This is the second time in my life that I've seen someone suggest materialists don't believe in energy lmao. How is that supposed to work? All materialists believe that matter moves around, right? And matter requires energy to move and interact and change directions and so forth, right?
I've never met a materialist who doesn't believe in energy. I have, however, met non-materialists who say materialists believe that. THAT'S what's truly mind-blowing. — flannel jesus
The earth, in a very real sense, is our mother. We are born from this mother, from Gaia; we are extensions of the earth and the cosmos of which it is a part. This means that our conceptualizing and our spirituality also extend from the spiritual dimension of the cosmos and the earth. — Thomas Berry
NB: ... "yinyang" ... "atoms swirling swerving in the void" ... "E=mc²" ... "fermions & bosons", wtf are woo-ologists talking about? :sweat: — 180 Proof
"Everything" which causes changes is material, ergo "energy" is material, no? — 180 Proof
https://grove.ccsd59.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2015/03/1.-Matter-Vs.-Energy-.pdfWhat are the differences between mater and energy?
MATTER
• Matter has mass.
• Matter takes up space (called volume).
Thus, matter is anything that has mass and takes up space.
ENERGY
• Energy is not like matter.
• Energy does not have mass.
• Energy does not take up space.
• Energy MOVES matter.
Therefore, energy is the ability to make things move.
No matter does not move around. — Athena
I prefer more descriptive terms like e.g. immaterial or disembodied or nonphysical or spiritual or magical ... to the umbrella term "supernatural".
"Everything" which causes changes is material, ergo "energy" is material, no?
The question of: "can what is not there be causally important," or can "properties that a system lacks," be essential for explaining phenomena. The range of possibilities seems essential for explaining things like the heat carrying capabilities of metals, or life, even though this range is not actual. — Count Timothy von Icarus
"Everything" which causes changes is material, ergo "energy" is material, no? — 180 Proof
It depends on how you define emergence I suppose. I do not mean classical emergence, where combinations of different substances somehow generate new terms that did not exist before. I think Jaegeon Kim dealt classic, substance based emergence a virtual death blow.
Prehaps emergence in the "more is different," sense you see at work in cellular automata. But then it's not really clear to me if this warrants the name emergence, or if it just obviates the idea of emergence, consigning it to the dust bin of history. — Count Timothy von Icarus
After all, it doesn't make sense to think of computations as being "composed of" smaller computations. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Matter constantly changes but the leaves do so much faster than rocks and neither the leaf nor a stone has the power of moving. So exactly how do you understand the energy of which you speak? — Athena
Silly projection.Good reasoning requires following some laws of logic and your post is not a good example of that. — Athena
Fermions and bosons. Nothing 'immaterial'. :roll:What are the differences between ma[tt]er and energy? — Athena
:fire: Yes! Also sounds Democritean-Epicurean (& Lucretian).Sounds rather Stoic and, therefore, preferable as such things go, to me at least. All that acts or can be acted upon are "bodies" and therefore part of Nature, or the Universe. There are different kinds of bodies, though. — Ciceronianus
How can "a beyond" the here and now provide "something better" to us within the here and now?
As a non-"materialist", what is it (ontically? epistemically?) about the material that you oppose?
What do you mean by "reality"? — 180 Proof
All the sources of knowledge we have to choose from make living a wonderful thing. It appears you want to enjoy it all as I do. — Athena
There are obviously other aspects of our existence that transcend the physical. But none of which are unscientific. — Bret Bernhoft
For example, when two (or more) people meet, their heart rhythms and brainwaves entrain with each other. These are energetic experiences that cannot be accounted for simply by assuming everything is materialistic. — Bret Bernhoft
Really? Why not? — flannel jesus
In other words, you believe that reality is also "immaterial"? If so, how does the immaterial affect the material and vice versa?What I oppose about materialism is that it is exclusively the domain of what is real; of reality. — Bret Bernhoft
Give a couple of examples of how "we encounter and ... verify or measure" the immaterial. Thanks, Bret.By "reality" I mean that which we encounter and can verify or measure.
House of Cards?
The most influential critiques of ontological emergence theories target these notions of downward causality and the role that the emergent whole plays with respect to its parts. To the extent that the emergence of a supposedly novel higher - level phenomenon is thought to exert causal influence on the component processes that gave rise to it, we might worry that we risk double - counting the same causal influence, or even falling into a vicious regress error — with properties of parts explaining properties of wholes explaining properties of parts. Probably the most devastating critique of the emergentist enterprise explores these logical problems. This critique was provided by the contemporary American philosopher Jaegwon Kim in a series of articles and monographs in the 1980s and 1990s, and is often considered to be a refutation of ontological (or strong) emergence theories in general, that is, theories that argue that the causal properties of higher - order phenomena cannot be attributed to lower - level components and their interactions. However, as Kim himself points out, it is rather only a challenge to emergence theories that are based on the particular metaphysical assumptions of substance metaphysics (roughly, that the properties of things inhere in their material constitution), and as such it forces us to find another footing for a coherent conception of emergence.
