no silly, how d-do you know to trust your observation.
>Dude its literally made up
>N-n-no your insistence on observation is made up.
>Anon I-
>n-no u
Le atheist epic owned
>in order to suppose anything as true one must presuppose the meaningfulness of one's own thoughts
In order to suppose X, I simply have to say "I suppose X," no thoughts required.
You just proved nihilism right
>But there is a contradiction between 1. and 3., because in order to suppose anything as true one must presuppose the meaningfulness of one's own thoughts.
Wrong. Next
I thought that was one of the more obvious premises of my argument. How could you suppose something is true if you admit that none of your suppositions can be true?
>3. But chemical reactions cannot be true or false. A firework, when it explodes, is neither true nor false.
how is it not true when the catalyst, reaction, and aftermath are all apparent?
This is hardly airtight. Plenty of philosophers consider propositions to be independent abstract entities (similar to universals).
I would suggest the Routledge Introduction to Metaphysics if this sort of thing interests you, good effort!
To quote myself here, I left off on my chain of recommendations this, which is probably a starting point: https://iep.utm.edu/scientific-realism-antirealism/
>Cartwright rejects all three components. She begins by challenging the first two components: there is a trade-off between facticity and explanatory power. Newton’s law of gravitation, FG = Gm1m2/r122, tells us what the gravitational force between two massive bodies is. Coulomb’s law, FC = kq1q2/r122, tells us what the electrostatic force between two charged bodies is. Each law gives the total force only for bodies where no other forces are acting. But most actual bodies are charged and massive and have other forces acting on them; thus the laws either are not factive (if read literally) or do not cover (if read as subject to the ceteris paribus modifier “provided no other forces are acting”). In physics, we explain by combining the forces: the actual force acting on a charged massive body is FA = FG + FC, the vector-sum of the Newton and Coulomb forces, which determines the actual acceleration and path. Cartwright objects that (a) we lack general laws of interaction allowing us to add causal influences in this way, (b) there is no reason to think that we can get super-laws that will be true and cover, (c) in nature there is only the actual cause and resultant trajectory. But if the facticity and explanatory components clash in this way, the third component is in trouble also. Realists cannot appeal to IBE to justify belief in factive fundamental covering laws because good explanations that cover a host of phenomena rarely proceed from true (factive) laws. Consequently, the explanatory success of fundamental laws cannot be cited as evidence for their truth.
>Cartwright’s own account has three corresponding components. First, fundamental laws are non-factive: they describe idealized objects in abstract mathematical models, not natural systems. In nature there are no purely Newtonian gravitational systems or purely electromagnetic systems. These are mathematical idealizations. Only messy phenomenological laws (describing empirical regularities and fairly directly supported by experiment) truly describe natural systems. Second, we should replace the DN model of explanation with a simulacrum account: explanations confer intelligibility by fitting staged mathematical descriptions of the phenomena to an idealized mathematical model provided by the theory by means of modeling techniques that are generally “rigged” and typically ignore (as negligible) disturbing forces or mathematically incorporate them (often inconsistently).
This shouldn't detract from taking science seriously, it's just important nuance.
Bro just deal with the argument. Stop being condescending and appealing to authority. The entire point is relations of identity are complete. If A is identical to B then whatever A has B has, and whatever A lacks B lacks. So now, if thoughts are identical to movements of atoms (which is a necessary conclusion of materialism), then whatever movements of atoms lack thoughts also lack. Since movements of atoms lack truth-value, being merely events, as illustrated by the firework example (when a firework explodes it is neither true nor false, it’s just an event), then thoughts must also lack truth-value. But if thoughts lack truth-value, it is impossible to suppose materialism is true. Hence, there is a contradiction which arises when you try supposing materialism is true. So, materialism is false.
Deal with the argument. Your appeals to authority are not convincing.
Things don't have truth values. Propositions have truth values.
Propositions are thought to be abstract objects with their own existence outside thought (realism).
Most philosophers would say: "Socrates is dead," is a proposition that had a truth value regardless of if it is being spoken or thought.
Water (3 atoms) being the combination of hydrogen and oxygen is true today. It was true 2 billion years ago before there were people to put propositions into linguistic phrases.
Atoms definitely due have truth values. "Helium has two protons," is true. Subatomic particles have truth values. "Protons have a positive electromagnetic charge," is true.
Propositions about combinations of particle have truth values, such as X isomer being left or right handed. You could have true/false propositions about all the atoms in a brain and how they interacted over a period of time, it would just be an enormous amount of information.
The only way your argument holds is if you claim propositions don't really exist as mind independent entities, anti-realism. But if you're saying "water is H2O" isn't true if there isn't a mind to think it then you are begging the question because you're assuming the mind as the basis for all truths, when what you set out to do is show that the mind is independent.
Another way to look at truth is to look for a truthmaker. The thing in the world that makes a proposition true.
"Socrates is standing," has a truth maker if there is indeed a referent named Socrates who is currently standing. The truthmaker for "brains cause minds," would be the observed connection between brain activity and mental life.
Now you can argue that those observations aren't enough to verify that brains cause minds, but obviously a truthmaker for the proposition that "brains cause minds," can exist.
There are plenty of good arguments against physicalism, but you're argument isn't one of them. It only holds if only thought/written propositions have truth values, which comes with a lot of follow on effects no one likes.
1. Materialists don't believe in abstract objects. They believe nothing exists except particles in motion. Once again you people change your position every time someone challenges it.
2. Even if you take this position, you may have escaped from the contradiction (thereby abandoning materialism by admitting of abstract objects), but your position is still extremely shaky. How do these "abstract objects" manage to penetrate our minds, when our minds are nothing more than movements of atoms? If the movements of atoms simply produce a representation of these abstract objects, like a computer would, then what assurance do you have that it will pick the true ones over the false ones?[1] Natural selection won't work as an answer, because it only cares about survivability, not truth. Maybe believing false things is more beneficial to survival than believing what is true. We can't see all of the colours on the light spectrum, and indeed under the indirect-realist assumptions of modern science colours do not even actually exist outside of our minds. So your position leaves you with no reason whatsoever to trust your own thinking, which is only slightly better than the materialist, who cannot even think at all.
[1]: Moreover, thinking is nothing like what a computer does. A computer doesn't understand the proposition, it merely produces a representation. Human beings understand the proposition itself; our souls interact with these "abstract objects" in a deep way.
This would be a good rebuttal to a hard eliminitivist. These are the minority of physicalists.
Many physicalists allow for abstract objects. For example, universals (Platonic forms). There are austere versions of realism where fundemental particles represent the primary universals and all other universals are "derived properties," the results of the interplay of these fundemental universals.
The question about whether a machine that could pass the Turing Test understands language is an interesting one. The popular Chinese Room analogy used to demonstrate how we "understand" words while machines just manipulate them has so potentially big holes.
Saying the man in the Chinese Room doesn't understand Chinese, so the Room doesn't understand Chinese is more analogous to saying "this one area of the brain doesn't 'understand' language, and so you cannot actually understand language." It's a very subtle way to throw the Cartesian Theater back into theory of mind. The claim is that there has to be a single entity that sits inside whatever truly knows language and is a unified observer. But physicalists are claiming understanding is an emergent property, so the question is if the entire system understands, not one part of it.
