Natural laws are ways to think about phenomena we observe.

The world is too big a place, with multiple conflicting interests. — S

The main thing we'd need to get over is people wanting to control others. We'd need people to be comfortable with letter others do their own (consensual) things

How can you claim to be a physicalist and not be a realist on natural laws? — Jamesk

What do you see as the conflict there? It's difficult to explain to you without having some idea of what you'd believe to be the conflict.

Then you weren't addressing what I asked you to address and you instead wanted to change the topic to something you wanted to talk about instead.

You had said that the idea of physicalism amounting to a "radical, brute separation of all things from one another" was a logical conclusion. I asked you to explain the logic--to show your work basically.

Why change the topic to natural laws? (I'm not a realist on natural laws, by the way.)

What was your question? Was it "Is a letter some ink or a brain state?" If so, it depends on the context. it can be both. Sometimes it's just one or the other. (And of course, sometimes it's things other than ink, too.)

So all I ever need to do with you in order to present an argument is disagree with you? Sweet.

Too bad I didn't have you as a professor.

An idea as such can hardly be matter as it is an idea. — Heiko

Why can't we just go, "An idea as such can hardly not be matter because ideas are matter"?

Haha . . . we have enough problems without people pretending to be morons.

What in the world would be the definition of "argument" you'd be using? "Saying something contrary to"?

Philosophy isn't about pretending to be ignorant. You don't do good work in philosophy by feigning ignorance, or feigning an inability to reason, etc.

The short bus is here to pick you all up.

Theories and ideas are not. That is the point of the argument — Wayfarer

That's your thesis. And you're telling me it as if it's some revelation, as if I either pay as little attention to what you say as you pay to what I say, or as if I'm also going to pretend that I have no memory, that my brain is a sieve.

I know you're not a physicalist. I am a physicalist, and presumably you know this. Repeating that you're not a physicalist isn't an argument against physicalism.

So you are saying that objects are specific combinations of the components of matter? — Jamesk

Well, objects are matter, but at least unless they're subatomic particles, they have "parts," if that's all you're basically saying there.

Ok I have a problem here, firstly I don't understand what a particular subset of brain structure means. — Jamesk

Weird,

So here's a structure of marks:

//[[]]\\

Here's a subset of that structure:

[]

Here's another subset:

]\

Secondly Brains and trees are largely made of water, so the must more shared matter between brains and trees than distinct matter. — Jamesk

What the heck would it matter if there is more of the same sorts of molecules, etc. than different? How would that in any way be relevant to anything I'd said?

Also these processes you talk of bother me, surely a the matter in a brain (a thinking substance) is undergoing more processes than the matter in a non-thinking one? — Jamesk

Again, what would a quantification matter there? Why would we be quantifying whether there are more mental than non-mental brain processes?

Trees are living and so perhaps can be seen as pseudo thinking — Jamesk

"Living" doesn't at all seem to be sufficient for "thinking."

whereas once fully grown brains are just slowly decaying organic material. — Jamesk

Brains don't continue to increase in terms of extensional boundaries--your head doesn't keep getting bigger, obviously, but brains certainly keep developing as long as you're alive.

Re the "principle of charity," what would you say is the explanation re it seeming like you're trolling, or like you maybe never really had any science education?

but what is a brain about? — Jamesk

For example, did you learn nothing about brains in biology? I can give you some basic info or direct you to some online resources, but what this seems like to me is you trying to argue in kind of a cocky way from a position of near-complete science illiteracy.

You're not using "radical, brute separation of all things from one another" to simply refer to the idea of there not being literal physical laws that obtain everywhere, are you?

If it's a logical conclusion, then there's a chain of logical inferences, logical implication for it, right? Otherwise, what is the word "logic" referring to?

Can you show your work re the claim that that is the logical conclusion?

So it just doesn't need any explaining then?

The problem is that I don't know if it coheres very well with anyone's view about physical stuff.

A universal mental substance would be mind; which is the very principal of deep and universal interconnection. — Janus

Why is the "mind" alternative simply left unexplained?

The idea of the physical is, among other things, the idea of radical, brute separation of all things from one another, whereas the idea of the mental is the idea of the deep inherent interconnection of all things — Janus

Where are you getting that idea from?

Please remember the principle of charity, it is far more likely that either Metaphysician is failing to explain the point or that you are failing to understand it than Metaphysician being insane. — Jamesk

What are you basing this likelihood on?

By the way, if that's the problem, then what he and other folks in the same boat need to dos pause for a moment, step back, take a breath, drop the arrogance, and try tackling much smaller, simpler bits at a time.

Can you please tell me what is matter?Then tell me what is a tree and then what is a mind.

If we can get these definitions accomplished we might be able to make some progress. — Jamesk

Matter--substances consisting of subatomic particles, which combine to make atoms, which combine to make molecules, etc. in various structures of gases, liquids, solids, plasmas, and Bose-Einstein condensates. Matter has mass, spatial extension, charge, etc. Matter is always engaged in some processes, too, some changing relations with respect to other matter.

Trees are particular combinations of molecules, undergoing particular processes. Hence, trees are matter.

