Deterministic physical theories, being time-invariant, render causality meaningless.
These methods are so powerful in condensed matter physics that entirely new states of matter have been predicted just from writing down an ingenious equation that either preserves or violates a symmetry. — Uber
They are physical mental states. — Uber
And for at least two connected reasons:Nope, you only need initial conditions, which can be given at any time. Differential equations are by their very nature time-symmetric, deterministic.
Since the Nature of the mind and spirit, as we learn, is basically a part of a human being - then return
The name of harmony to the musicians.
Now pay attention here:
I tell you mind and spirit are bound up with one another,
And that together they combine to form a single nature.
All in the void beneath our feet lies open to our sight,
Such revelations and I'm seized by a divine delight,
I shiver, for due to your power, Nature everywhere
In every part lies open; all her secrets are laid bare.
If so, mental would be a type of physical (just as inorganic and organic). I don't have a problem with that in principle. But can science demonstrate that nothing except physical things exist, or that nothing is real?It's all physical. — Uber
Perhaps, but I don't think that a physical-mental (i.e., physical and mental) state is a contradiction in terms. The above list of conditions are in fact mind-body states.A ‘physical mental state’ is a contradiction in terms. — Wayfarer
Sure. And I'm very much interested in examining the Free-Energy Principle mentioned by Wellwisher and yourself in the New Dualism thread. But disappointed to read that it is "based upon Helmholtz's observations on unconscious inference". Because, according to Bennett & Hacker, that is a "misconception of perceptions as conclusions of inferences".Some fundamental work has already been done along these lines by neuroscientists like Anil Seth, Karl Friston, and Giulio Tononi, among many others. — Uber
We could indeed never show why wanting peanuts is followed by trying to get peanuts, but we could show why this behavior follows [some state] Px; and this contingent nomological regularity would be what underlies our present use of the concept "wanting peanuts."
By "them" do you mean logic and mathematics themselves of their predictive capacties?I contend that the predictive capacities of logic and math are entirely explainable by seeing them as emergent properties of human cognition.
It lives on under other guises - most attempts to refute philosophical arguments end up being refuted themselves.I also don't know if you are aware that this argument has been mercilessly refuted by now,
Who refuted it? I know Anscombe went to town on the first version of the argument Lewis presented, but Lewis revised the argument in light of her criticisms. Peter van Inwagen had a crack at the second formulation a few years ago, and as far as I remember claims that Lewis didn't do enough to establish the idea that mechanistic explanations for beliefs exclude rational explanations for them, but I'd be astonished if his was the last word on the subject.I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the canonical versions of the argument from reason, as proposed by Lewis, have been completely refuted
David Johnson had a great takedown:
Naturalism Undefeated: A Refutation of the Argument from Reason — Uber
Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.
….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too.
Is a physical mental state a contradiction? To truly argue that, you would need to provide your understanding of the word "physical." Have you automatically defined "physical" as everything that exists outside the mind or the brain? — Uber
I think a combination of sound theoretical arguments and the "weight of the empirical evidence" is good enough for believing that naturalistic explanations are sufficient to describe what we see, notice, and measure. — Uber
On the other hand, metaphysics has often flirted with becoming totally detached from empirical reality, depending on who was using it. And that's when you start getting things like angels, Platonic realms, and Jedis. — Uber
Here is good old Lucretius in the Nature of Things: — Uber
I'm probably more sympathetic to your position than I am to Uber's - the psychologism that seems to be implied by it gives me pause for one thing - but this remark of yours bothers me a little. Why do you have to operate outside of reason in order to show that reason is amenable to a naturalistic treatment? There seems to be no obvious contradiction in supposing that we can use the tools of reason to investigate what reason is and how it surfaced. I've not seen an argument to say that the only approach to understanding reason is the Kantian one of attempting to delimit its bounds. You might be inclined to think that naturalists are trying to go (surreptitiously) transcendental with reason, but that would take some serious argument.To provide a completely objective and indeed physical account of the operations of reason, you would have to treat reason from a point that is outside of it.
It is the fact that the same information/proposition/idea can be represented in any number of languages or physical media. I can write out the recipe for chocolate cake, or the specifications for building a box-girder bridge, in any number of languages or codes.
So, the material representation is completely different, but the information is the same. So how can the information be the same as the material representation?...This is where I tend towards dualism. — Wayfarer
This is where I tend towards dualism. But the crucial caveat is, that mind is *not* a 'substance' in the sense that it is now universally misunderstood. It never appears as an object, but is always that to which everything appears. The profound error of modern philosophy is to reify or objectify mind and then ask what kind of thing it could be. It is simply 'that which grasps meaning', and in that sense the ground of meaning itself. — Wayfarer
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