And there is some support for this modular approach. People with brain damage may be able to produce language fine, but are unable to understand it. They may understand language but be unable to produce it. Split brained people can appear to understand language, but careful experimentation shows that, in some cases, half of the brain might understand half of a compound word, while the other half gets the other. When asked to preform tasks that require linking words to objects you get a fractured response.
This being the case, where does the true intellect that understands on a "deep" level lie?
1. You came to defend materialism now you’re defending Platonism. I’m a Platonist so I have no objections to this part.
2. But despite claiming to be a Platonist you still want to cling on to your materialist assumptions. For example you made the fallacious “brain damage” argument that materialists always make. This is a fallacy because it attempts to identify cause with identity. Even if one can prove the brain CAUSES the mind, it would not therefore follow that the brain IS the mind. That would just be epiphenomenalism, which is still a dualist position. But brain damage doesn’t even prove epiphenomenalism, because it could be that the brain is analogous to a radio and the radio signals analogous to the soul. Even though the radio can be damaged, the signals remain pristine.
You didn't refute anything he said. Thoughts cannot have truth values even if propositions are "real" in this hilariously naive conception of yours. You have the choice between conflating "thought" with "proposition", thereby making thought metaphysical and eminently real, or separating them and ensuring that thought cannot reach true propositions unless it can bridge an ontological gap between matter and truth.
>Hilariously naive
>Implying realism vis-á-vis propositions hasn't been popular for centuries
I'm creating no such division. Thoughts in the form of propositions are linguistic representations of those same propositions. Propositions written out are linguistic representations of those same propositions. The representation is not the thing, the map is not the territory.
I'm not conflating thoughts and propositions. Not all thought represent propositions.
Second, only eliminativism denies that though exists, denied that it is "eminently real." Of course thoughts and abstractions exist for most physicalists. You can think about triangles, right? You can see the property red instantiated in multiple objects. You experience thoughts.
The physicalists claim is not that things do not exist. It is that they are composite objects that can be broken down into smaller physical entities in the same way that an atom can be broken down into electrons and nucleons and nucleons can be broken down into quarks.
Thoughts exist, they just have an extrinsic appearance as brain activity (this is also what idealists like Katsrup maintain).
There is no ontological gap. Thoughts are physical things interacting with other physical things. Some physicalists may deny that thoughts or propositions are real, others do not.
Within physicalism you have reductionists who think that all thought (all things) can be described by physics and non-reductionists who think emergence means that a unique language is required to describe more complex systems. You have elimitivism on one end and on the other predicate dualism, which says that thoughts, although the result of physical entities, can only be described using a psychological lexicon.
So the choice isn't a hard one. Tons of observation, all of it lol, suggests thought is real. It has no problem representing propositions about other real things.
>*destroys all your materialist arguments*
Heh... not trying to be mean...
No
you chimpos just can't escape the idea of the unknown
Scientific materialism is fairly old and outdated imo, it doesn't fly in the face of any serious rigor in the contemporary philosophy. Ofcourse that doesn't mean generic scientists/atheists dont hold these views, they're common within modern scientific world/society. But its got no grounds to land on. Even a breeze from idealist positions would shake those straw grounds on which the scientific materialism stands upon and idealistic position isn't even the final end game in today's philosophy. Current "final" phase of philosophy is post structuralist, but thats still bit outside the norms of acceptance(give it some time for it to be well accepted), so the next layer below that is structuralist universe. You could be a scientific structuralist and that would have a much higher grounds to which you can stand upon than the shaky grounds for which the scientific materialism stands upon.
We live in a time line where christians and trannies can find something they can agree on
Trannies are gnostic.
Gnosticism is condemned as a heresy.
Well and for once I thought the religious and homosexuals could find common ground in post structuralism. Maybe have some tea together and complain about reality affirming materialists
Materialist atheism cannot provide a coherent account for anything.
Only Christianity can.
Simple as that.
Distinguish between "I" and "think" by using materialism.
Justify the scientific method using science.
Go ahead.
Nagel's Bat.
The primary weakness of scientific materialism is that it assumes that everything in the universe can be sensed and understood by man. At the very most man can obtain operative knowledge - if x happens then it probably means that y will follow, and theory z gives an account of why this might be the case. This seems like a very poor imitation of absolute knowledge, which is what most materialist brainlets seem to consider "settled science" to consist of.
Even Quine, who was an atheist materialist, admitted that it is literally impossible for a materialist to justify the principle of induction, for example. He admitted that it is viciously circular.
Noone says humans can sense or understand everything, but why do you think other theiries explain it better? Do yiu think you can sense those things through mysticism?
>self
>identity
>time
>external world
>physical laws
>mathematical laws
>numbers
>laws of logic
The atheist reaches an epistemological dead end.
also
>causality
desu
you don't need god to explain any of those, Hume and Kant already articulated functional answer for each and everyone of those without resorting to a trascendental deity
scientific materialism can't even prove or disprove love. It can't even organize values
>It can't even organize values
nothing can organize values
religion tried to do it for millenia and failed spectaculary
Actually it was Masonic atheists who ruined it
So many convoluted arguments just to justify skydaddy lol
Reducing all concepts, ideas, theories etc that doesnt fall within the purview of your material worldview skydaddy shows how much of a midwit you are. A clear misunderstanding (or straight up refusal) of all opposing views, what a childish take.
>you are a moron if you don't appreciate the multitude of views!
>Okay, what are the opposing views?
>Well, there's this skydaddy and he's made immaterial stuff
>can you show it to me in any way
>no, my view doesn't allow me to do that
>why should i believe you?
>you should just blindly believe and feel how good it feels to believe
>why should i do that?
>if you don't, you're turning down being as happy as i am
>well, as much as i would love to be fulfilled and entertained, i'd prefer to keep searching for answers and worldviews
>nooooo you're a midwit and a moron
proving my point
okay, demonstrate to me something immaterial
Demonstrate your qualitative experience to me physically.
The burden of proof is on YOU to show there is something other than physical stuff. Physicalism explains a lot, successfully. There are obviously gaps in physical explanations - qualia being one of them. Unfortunately, having a mere explanatory gap isn't good enough. I could just as easily point towards explanatory gaps that exist within immaterial postulations - chiefly the problem of interaction. If you want anyone to believe in a word you're saying, you need something to back it up other than a "no you". On the other hand, if all your alternative take can provide is a finger raising "um technically", then I nor anyone else has any reason to do anything but dismiss it
The burden of proof is on you because qualia is primary in human experience and the quantitative abstractions come second. Cope and seethe about it if you like.
Perfect example. People with no real exposure to metaphysics think that physicalism as an ontology is necessary for the methodology of science to hold. There is this idea that if you reject physicalism you must be rejecting science.
Physicalism is a metaphysical claim, a rather poorly defined ontology. Science is a set of epistemological methodologies.
Science can just as well be thought an excellent way for studying the nature of phenomena under any other ontology.
But there is a presupposition that idealism must mean solipsism and rejecting science, or that dualism only comes in the form of Cartesian substance dualism.
The burden is on you to literally even prove what "physical" is or means, and that it actually has objective reality aside from our perceptions
So its the same moronic "empiricism doesn't justify itself" argument.
