The relationship between science and materialism

LW said:
I am attacking your reasoning. To put it more precisely, your statement:

You have not ruled out the possibility that P1 is physical but different from P2.
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You haven't defined "physical". If you define "physical" as "everything which exists" then no proof against materialism could possibly worked, because you have defined it to be true.

But what you are doing in the above is assuming that physicalism is false and then proving it false based on that assumption.
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NO I DID NOT. That is what YOU are doing, except in reverse. I assumed NOTHING. I started from a set of definitions agreed upon by Paul and then tried to define "physical" in terms of those definitions.

I did not assume that physicalism is true. I did not assume it is false.

YOU, on the other hand, have EXPLICITLY assumed that physicalism is true in order to deny the proof. I am innocent of what you are accusing me of. YOU are guilty of what you are accusing me of. You are assuming your conclusion. I am not.

REPEAT OF NOTE:


NOTE: If you want to challenge this proof then you must challenge either the premises, the definitions or the reasoning. What you must not do is make some other sort of statement, which depends on an assumption that physicalism is true (thus assuming the proof fails before examining it), and claim that this means the proof is false. Any responses to this proof which take this form will be rejected on the grounds they they have nothing to do with the proof.


You assume that if an object and an experience of an object are different, then they are so completely different that have to belong to completely separate realities.
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I assumed no such thing.

No. What I did was to show that there was one line of reasoning that you didn't address in your proof.
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Oh yes I did. I posted it in RED so nobody could miss it.

It is an invalid line of reasoning because it simply assumes that physicalism is true. Since this is a thread which accuses of materialists of treating materialism like a religion, you have just demonstrated that the accusation is justified. The "one line of reasoning" you say I missed is the one which does not question materialism at all, but simply defines it to be true and rejects any evidence or argument that contradicts it. Which is what the physicalists do all the time, but cannot see they do it, even though they can see it perfectly clearly when Christians do precisely the same thing.


If you want your proof to be waterproof, you have to address it.
Unfortunately, I can't see any way to do it except that by assuming that P1 and P2 must necessarily be different, but feel free to prove me wrong by doing it.
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I did not ASSUME that P1 and P2 are different. I very carefully made sure that Paul had agreed this was the case, and wasn't going to backtrack when the proof was delivered. The proof was delivered. He backtracked.

I am not "assuming" they are different. They ARE different. Think about it.
 
Geoff said:
Paul, This is what physicalism is. You are DEAD RIGHT. It's patently absurd.
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No Geoff, the definition is patently absurd. What does it mean to say that matter is the only reality? Isn't energy reality, too?

Is this the definition you are going to go for? How are you going to defend it from my proof?
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Geoff, buddy, pal, I'm not going for any definition of physicalism. You are the one who insisted on using it before we defined it. I do not know what the definition is.

This thread has gone to hell because you jumped the gun. Back up to post #211 and let's keep trying to define our terms.

~~ Paul
 
Geoff said:
I did not ASSUME that P1 and P2 are different. I very carefully made sure that Paul had agreed this was the case, and wasn't going to backtrack when the proof was delivered. The proof was delivered. He backtracked.
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No, I did not. You went so farking fast that you couldn't keep track of the conversation.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
No, I was saying that we hadn't agreed on what physical meant.

~~ Paul
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That's because you couldn't define it! And the reason you couldn't define it is part of the proof. Paul, at no point in the proof do I define what "physical" means. Instead, I try every possible way of defining it, and all of them fail. So, no, we never agreed on the meaning of physical. But that makes no difference to the proof because the proof works against all of them.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
No Geoff, the definition is patently absurd. What does it mean to say that matter is the only reality? Isn't energy reality, too?
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Energy is included within the conception of physical. I don't see why this is relevant.

Geoff, buddy, pal, I'm not going for any definition of physicalism.
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Then how do you except me to disprove it?

Here I stand, loaded rifle at the ready. All I want is a stable target. You keep swiping it away at the last moment. I feel like f***ing Charlie Brown....

http://www.popular.com.sg/images/product/book/42466.jpg

You are the one who insisted on using it before we defined it. I do not know what the definition is.

This thread has gone to hell because you jumped the gun. Back up to post #211 and let's keep trying to define our terms.

~~ Paul
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Fine. Go back and try to fix your definitions. It won't make any difference. I'm going to the pub. :(
 
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This is absurd.

You are taking advantage of some flawed definitions of P1 and P2, and comparing two different things. That´s why you can trash physicalism.

The contention of physicalims is that P1 and P2 are the same. But with those definitions, you are just making it impossible to prove that this is true.
 
Mary Dennett said:
This is absurd.

You are taking advantage of some flawed definitions of P1 and P2, and comparing two different things. That´s why you can trash physicalism.

The contention of physicalims is that P1 and P2 are the same. But with those definitions, you are just making it impossible to prove that this is true.
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Hello Q......., sorry, Mary. ;)

The definitions of P1 and P2 came straight from Paul, so I couldn't be accused of rigging them. What's wrong with them?

Geoff
 
Geoff said:
Energy is included within the conception of physical. I don't see why this is relevant.
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The definition I called absurd is:

physicalism ((philosophy) the philosophical theory that matter is the only reality)

No mention of physical at all. Clearly matter is not the only "reality."