Mind is particular subsets of brain structure and function. Brains, of course, are composed of particular molecules undergoing particular processes, too--many different materials than trees, but materials nonetheless.

Suppose you have a book of gibberish that could be a possible language if you had an interpretive structure (a decryption key). If the key no longer exists to decode information (the language) then the information no longer exists. Information stands in relation to the decryption key in the same way as the world stands in relation to the mind. — Nils Loc

But idealists are saying that the book of gibberish IS itself the decryption key, that it was essentially just an illusion that it was something else; it's not something different than the decryption key.

Sure, but why not just systematically tackle one thing at a time? I don't know how many pages you can feasibly do in a day, but even if it's just 5, say, you'd get through all of Philosophical Investigations in less than a month, and then all of the World as Will and Representation in less than two months . . . you could tackle 6-8 of the major philosophy texts per year at least. If you could do 10 pages per day, you could double that. You just would need to make a commitment to sit down every day and read however many pages, concentrating on one thing at a time until you finish it.

Political and sexual deviants like myself tend to associate with other political and sexual deviants. This can lead to a serious misapprehension about what the masses are thinking. — Bitter Crank

That's a good point. My perspective is pretty skewed because I was born in 1962, and I have very libertarian/libertine/hippieish parents who treated me like an equal almost immediately, plus my musical skills catapulted me into an (again libertine) adult world when I was pretty young, too--I was making money from music by the mid 1970s, So it seemed to me like the whole world was in the midst of a major change.

I progress at a slow pace. I'm a slug when it comes to reading. — Wallows

Good reason to start 20 different reading groups at the same time.

You never did ‘explain your view’ because it’s self-contradictory and it can’t be explained, as it desn’t make sense. — Wayfarer

First off, this means that you weren't really paying attention. All you'd have to do is repeat back what I said, even if you think it's contradictory or doesn't make sense.

You asked about weight. So I answered about weight. It doesn't really make sense to talk about a theory's weight, just like it doesn't really make sense to talk about the wind's weight, or it wouldn't make sense to talk about the weight of your circulation. That doesn't imply that the wind or your circulation aren't physical.

The theory of relativity obviously has physical attributes. It's a set of dynamic states in any number of brains. Those have physical attributes.

And nothing is the same for multiple observers.

Simply ignoring what I say isn't actually an argument against it, even though you'll act like it is, and I'm sure we'll go through more or less this same exchange many times again in the future.

T-shirts are as categorically abstract as clothes, as trees are to matter when talking about abstracting properties from sense experience. We experience none as they truly are a part from mind, so their existence depends upon mind (any mind, including a mind that might transcend conventional mind, like a network of minds as mind). They aren't really anything besides what we perceive them to be, which includes the fundamentally or functionally pragmatic imposed categories of experience. — Nils Loc

It might be worth talking to someone who isn't as trollish, confused or insane as Metaphysician Undercover. What I said above about this was:

"How do we get to the point of saying that matter is an idea?

"You know, so phenomenally, there's a tree say (not as a 'tree'--that is, the concept, etc.--but 'that thing'--I have to call it something to type this), and then how do we go from that to saying that the phenomenal tree is an idea?"

But music is not the thing you are sensing, — Metaphysician Undercover

lol. You are really off your rocker.

Shouldn't we maybe do less than 20 books at a time?

Trees are not matter though, they are trees. You violate the law of identity if you say trees are matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do we violate the law of identity when we say that the song "Kashmir" is music?

"You can sense a song, you can't sense music" "What's the difference?" "You can sense the existence of a song, you can't sense the existence of music. That's the difference."

Sure.

The question might then become why we ever looked inside for meaning? — sign

If you don't look inside then you have to claim things such as the sentence I quoted above literally contain or are doing meaning. How could that be, though? Just what would meaning amount to re a set of pixel activations, say? Just how would pixels refer to anything?

Derrida falls squarely within the movement which regards the role of utterances in actual discourse as the essence of language and meaning, — intro

What were some of the alternatives to that?

"You can sense trees but not matter. Trees and matter are different. What's the difference? You can sense (the existence of) one but not the other."

The problems with that argument should be pretty obvious to you.

If trees are matter, then you sense matter all the time, right? (Well, assuming you often encounter trees.)

First, memories do not refer to anything if they're not present-to-mind.

When they're present-to-mind, they only refer to a "where" when the individual in question takes some part of the memory, or the whole thing, to "point to" a location.

A tree is something you can sense while matter is not only if it's the case that there's a difference between the tree and matter. I'm asking what that difference is. If you answer that the difference is that you can sense one and not the other it's circular.

Counter: You can never know how much there will be, why take the chance? — schopenhauer1

I don't think that's true though. The only reason to think that would be to think there's a good reason to believe that future people will be radically different than present people, but there's no good reason to believe that.

Also, what's the point of even causing a little harm to someone who doesn't need it? What even constitutes little harm? Maybe you are the golden god and don't go through annoyances large and small throughout the day, but even minor annoyances don't need to be created for someone. — schopenhauer1

That's the (A) stance.

Unless you're saying something about the calling per se, that just restates that you think there's a difference between trees and matter. It doesn't specify what the difference is.

(And even if you were saying something about calling, would there be no difference if I did call a tree "matter"?)