It justifies itself every hour with how good it is to describe reality that we can't just know it but manipulate it better too. Or maybe the pc you're typing on is another "dogma".
saying that I think the pc im typing on is a dogma or something is just another way of proving my point.
you are so far off base with your understanding of the opposing viewpoint that we aren't even talking about the same concepts anymore. Nothing i brought up in this thread implies that I can't have the experience of typing on a PC, or that it doesn't exist in some way. It's typical, using the technological advancements of science as a basis for materialism as a metaphysical worldview. They are not related in the way that you think they are, what you are describing as science are models not explanations of the underlying nature
>Everything you say is a way of proving my point because I said but I won't explain how
So we don't have any grasp on the underlying nature but we can still meaningfully interact with reality. Are you even listening to yourself.
Your entire argument that the empirical method has no justification is vacuous. When the same method gives us a grasp on reality better than metaphysical philosophy ever did.
But yeah keep on using bare abstract ideas as a crutch to reach whatever immaterial you have in mind
>It justifies itself every hour with how good it is to describe reality
This is a logical fallacy known as "begging the question" wherein you assume in your premise the very thing that you are supposed to prove.
When I say skydaddy I mean exactly that. The skydaddy you worship. I dindu talk abt nuffin else.
Nowhere in here did I bring up a skydaddy. I'm not even religious. Have a real conversation for once instead of projecting your insecurities onto others.
>Reducing all concepts, ideas, theories etc that doesnt fall within the purview of your material worldview SKYDADDY shows how much of a midwit you are.
Atleast don't straight up lie
Accidentally left it there. Should read "material worldview shows"
Oh then I completely misinterpreted you comment
Yeah my bad homie
You're arguing with a brainlet lmao
Says the guy whose side's entire argument is "logic and thoughts are immaterial therefore spirit ghosts are real"
No, I'm saying you're a moron if you think those two are the only option, especially since neither of those two positions hold any real grounds anymore.
Wait what? Are you saying that logic is not immaterial?
Sorry, took the existentialism pill.
No
I haven't read that one yet but I recently finished this one and it's probably the most remarkable book I've read in a long time. Kastrup crams the entire supposed meaning of existence into 250 pages with a wieneriness that's both impressive and somewhat annoying, but also with incredible clarity.
Oh and another thing that I forgot tbh. Materialists cannot solve the problem of universals. Materialists have to be nominalists by definition.
Well they better stop using oil then.
I'm not some oil deadline alarmist but we're in no fricking hurry to colonize and we're going to use it all up driving to work for Mr. Shekelstien so we can sit at a computer and order car parts for another company and set up shipping.
If we don't leave soon Earth is going to have to wait another 60 million years and use our bodies as fuel for whoever evolves to explore space.
Otherwise I'm fine with mostly running out of the stuff and living in wooden and stone homes for the rest of humanity and relearning the techniques to keep our houses cool and free from mold. I'm sure we can whip up a little oil for important lubrication then but no more of this driving and flying everywhere.
Thanks for reminding me how human society has no regard for scarcity despite being so far away from being post-scarcity...
Woah... for real dude........
It's funny how I switched from not giving a shit about what they claim climate change is to, "We're really never leaving Earth, huh? Every single government has a vested interest in keeping oil as cheap as possible so they can get as much of it as they can so that we pay them paper dollars that they claim has value so they can buy mansions."
We're going to use it all up for fun and profit. There won't be enough to launch into space at some point...
Unless that shit I read about the Earth just making it's own oil instead of fields of plant matter distilling down to oil. Then we might have infinite oil.
Who knows? It's only been, what like 50 years since we've had computers where we can't see the size of the pixels and all of our calculations are based off of the crap we've run through 1970's computers.
Parapsychology is producing a lot of scientific anomalies that are slowly accumulating. They can't be ignored forever so eventually scientists will have to move past the materialistic paradigm.
>Parapsychology is producing a lot of scientific anomalies
Let's here 'em.
These are the topics I know of
>Near Death Experiences
>Out of Body Experiences
>Psychokinesis
>Extrasensory Perception
>>
Viewing
>>
-Optical Vision / Blindfolded Sight
My interest is mainly in extrasensory perception. But I believe psychic archaeology is the most likely to legitimize parapsychology, since archaeologists already have a history of applying psychically gathered information for finding good excavation sites (e.g. Scott Elliot, Dr. Emerson and George McMullen) and answering questions about artifacts by traveling out of body (e.g. Stefan Ossowiecki). Secret Vaults of Time by Stephan A. Schwartz is a great book on this.
Most interesting articles are published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, see their book reviews too. A few others from Japan are found in the Journal of International Society of Life Information Science (Yoichiro Sako). If you like short articles more, Psi encyclopedia is available here: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/
Read Wolfgang Smith. There is no "final philosophy" in the way you seem to assume. Scientific materialism and physicalism was already refuted by itself in the 20th century by Whitehead and others.
I'm watching this documentary right now.
>studied math, physics, philosophy
Okay, pretty cool.
>traveled to India for answers
Hmm, well I'll stay with him.
>Met his wife and realized love is the key.
mmmuh-oh
>Discovered the writings of St Thomas Aquinas...
ABORT! ABORT! VAPID GARBAGE AHOY!!
Yeah, frick this guy. Its high-level woo but woo nonetheless.
Read his books, don't watch pop documentaries.
>woo
Anyone who uses this term unironically can be safely regarded as a fool and ignored
Your immaturity does not make up for your lack of Wit.
"Physicalism" will win out because physicalists just define the physical as whatever science validates. Non-locality from experiments using Bell's inequalities? Guess we have magical interaction instantly across any distance and that's physical. Multiple "objective" realities in modified Wigner's Friend experiments? Guess physical always meant a universe relative to a single observer. See also: Humple's Dilemma.
Hell, we could solve the hard problem by finding out consciousness is caused by soul particles beamed in from another universe and attached to brains and this would be called a physical function of science bore it out.
The fact is that methodology has nothing to do with physicalism and while it is the dominant ontology there are very many scientists who do not except it. There are leading neuroscientists who have embraced dualism or hylomorphic theories of mind. There are physicists who think information is the fundemental ontological primitive. There are idealist scientists. Idealism doesn't mean rejecting science it just means that science is an accurate means of predicting how mental objects interact (this has been the case since Berkeley).
Physicalism is so popular because without an instruction in philosophy, something few people ever get outside some historical overview, it is very, very easy to mistake the maps of the territory, the abstract models used for science with the things themselves of the universe. Actually, if the history of science is any guide, a whole bunch of shit we think is rock solid now will turn out to be gross simplifications or bullshit (N rays, caloric substance, luminiferous aether). Probably the biggest problem with physicalism is that our models are warped to fit our evolution has shaped our perceptions. But we're designed to see fitness payoffs in the environment, not truth, medium sized objects not fundemental ones. The idea of matter as a bunch of tiny balls is pretty bad. Fundemental particles are mathematical abstractions, they lack the haecceity of medium sized objects and are subject to complimentarity, so they are nothing like little balls.
There are several major interpretations of what physical stuff is at a fundemental level in the field out quantum foundations. Not one has majority support. That should tell you something is off.
Now that I did my rant I will post books.
This is a good intro on interpretations of quantum mechanics that is fine for a novice.
Every chapter of this book is available as a peer reviewed paper. It lays out all the major problems with physicalism as an ontology. Unfortunately, the idealist ontology is puts forth is less than convincing.
The Routledge Introduction to Metaphysics is great for a deeper dive here.