The critique is subtle and complicated, and I would agree that it is devastating for the conception of emergence that it targets. It can be simplified and boiled down to something like this: Assuming that we live in a world without magic (i.e., the causal closure principle, discussed in chapter 1), and that all composite entities like organisms are made of simpler components without residue, down to some ultimate elementary particles, and assuming that physical interactions ultimately require that these constituents and their causal powers (i.e., physical properties) are the necessary substrate for any physical interaction, then whatever causal powers we ascribe to higher - order composite entities must ultimately be realized by these most basic physical interactions. If this is true, then to claim that the cause of some state or event arises at an emergent higher - order level is redundant. If all higher - order causal interactions are between objects constituted by relationships among these ultimate building blocks of matter, then assigning causal power to various higher - order relations is to do redundant bookkeeping. It’s all just quarks and gluons — or pick your favorite ultimate smallest unit — and everything else is a gloss or descriptive simplification of what goes on at that level. As Jerry Fodor describes it, Kim’s challenge to emergentists is: “why is there anything except physics?” 16
The concept at the center of this critique has been a core issue for emergentism since the British emergentists’ first efforts to precisely articulate it. This is the concept of supervenience...
Effectively, Kim’s critique utilizes one of the principal guidelines for mereological analysis: defining parts and wholes in such a way as to exclude the possibility of double - counting. Carefully mapping all causal powers to distinctive non - overlapping parts of things leaves no room to find them uniquely emergent in aggregates of these parts, no matter how they are organized...
Terrance Deacon - Incomplete Nature
This is not meant to suggest that we should appeal to quantum strangeness in order to explain emergent properties, nor would I suggest that we draw quantum implications for processes at human scales. However, it does reflect a problem with simple mereological accounts of matter and causality that is relevant to the problem of emergence.
A straightforward framing of this challenge to a mereological conception of emergence is provided by the cognitive scientist and philosopher Mark Bickhard. His response to this critique of emergence is that the substance metaphysics assumption requires that at base, “particles participate in organization, but do not themselves have organization.” But, he argues, point particles without organization do not exist (and in any case would lead to other absurd consequences) because real particles are the somewhat indeterminate loci of inherently oscillatory quantum fields. These are irreducibly processlike and thus are by definition organized. But if process organization is the irreducible source of the causal properties at this level, then it “cannot be delegitimated as a potential locus of causal power without eliminating causality from the world.” 20 It follows that if the organization of a process is the fundamental source of its causal power, then fundamental reorganizations of process, at whatever level this occurs, should be associated with a reorganization of causal power as well.
Terrance Deacon - Incomplete Nature
Materialists do not see reality like this...
The earth, in a very real sense, is our mother. We are born from this mother, from Gaia; we are extensions of the earth and the cosmos of which it is a part. This means that our conceptualizing and our spirituality also extend from the spiritual dimension of the cosmos and the earth.
— Thomas Berry — Athena
This thread seems to have diverged into a debate on Physics (energy, matter) instead of Metaphysics (abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space). But the OP seems to be implying a metaphysical (philosophical) distinction : Theism postulates non-physical (metaphysical) causes, while Materialism denies anything non-physical. Yet even Materialists must accept the existence of causal Energy, even though scientists don't know what it is (ontology) -- only what it does (epistemology)*1.Energy being physical is fairly well established. If you want to get into a more wonky question there is the matter of it information is physical (Landauer's Principle) and there remains some hot debate on that.
But, if information because essential for explaining cause in a way that people do not think is somehow an epistemic artifact, I imagine we'd see widespread acceptance of information as physical (it's already a majority opinion I would think). — Count Timothy von Icarus
Good Point! For all practical purposes, and within the here & now world, I am essentially an Atheist, but I prefer the more modest & philosophical label Agnostic. Even so, the physicalistic/materialistic Big Bang theory, was formulated with the unprovable assumption (axiom) that Energy & Natural Laws pre-existed the Bang.I am not sure but I think the big divide between materials and the spiritualist is disagreement about the source of the energy that makes life possible. — Athena
Well, I find Spinoza's non-transcendent substance, or natura naturans, much more parsimonious and elegant (as do e.g. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche ... Einstein, Bohm, Wheeler, Everett ... David Deutsch, Seth Lloyd et al). Btw, Epicureans & Stoics are also immanentists, to wit: "the source of energy" is existence itself (à la the vacuum); thus, "creationism" by any other name, whether biblical or onto-theological – multiplying (transcendent) entities – is both philosophically and scientifically unnecessary. :smirk:I don't imagine the origin of the world as a biblical Genesis, but Plato/Aristotle's abstract notion of LOGOS & Prime Mover suits me for philosophical purposes. — Gnomon
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