Here I stand, loaded rifle at the ready. All I want is a stable target. You keep swiping it away at the last moment. I feel like f***ing Charlie Brown....
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I don't expect you to disprove "physicalism." I expect you to disprove something that you carefully define, which forces us to accept neutral monism. I don't give a crap about physicalism, especially since I don't know what it is.

~~ Paul
 
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Geoff said:
The definitions of P1 and P2 came straight from Paul, so I couldn't be accused of rigging them. What's wrong with them?
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Say what? I never defined anything called "P1" and "P2." I read your definitions and agreed they were not the same thing. Then I warned everyone to make no assumptions about whether they were the same type of thing.

~~ Paul
 
JustGeoff said:
Hello Q......., sorry, Mary.
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Are you alright? :rolleyes:


JustGeoff said:
The definitions of P1 and P2 came straight from Paul, so I couldn't be accused of rigging them. What's wrong with them?
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First, Paul does not represent physicalists.

Second, very subtly you are forcing people to accept the existence of "inherently subjective experiences", when this is precisely the moot point. This is an assertion that should be put to the test IN THE FIRST PLACE, instead of taking it as an assumption in P1.
 
(E) Physical is both (P1 and P2):

This is just plain incoherent. We’ve already agreed that this isn’t a valid option.
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I think you have got it wrong, Geof. We have agreed that our perception of a chair is not a chair. We have not, however, agreed that our perception of a chair is not firing neurons in a brain. I am challenging your terms for P1 and P2.

I am no philosopher, but I think you may be committing a straw man.

"The perception of a chair != a chair, therefor P1 != P2, therefor perception of a chair != to neurons firing in a brain"

EDIT: Fixed quotation tags
 
OK.

Let's go back to before I provided the proof. My proof wasn't off-the-shelf. I waited for Paul to provide some definitions and made a proof up ad-hoc given the definitions he gave me. He failed to define "physical" so the proof ended up using the definitions he did give me to prove it wasn't possible to coherently define "physical" in those terms.

SO let's rewind.

Anyone want to provide me with a coherent set of definitions for:

Objective
Subjective
Physical
Mental
1st-person
3rd-person
Qualia

?

Give me a coherent set of definitions and I will make up another proof againt physicalism, based on those definitions.

There is ONE rule only: You not allowed define physicalism to be true. If you do that then you are committing the crime that scientific materialism is accused of in the opening post of this thread: you have turned materialism into your own version of the Bible; defined to be true.

:)

Geoff
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
The definition I called absurd is:

physicalism ((philosophy) the philosophical theory that matter is the only reality)

No mention of physical at all. Clearly matter is not the only "reality."
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Well, it's pretty clear to me. But there's no shortage of people who think that matter is only the reality. Well - matter and the rest of the entities of physics. I don't really understand why there is such a big deal about the difference between physicalism and materialism. "Physicalism" is just a name for post-billiard-ball physics. The only part of this that might legitimately transcend both "material" and "physical" is QM, but we're not going to resolve anything by discussing QM because nobody can agree what it means and the problems are all to do with subjective and objective!

I don't expect you to disprove "physicalism." I expect you to disprove something that you carefully define, which forces us to accept neutral monism.
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I can't do that. From my point of view, all versions of physicalism are incoherent except for eliminativism. Until YOU define your terms, I can't know which version of physicalism I am supposed to be debunking. There is no point in ME defining the terms. You'll either reject them, or say you don't understand them. I need terms you both accept and understand, otherwise you won't accept the proof. Hence, you have to supply them.
 
Hello Jeremy

Jeremy said:
I think you have got it wrong, Geof. We have agreed that our perception of a chair is not a chair.
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Good. P1 != P2.

We have not, however, agreed that our perception of a chair is not firing neurons in a brain. I am challenging your terms for P1 and P2.
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Would you like to offer me some alternative definitions?

Forget the neurons for a moment. Right now what I need is some sort of word to attach to P1 and P2.

"Brain processes" is a tricky one, which is why I have avoided it. For the moment, I am interested in the perceptions of a chair, the chair itself and how this relates to the terms "subjective" and "objective". After we have those definitions agreed we can go back and think what brain processes might be.

If it helps, we have three (not two) things that might be confused:

1) The external (to mind) thing which causes perceptions of a chair (a real chair?)

2) The experience of seeing a chair

3) The brain process that sits between them

Also, if it helps, we might want to talk about distal and proximal causes. There is a causal sequence:

"Real external chair-thing" ----> Brain process ----> subjective experience of a chair

There seem to be two "causes" of the subjective experience. The "real external chair-thing" is called the "distal cause" (because it's distant) and the brain process is called the "proximal cause" (because it's the last link in the chain).
 
Mary Dennett said:
Are you alright? :rolleyes:
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I am just hunky dory. How are you "Mary Dennett"? :D

First, Paul does not represent physicalists.
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No, he doesn't. But he doesn't want to accept physicalism can be shown to be wrong, either. Paul is a weird one. Somewhere deep down, it is obvious he doesn't believe that physicalism is true, but he doesn't want this to be shown logically, and he doesn't like any of the alternatives. That's how it looks to me anyway. Whatever, this certainly isn't a description of a typical physicalist.

Second, very subtly you are forcing people to accept the existence of "inherently subjective experiences", when this is precisely the moot point.
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There wasn't anything subtle about. I just asked them if there were things which existed which are inherently subjective in nature. I think there are. Do you?
 
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