About how evolution misleads us about how the world actually is and how this leaks into science.
There is no such thing as fundamental matter, or maximal matter, or space in itself or time in itself. We are not adapted for "medium sized objects", we are just adapted for objects which don't really exist.
Well put anon.
I don't see what's wrong with that. Science is perfectly fine to accept that it can always expand its understanding of the physical. Remember that all these conjectures regarding field theory and non-locality is still based on results of experiments.
Heck give me a verifiable theory of consciousness that is not purely inductive and I'm all in.
I'll try to explain this very, very simply.
Let A be the set of all things.
Let B be the set of all things that can be empirically measured, and C be the set of all things that cannot be empirically measured.
=> A = B ∪ C
Scientific materialism needs to prove at least one of the following
>C = Ø is true
>A = B is true
>B ⊂ A is false (that B is not a proper subset of A)
The "problem" is that scientific materialism just presupposes that the above are true, without attempting to prove them. That's the main reason why it's gone out of fashion in favor of other views.
The only non-pseud in this thread, very high quality post.
This should be reposted again and again at every person who mistakenly thinks realism, the ideal that the external world actually exists = physicalism = science.
Not totally sure what you meant by this, but an interesting point about experimental results is that we always access them as part of mental life, as parts of subjective experience. All of empiricism is based on gaining knowledge through experience, which is why it is sort of comical that some empiricists, frustrated with the difficulties of creating a theory of how consciousness emerged, have gone on to deny experience actually exists.
ok hylic
Solid intro on information that will let you understand "it from bit," the claim that the universe is information (and two dimensional). Note that this is not saying the universe is a "simulation" in any way. Hoffman, above, talks about how 3D space could be error correcting code evolution hit upon, though this doesn't cover it.
I will say it starts off a bit math heavy and slow so if you want a lighter read The Ascent of Information or The Information might be easier. I like Ascent.
Or finally, if you want something deeper, with more of the philosophy and science laid out in depth: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-03633-1
Also free, which is nice.
Materialism states that your perceptions of the world happen only inside your physical brain. That is, the stuff you're looking at is actually beyond your skull, and your perception is literally bound inside of your skull, and removed from the outside (objective) reality. Now, if you extend the logic a bit you will notice that materialism is postulating that things you can never know to exist (objective reality) are actually responsible for the only thing you can be absolutely sure to exist, which is your consciousness...
>be me, materialist
>invent peak materialist technology
>make exact material and energetic duplicate of myself
>wait I'm still here looking out the eyes of this material body
>exact same material and energetic duplicate over there, acting like me, thinking like me...
>not me though
>shit
i wonder if philosophy has created its own corner of abstract ideas based on the idea that consciousness is indescribable for so long that we literally cant accept that materialism has solved it....oh wait...it hasnt
Hard mindfrick: Immaterial monism and material monism are actually functionally identical
Not a mindfrick at all, this realization is what made me bored of the whole debate in general. It's the typical problem of any sort of reduction of a class to its opposite. By doing so you quite literally render words meaningless.
Scientists don’t actually know what’s happening below what can be perceived, that’s why there are multiple theories that explain the same phenomenon such as wave-particle duality or string theory or dark energy. Beyond a certain point, we don’t actually know why the physical laws are the way that they are, or why anything exists at all. Black holes seem to break the laws of physics at a certain point. Science is reaching, not grasping. Similarly, like Nietzsche points out, no philosopher has ever been proven right. To be conscience is to be in the dark. We’ll never really know anything.
No definitely not. Have you read Hegel? You probably need to incorporate dialectics into science in some way. A materialist dialectic or something like that.
thesis: matter is atomic
antithesis: true atoms can't exist in space
synthesis: matter is prope nihil; Aristotelian hylomorphism is correct.
I do appreciate your antipathy towards this material flesh-prison, but "woo" is honestly just the gayest fricking term ever and stinks of reflexive thought-terminating cliches
>Is scientific materialism the final philosophy?
no. what is this, the 1800s? dumbass
did he died
Considering he didn't bleed-out initially and is sitting upright, its possible he survived.
Read Job
At the end of the day, science still can't answer the most fundamental question: how did everything come from nothing?
If we claim time isn't real, or linear as we suppose it is, this would eliminate the question above because it is framed with the assumption of linear time.
Ok, then if time isn't linear, causality goes out the window and we are left with an utterly baffling universe.
Everything depends on the linearity of time, but this dependency spawns the paradox of everything emerging from nothing. If we try to rid ourself of linear time, things get even more confusing.
I'm only a casual student of science, but some very fundamental things don't seem to add up. I'd be please if anyone can point out a flaw in my reasoning.
I think it would help if we stopped thinking of time abstractly and recognized it as a way of being in the world. Constructing a theory about it would remove the uniqueness and actuality it has in our consciousness because how we experience the world isn’t a theory or something that can be reconstructed.
who is this aryan goddess
Paulina Porizkova
Science has settled virtually nothing. In fact the safe bet is to assume that everything science says right now will be proven false by science itself (as that is it's exact nature) at some point in the future.
On a more practical level science is next to useless. Unless you have a lot of time to dedicate to reading and verifying studies (only to find half of them haven't been replicated even once and the other half are equally inconclusive, not remotely actionable to the layman, or obviously subject to bias or bribery) you're likely better off just just trusting your own instincts which have been honed for longer than science has even been around and are designed to actually serve you in a quick reliable fashion.
Basically what I'm saying is no.
>On a more practical level science is next to useless.
>goes on to spout worst of evopsych scientism
lmao
People radically misinterpret the "replication crisis." Experiments are replicated all the time, particularly the ones that move the needle on paradigm shifts or ones that seem to violate physical laws. When non-locality showed up people reran the experiment over and over. The double slit and quantum eraser have been done over and over and over.
What you are talking about is:
A. More of an issue in the social sciences
B. Actually fairly well understood.
First you had the problems you pointed out with incentives. Bribery isn't very common in terms of results, if there is bribery in science it is almost always someone trying to steal applied science so they can make a valuable technological item themselves. There is an issue of some findings cutting against the grain of a field, and people having their careers at risk if they publish certain hypotheses, but this is sort of cancelled out by the effects of Kuhn and everyone wanting to be a paradigm shifter.
The second part of the incentive issue is that null findings aren't seen as interesting so they go into a drawer somewhere or maybe a free database. So, if you have thousands of experiments a year, you're going to get plenty with .95, .99 and even .999 confidence that are actually due just to chance. Combine publication bias and the issue of volume and you get a shit show. Also add in that novel findings that contradict current conceptions tend to get more attention, even if they should be judged as less likely until replicated.
Part of this can be solved by putting null findings in searchable databases so positive results can be compared to similar numbers of nulls.
The other thing that will help fix this is the birth of analytical dashboards that can be published instead of static papers. Now a paper can be set up to refresh its data as more data comes in. A reader can rerun the regression analyses used, adding controls or taking them away with a mouse click. The whole process becomes much more transparent.
The other big issue is the use of linear models in the social sciences for systems we know to be chaotic and dynamical. Unfortunately, the methods born of chaos theory, simulation, non-linear techniques like splines and kernal regression are not taught in most graduate social science programs.
This will change, but slowly as the Boomers have a death grip on positions.
The replication crisis isn't what people think it is, the unearthing of some great conspiracy (science unearthed it after all). It's a combination of bad incentives doing what economics predicted they would do combined with the chaos revolution hitting physics, biology, and economics pretty hard, but not making it to other fields yet.
If you have dynamical systems with high sensitivity to initial conditions of course your linear relations wont reproduce. That doesn't mean the experiment was wrong really, it says it missed that the system is chaotic and patterns will fluctuate.
Read the Ioannidis 2005 paper. Most published research findings are pure bullshit. This is not just a problem for the social sciences, but also for fields like medicine where financial corruption plays a huge factor (think of the billions they make from pills and vaccines). You say bribery isn't common, but that's only technically true. A lot of studies are funded by companies who have a vested interest to have the findings come out a particular way. That's why positive results are much more likely to get published than negative ones. Maybe it's not outright bribery, but it's close enough. There have also been numerous experiments where people have purposefully sent in nonsense, or papers written by AI, which have been peer-reviewed and published in respected journals.
>actually fairly well understood
Come off it. Scientists are a tool used by technocrats to control the population. Nobody talks about the replication crisis in public; it's always "trust the science! follow the experts! wear your mask!" The reason scientists get so much prestige is mostly because of the work of wartime engineers, who created most of the "technological advancement" that science claims for itself.
>There have also been numerous experiments where people have purposefully sent in nonsense, or papers written by AI, which have been peer-reviewed and published in respected journals.
There have been a few and these were very low caliber journals or humanities journals.
You're vastly overstating the case. The fact is no other system gets us steam engines, planes, satalites, cars, vaccines, antibiotics, etc.
No other system makes anything like the accurate predictions of the future.
Also:
>Studies are useless and likely to be false.
>Here, look it says so in this study!
>Implying Ioannidis is saying science is totally broken, there is no way he is saying something far more nuanced about the strength of definitions, number of relationships being probed, effect sizes, the size of the field asking given questions, etc.
>Ironically, his paper fits most of the criteria that would denote that his paper is unlikely to be accurate and uses a simulation model that can be critiqued from many angles.
>Implying "Most Published Research Funds Are False" wasn't meant to have some level of irony.
>Implying that even if most findings are actually false that dooms science.
>Implying that the real issue is simply if studies are less likely to be false than other attempts at causal inference and explanation.
>Implying bad results don't undergo selection pressures over time that fit knowledge towards coherent models that are based on replicability and high levels of prediction.
>Implying this isn't very similar to Smith's Invisible Hand
>Implying paradigms aren't what matter, not individual papers.
>Implying every field is as jacked up with the influence of cash as medicine.
Part of the issue is novices want to see a published paper as a unit of definite scientific knowledge. They aren't.
When a finding is important it gets rerun through thousands of various interactions. Newton's laws weren't just written down and accepted, they were run through thousands of experiments and in the end very many of those experiments did falsify Newton's laws which is why there was a push to abandon relativity. Copernicus's model also was falsified and needed Newton to come along and fix it. This doesn't mean that Aristotle's physics was just as accurate as Newton's, or Ptolomaic solar system models as accurate as Copernicus. You keep a useful model that works most of the time until you find a better model.
"The fruit does not refute the bus," as old Hegel would say.
Science requires millions, really billions of observation points to flesh out. A paper might represent a few hundred in many cases. People are mistaking an observation with some theorizing for a complete model.
*Abandon them for relativity.
Really, Newton's laws had billions of experiments run. They are proven in almost every engineering project.
Same goes for germ theory and medicine.
>The fact is no other system gets us steam engines, planes, satalites, cars, vaccines, antibiotics, etc.
What did I just say in my post, which you obviously didn't read? The prestige scientists get is based on the work of engineers and mathematicians (often working in wartime). Empirical science has "progressed" nothing except medicine, and, as I have shown, that field is one of the most corrupt and untrustworthy of them all. They push pills and vaccines on people just to make money. The third leading cause of death is medical error. Going to the doctor is more likely to get you killed than having an encounter with gangsters.
>Engineers could do any of what they do without physics, definitions for entropy, Kolmogorov Complexity, genes, DNA, quantum mechanics, etc.
>We'd have nuclear power plants and weapons without physicists.
>We'd have anything like efficient engines without atomic theory and chemistry
>Some of the best engineers haven't done their best work in pure theory (e.g. Shannon Entropy)
>Engineering as a field didn't just spend a full century pretending differential equations must be neat and linear because "how else would you solve them?" and mathematicians didn't have the math for chaos and fractal geometry for like a century before a fricking meteorologist figured out that weather prediction sucked balls because of chaos
>Mandelbrot wasn't ignored as a fricking looney by engineering and math, the two fields he actually studied, until he showed his shit worked for economics and biology.
>Implying
ISHYGDTT
It's useless arguing with these sophists anon, they literally think Oppenheimer woke up one day and invented the bomb
Ok let's just look at what you listed
>steam engines
engineers.
>planes
wartime engineers
>satellites
cold war engineers
>cars
wartime engineers
>vaccines
XDDDDDDDDDD Did you get autism from yours?
>antibiotics
Well done you cured a sore throat and made my immune system weak in the process. Now talk about the billions you've made on bullshit medicines, psychology zombie pills, all the people dead from medical error, etc.
>Planes were invented by wartime engineers in 1903 in the US
>Planes would have been possible without Newton's Laws, gas laws, and the concept of lift.
>Satalites would work without knowing physics.
>Efficient steam engines didn't require someone to develop the idea of entropy.
Do you know how any of this shit was actually developed or worms?
>Well done you cured a sore throat and made my immune system weak in the process. Now talk about the billions you've made on bullshit medicines, psychology zombie pills, all the people dead from medical error, etc.
You're right. The entire industry is worthless, clearly we should destroy all medicine.
They tried to give us vax poison and conspired to make a fake virus HOAX to take down the God Emperor.
Science is bullshit, they only allow liberal papers to be published. We've all read the race/IQ data and seen the truth but they refuse to publish.
It's an agenda by neomarxists to enforce degeneracy on us and make us goyim cattle and if you can't see that you are blind!
I don't think it's worthless. I just think it's hilarious when people point to medicine as proof of science's value, when the medicine industry is the most corrupt of all the scientific disciplines. Of course when you set something up as a God, any criticism of that thing will seem like an attack.
How does that negate the fact that medical scientific achievements are still impressive by themselves?
Scientific achievements don't explain the nature of reality. Its just playing a game of relationships, attributes and pattern recognition. You can "win" the materialist game without having an underlying understanding of things as they really are or ever asking those questions. They are not the same thing
then what is the value of your metaphysical philosophy? why should we consider it?
>Well done you cured a sore throat and made my immune system weak in the process.
Subwit, without antibiotics you'd prolly be dead by syphilis.
Also you keep citing physics when physics is more of an a-priori discipline than an empirical science. Physicists are basically mathematicians, so yeah they can be respected. The others? Not so much.
Many of those things are not from physics. Physics has borrowed them because they are concepts that apply across the sciences. That's the beauty of Shannon Entropy, Chaos, and Kolmogorov Complexity, you can take them anywhere. Might as well keep moving the goal posts and say information theory is mathematical too and say Shannon wasn't a scientist. And DNA / genetic engineering is really just information theory, so that's math too.
But if that's the case, then really every branch of science might be reducible to information theoretic approaches and it's all math then.
>Has science settled everything?
It hasnt settled anything, nor does it have the means to settle everything. The fundamental question, "why is there something instead of nothing" will never be bridged by "science", its simply outside of its frame
>What are some good books about this topic?
Gödel's proof destroyed every sense of a scientific materialist worldview, anyone who still subscribes to it doesn't understand science
> Gödel's proof destroyed every sense of a scientific materialist worldview,
You failed maths, or never took higher level maths, and possibly you skimmed the wiki page on godel’s proof
He’s right but his statement is very unqualified. Godel proved that there are mathematical truths expressible within the language of a given formal system which are not deducible from the axioms of that system. This is a complete refutation of empiricism if you know the history of the argument. To deal with the existence of mathematical truths, empiricists posited that they are merely tautologies, and the process of mathematical discovery is not really “discovery” but rather a string of tautologies. The only reason it FEELS like discovery is because our minds are too weak to see their tautological nature; but, the empiricists said, if there was a super-intellect, he could simply start from the axioms and discover every mathematical truth, as if it were a tautology. But Godel proved that this is wrong, that there are mathematical truths not deducible from the axioms, and that therefore mathematics is NOT merely tautological. The empiricists so far have simply ignored Godel, because as soon as you grasp the implications of his proof you have to become a Platonist.
If matter has no truth value, and thoughts are identical to matter, then thoughts have no truth value. Am I wrong?
>But Godel proved that this is wrong, that there are mathematical truths not deducible from the axioms
Not deducible from a given set of axioms. There are different axiomatic groundings of mathematics. Godel's point is that there is not one axiomatic system which can "ground them all" so to speak.
Gödel was looking for a prime mover, so to speak. A truth of all truths.
I specified this already: "expressible within the language of a given formal system."
The point is that mathematical truths are not tautological because it is possible to express them within the language of a formal system from whose axioms it is impossible to deduce them. Yes, you can arbitrarily take them as axioms in a different formal system, but this is obviously unsatisfactory. Godel proved Platonism.
>it is possible to express them
What exactly do you mean by express? Prove?
I just mean write a statement within that formal language. For example “2+2=4” is a sentence which can be expressed in the language of the Peano Axioms (which define the natural numbers). Godel proved that there will always be TRUE sentences like this, expressible within the language of the Peano Axioms (or any other formal system) which will not be deducible from the formal system itself. This means mathematical truths transcend formal systems, and therefore the empiricists are wrong about maths being tautological.
For a longer explanation, the empiricists were faced with this problem: How is it that mathematical truths seem to possess this certainty about them, even though they are impossible to demonstrate through empirical methods? And how is it that we can discover new mathematical truths just by thinking about them, without the aid of empirical data?
The answer they gave was: Mathematics is just a matter of definition. Yes, it's true that 2+2=4 will be true for eternity, and yes, it's impossible to demonstrate it through empirical methods, but the reason for this is simply that 2+2=4 is just true BY DEFINITION. The reason we SEEM to "discover" mathematical truths just by thinking about them is because we are too dumb to see that they are tautologies. It takes us a bunch of intermediate steps before we get to the end of a proof, whereas a super-intellect would see that they are tautologies straight away. We have a bunch of axioms, and a bunch of rules of inference, and from these we deduce various theorems which are really just tautological to the axioms.
What Godel did is prove that, in fact, there are mathematical truths which are TRUE and which are expressible within the language of a particular formal system but which are not deducible from the axioms of that system. It means that mathematical truth transcends formal systems; that it's not just a matter of definition. It also means the human intellect is significantly more powerful than the formal systems we construct.
Unless the empiricists can explain away mathematics now in light of Godel's revelations, I think we must all become Platonists.
>What Godel did is prove that, in fact, there are mathematical truths which are TRUE and which are expressible within the language of a particular formal system but which are not deducible from the axioms of that system.
How can you say that they are true without reference to anything outside of themselves? If you refer to some kind of workability, it is you actually that has to account for your reliance on physical phenomena to explain your view. If it's just because it works within some system, as Gödel's study implies, then it goes against your idea that Gödel's proof has any platonic implications.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you doubting Godel's theorem? If so you'll have to give an argument for why it's wrong. Godel proved that there are well-formed sentences expressible within the language of a particular formal system which are unprovable from within the system. For every well-formed sentence in a formal language, either it or its negation is true (the law of excluded middle). Hence, there are true statements unprovable from the axioms of a particular systems, yet expressible within the language of that system. If you disagree with this you have to refute Godel's theorem.
>well-formed sentences expressible within the language of a particular formal system which are unprovable from within the system.
Just because they are expressible doesn't mean they are true in any sense. You're overreaching the philosophical importance of that proof. If well-formedness was the only criterion of truth, our current discussion would be absurd. Additionally, just because those well-formed sentences can't be proven from within the axioms, doesn't mean they make sense outside of the system ie. are independent of it, which any sort of platonism would seem to imply.
Yeah well-formedness doesn't imply truth but it implies that either that well-formed statement is true or its negation is true. It's not "true within the system" like you're claiming. The whole point is that it's NOT a theorem of the system, it's not able to be derived from the system. It's true independent of the system and yet the system can express it.
it's not a theorem of the system, but it's well-formed within the system, so its intelligibility and meaning are completely connected to the understanding of the system.
The Quine-Putnam Indispensability Argument is also a point for Platonism, at least mathematical Platonism.
If only one guy had found a way to reconcile apparent nominalism and realism in a single system and had a system for explaining emergence as well...
different anon here, just wanted to say my own perspective.
We don't know if thoughts are identical to matter. We need to be agnostic as regards to this metaphysical base. After we've ditched metaphysics, physicality is the only thing where we can refer successfully, even mathematics developed historically from surveying the land and agriculturality (geo+metry). All the categories mean nothing without referentiality, which is the role of physicalism, of course as its phenomenally presented to us. This offers us a solid way to accepting a scientific worldview, not so much any kind of metaphysically presumptuous theory of everything.
i meant different to the one you originally responded to, thats why i didnt directly reply to you
>physicality is the only thing where we can refer successfully,
We can't. This view has been discarded by physics ever since the overturning of Newton's metaphysics. There is no such thing as a "physical world" anymore, only operational equations. Unless you bring back metaphysics, it will stay this way forever, and physics will keep developing mathematically. But we will never have a "physical world." Nietzsche was entirely right; when you discard the "world of truth", you also discard the "world of appearances."
What do those operational equations refer to? FYI there's actually a lot of controversy about whether theoretical physics actually succeeds to refer, and whether it's actually bankrupt, see Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder. Just because you have a model that looks cool and whatnot does not mean you succeeded at referring. I talk about concepts like "beauty", "power", "justice" with apparent intuitiveness, and they never succeed at referring to anything save for an actual application situation.
>What do those operational equations refer to?
Probability distributions, Heisenberg's matrices for example. They actually scale up and apply at higher levels, they are just more cumbersome and far, far less intuitive (say goodbye to any "common sense" understanding of physics - atomistic metaphysics is conclusively refuted). Einsteinian physics (and all theories which resemble in any way the classical Newtonian models) are close to being thrown out entirely.
those theories still wouldn't work if they didn't refer to the particles and their potential states of being. those theories are still basically talking about behaviour of physicality and attempting to explain it, which allows them to have such a model. it's not as if, within science, it's a battle of opposing metaphysical interpretations, and now there's a new metaphysics around to replace atomism. Rather, it's a battle of models responding to materiality as their referent. Sure, the theoretical structures are huge, but the initial categorization and abstraction wouldn't make sense without an experienced material referent (and only reference matters, since the metaphysical nature of our minds is inaccessible to us): and it is really possible to reify these theories or get lose the point of them.
They can and do work without referring to any actual states of being, because we are incapable of knowing what a state of being is. As I just said, Newtonian axiology has already been discarded. Operational theorems based purely on measurements (not measurements of things, just measurements by certain devices configured in a certain manner) are the only relevant scientific "quanta." You have absolutely no justification for claiming that anything "physical" exists, or that there are any concrete facts of reality which are purely quantifiable. This sounds like a revelation, but it's not. The scientific mainstay (outside of lower level schools where the old, erroneous Newtonian intuitionism is still employed) does not consider Newtonian axiology valid at all. This is beyond the level of "models" as well, models ARE the operational equations that I just referred to. The point is that science no longer considers these models as being in any way related to an experience we can conceive of, they are entirely quantitative and devoid of intuitive content.
>Heisenberg's matrices consist of an array of numbers representing all the possible quantum states of particle
Thats what i mean by referring to states of materials. The whole theory doesn't work if it doesn't take some piece of materiality for its reference.
>You have absolutely no justification for claiming that anything "physical" exists, or that there are any concrete facts of reality which are purely quantifiable.
In that case you don't have any justification to claim any validity to a model like heisenber matrices which assumes the existence of a particle. You're demanding from me more than you're demanding from yourself.
>The whole theory doesn't work if it doesn't take some piece of materiality for its reference.
It does because there is no materiality, there is only measurer and measured, the latter always conforming to the limitations of the measurer (and by measurer I do not mean human per se, even just the mechanical instrument).
>In that case you don't have any justification to claim any validity to a model like heisenber matrices which assumes the existence of a particle
They don't assume the existence of a particle. That's the entire point of matrix mechanics - the fact that particles are problematic and only perceived as real from a human - which is to say simplified and ape-brained - perspective. The fundamental overturning in physics in the 20th century, at a level which is not merely outer and crust, is the clarification that there is no such thing as a particle, and that Newton's assumption of point-particles and point-masses, which was passed down all the way even into electromagnetism, was metaphysical, and therefore counter to scientific objectivity. The idea of a particle is an abstraction which has no basis in reality, therefore the models which try to take reality in some form as a referent cannot presuppose particles. Hence why particles, the very definition of which is supposed to include a definite position, no longer have definite positions. In every domain of physics there is the unobservable (Heisenberg's discovery), the goal of every particular field is merely to relegate that unobservable to a different schemata.
>It does because there is no materiality, there is only measurer and measured, the latter always conforming to the limitations of the measurer (and by measurer I do not mean human per se, even just the mechanical instrument).
As for the rest of the post, you can't draw metaphysical conclusions about the insufficiency of measurement. As Bell said
>but this does not bother us if we do not grant beable status to the wave function
So what you have is you start from a taken-to-be physical measured, you can't measure its locality after a certain point, but that doesn't really say anything about its existential status in itself even according to physicists. That could be seen as simply over-metaphysical interpretation of the results, depending on how you want to look at it.
>As for the rest of the post, you can't draw metaphysical conclusions about the insufficiency of measurement
No one said anything about the insufficiency of measurement, only that a measurer cannot measure its own capacity as a general measure. The measurement might well be perfectly accurate in terms of what it measures (we'll never really know). Basically what is essential is that measurements line up with other measurements according to a set of equations which correlate variables accordingly, however complex or simple this process might be.
>So what you have is you start from a taken-to-be physical measured
The taken-to-be-physical has been eliminated. There is only a measurement, which is a quantification, and then a relationship of this quantification algebraically with other measurements. The general form of the measurement, its general relation, is given under a variable or some other mathematical structure or template, whether they are matrices, vectors, or anything else. But because there is no quantifiable substance or atom, nor grounds for assuming these, it is impossible to refer mathematical quantifications to these types of referents. This is exactly what Newton proposed in his seminal works. In Newton's "experimental philosophy" (which was actually the origin of experimental science as we know it), it was assumed that we start from the "concrete given" or referent, which is the atom, substance or point-mass ("substance" being ruled out because they could never agree on what it meant exactly, and it didn't seem to be mathematically or mechanically valuable as a concept). This concept worked heuristically because the world we normally deal with is composed mostly of solids or substances which can be at least theoretically reduced to them in some sense. The problem arises upon further investigation, physically, of the premises thereby assumed, atomism, which is actually a method of relegating the unobservable as I just said in the previous post. Positing atomic substance is a way of actually concealing what is not known for the human mind to deal with things at a given level. There is no intuitive congruity between schemata, in fact there is not even a reason to assume there are atoms, substance, which means that it is feasible things are infinitely divisible and expandable in every dimension, scientifically speaking. Any assertion to the contrary is the hiding of unobservable (for example when modern physicists posit extra dimensions - this is a classic example of hiding the unobservable). It's not even a bad thing, it has to happen for us to make sense of things, but it's necessary to see what's happening here.
>you can't measure its locality after a certain point, but that doesn't really say anything about its existential status in itself even according to physicists
There is no existential status to begin with. It neither exists nor doesn't exist according to science, there are only corresponding measurements which are received. At best the only existential judgement would be that "this number is not its subjectively decided default value, therefore there is existence of something or non-existence of something here." In the case fo wave-particle duality, there is no hard distinction between waves and particles, or particles and energy for that matter. Even using the flawed intuitive understanding I've been railing against here repeatedly, waves do not suddenly become particles or vice versa. There is only a relativity between the status of particle and wave from the perspective of a given observer; a wave is more particle the greater its bandwidth, and less particle the less its bandwidth (ie the more it approximates a single band on a Fourier transform - yet there is nothing absolute, only relative to measurer and other measurements). These are only relative judgements. The only absolute judgement in any sense is whether there is or is not a measurement being recorded, which is still dependent upon what the "default" reading is taken to be.
>responding to materiality
See, they are not responding to materiality at all. There is NO materiality according to these models, because that would be an unfounded assumption.
I absolutely know that thoughts are not identical to matter. My argument demonstrates that it’s logically impossible to even suppose they are identical to matter, since to suppose anything as true requires you to presuppose that your thoughts possess truth values, and matter itself possesses no truth value. That’s what I’ve been arguing from the beginning. You say “we don’t know” but who’s “we”? The academic community? You scientism people always sound like cultists. Maybe YOU don’t know, but I know.
different anon here
>I absolutely know that thoughts are not identical to matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatoparaphrenia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia
You can also absolutely know that your limb does not belong to you. Your claims of knowing don't matter shit, since you don't know how you know.
Your premise "matter has no truth value" is begging the question. If thoughts are material, then clearly some matter "has truth value" as you put it.
We can theoretically correlate any emergent property to some brain state, however we can't correlate them with anything else, nor do we know how something immaterial could emerge "to" a physical mind. While matter doesn't have a truth value in itself, we can correlate estimations of truth values to physical phenomena, which allows to make a statement about them. To make a statement about them needs them both, but in this dynamic matter is the only "other" by which we can correlate our own intuitions, otherwise we're reduced to arguments about things with no referents ie. every adjective in existence. Reference presupposes the other, which presupposes the matter, but the explanation of what consciousness is fundamentally remains transcendental.
Scientific worldview should also not be conflated with the most crude form of metaphysical materialism imaginable. We shouldn't even discuss from a metaphysical POV cause nobody has anything better to offer on that front either.
progress is a lie, modernism is wrong, back to plebbit
>progress is a lie, modernism is wrong
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/04/07/after-yesterday-review-and-commentary-of-catherine-malabous-before-tomorrow-epigenesis-and-reality/
"I urge her [Catherine Malabou] to set aside the institutional defense mechanisms as I once did: charges of scientism or performative contradiction simply beg the question against the worst-case scenario. I invite her to come see what philosophy and the future look like after the death of transcendence, if only to understand the monstrosity of her discursive other. I challenge her to think post-human thoughts—to understand cognition *materially*, rather than what traditional authority has made of it. I implore her to see how the combination of science and capital is driving our native cognitive ecologies to extinction on an exponential curve.
And I encourage everyone to ask why, when it comes to the topic of meaning, we insist on believing in happy endings? We evolved to neglect our fundamental ecological nature, to strategically hallucinate spontaneities to better ignore the astronomical complexities beneath. *Subreption* has always been our mandatory baseline. As the cognitive ecologies underwriting those subreptive functions undergo ever more profound transformations, the more dysfunctional our ancestral baseline will become. With the dawning of /AI and enhancement*, the abstract problem of meaning has become a civilizational crisis."
God damn it Bakker, get back to work writing the No God! You're killing us.
Scientism is cringe but it's truly threads like these that show why nobody takes the humanities seriously.
Metaphysicsgays and religiogroids should just stick to self referential pointless word salad arguments. Their shit collapses hard when they start making claims about anything that is real and matters. Like that anon trying to criticize the scientific peer review process
You're assuming the anything science studies is composed of or reducible to some sort of substance called physical. This is begging the question.
What is physical and what results of science in the future could be used to counter the idea that this physical substance is ontologically basic?
If you don't have a clear definition of what physical things are, you get gored by the first horn of Hemple's Dilemma. If you don't have any criteria that could falsify physicalism as a "scientific" claim, you get gored by the other.
Note that MWI, Copenhagen, It From Bit, QBism, Bohmian Mechanics, etc. all make different statements about what physical stuff is but are indistinguishable from each other. By the same logic, many forms of idealism and information ontology or the idea that the universe is composed of mathematical entities (Tegmark) are indistinguishable from physicalism.
Physicalism is hardly even an ontology. It's the claim that accurate models for prediction are the things themselves, and the problem here is that the models change, making physicalism as a definition indefinite, while you still have the problem of the abstract models only existing as part of conscious experience, not as actual noumena. This is perhaps where the Hard Problem comes from. You're asking a set of abstractions, just one aspect of conscious experience, to explain the character of all conscious experience, that is, asking something that is ontologically derived from something else to explain the thing that is more ontologically primitive. This doesn't mean physicalism is wrong, it might just mean the Hard Problem cannot be solved to satisfaction.
>I can find my assumptions in something that shares my assumptions that means you can't point this out or criticise moronic mythology-tier shit
Atomic movements of matter do not possess truth values. Large-scale, gigantic bundles of matter possess truth values. What I mean by truth values: regardless of whether materialism is true or not, I would hold that truth values are not anything that exist in the world in their own right, but rather are properties of certain mental configurations exclusively, whether that mental configuration be physical or non-physical.
explanation:
Westudy different properties of matter based on its arrangements. There is a relevant level of description to this study (i said analysis in the other post but, same thing. Arrangements of matter produce vastly differently results based on their level of description. A relevant level of description describes a set of atoms of a certain size, kind, and distance. For instance, when we study ocean currents, we do not study the individual atoms, but the way entire bundles of these atoms move together as they are influenced by other large atom bundles. The reason for this is because talking about individual atoms is such an immense level of complexity that we will never in the history of humanity be able to describe it. So, we choose to generalize at the level of "ocean" and while we lose some accuracy of material description, we also gain the possibility of describing it at all.
Similarly, "thought" requires its own level of analysis. When I said "thought is way higher up the chain", this is what I meant. The reason for this is because thought is evidently not effectively described at the level of atoms moving. It's not effectively described at the level of chemical reactions either. While technically possible to describe, just like ocean currents, the brain is physically too complex for anyone to ever finish that kind of description.
So, when you describe "atoms" having a truth value, you're mixing up levels of description. A truth value is something that belongs exclusively to a higher level of description. This is exactly what you mean when you say atoms can't have truth values. But this is the same kind of statement as "atoms can't have gulf currents" or "atoms can't have tsunamis". You will never find a "tsunami" if you look at atoms. You will never find truth values if you look at atoms. BUT, however, if you zoom out to see an ocean, you can observe and study tsunamis.
If you zoom out to see human activity you will find truth values. Truth values are judgements which we apply to existing thoughts: Is this thought true or false? Or, more simply they are thoughts that relate to other thoughts. Thoughts result from a specific configuration of a brain. We know that if I hit you on the head with a hammer in the right places, you're going to stop having thoughts. We know if you take drugs/drink, your thoughts will be different. There are causal physical interactions existing between brains, matter and thought. The trouble currently is figuring out exactly how this happens.
Better than I could've said it
there are a multitude of studies showing that brain inhibition, in case of drugs, trauma etc actually causes a more disconnected or non local experience meaning that they aren't producing these effects by increased activity. As in, when brain activity lowers we have experiences that we can't explain by purely the increase of electrochemical activity
Every materialist or physical realist in this thread is conflating scientific achievement with materialism as an ontology, which is typical
>is now the prevailing ideology of the west
has been for 300 yrs
What is a natural law?
op here, i really kicked a hornet's nest huh
It's certainly been a good thread, thanks anon
Sorry you got so many replies and so few genuine recommendations OP. Here are some helpful ones, all related to the science of philosophy or "scientism."
>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)
The argument was revolutionary for its time but is so simple you can get the gist of it from an internet search honestly.
>Against Method (also: Farewell to Reason. Science in a Free Society)
All by Paul Feyerabend. Against Method is his seminal work. Kuhn can be described as a skeptic, but Feyerabend calls the entire scientific method and its method of progress bankrupt.
>The Counter-Revolution of Science (Friedrich Hayek)
Even Hayek's biggest worshippers don't know about this work. Would highly recommend. It's a collection of many essays and speeches, some of which can already be found online.
>Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology (J.P. Moreland)
Short, modern book. Concise, coherent, and convincing. You can pick this up with no background on the aforementioned titles.
>Black Swan/Antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Antifragile blackpilled me on the idea of experts in general. Taleb is a meme but that book changed my life. Just ignore his Twitter account and read him with an open mind. The black swan theory is used as an approach to criticize scientific progress but he uses the idea to apply to all facets of decision-making and planning in modern society.
Then there's the analytical school, which isn't my cup of tea. I've never read Karl Popper but "Logic of Scientific Discovery" and his theory of falsifiability are helpful if that's your thing I guess.
Good luck OP. Also picrel. Cheers.
>throwing in a christBlack person book among genuine classics
i see what you did there
I generally find the self assuredness of materialists annoying but the question begging of their opponents might be worse, or the consistent strawmans where all materialism is hardcore reductionist.