So after the Big Bang, the bath of radiation cools enough and massive, slower than light, particles emerge. A lucky asymmetry means that nearly all of the negative anti-protons have gone, likewise nearll all of the positive anti-electrons. That lets you have some persistent basic ingredients - oppositely charged electrons and protons. From there, you can get stellar physics and planetary chemisty.
So the emergence of complex materiality - stuff with properties - is no big deal at all. What is a big deal is getting behind that to the story of how anything could emerge to start the story in the first place. — apokrisis
People call Whitehead a process philosopher. I don't. I am arguing pansemiotics, not panpsychism. — apokrisis
And you don't need a middle ground between substance and process as the argument is that substantial being is a process. — apokrisis
So, the fact that you think beauty, goodness and truth can best be modeled in physicalist terms ... cannot ever be more than a person belief that is not demonstrably true. — John
You said yourself that there are some persistent basic ingredients — darthbarracuda
Then what would you consider him to be? — darthbarracuda
Yet this becomes a monism. You reduce substance to process, in the same way Aristotle would reduce process to substance. — darthbarracuda
Well, only the one. Apeiron. Or however we would best understand that appeal to material principle in our best physicalist theories. — apokrisis
A "monism" that is irreducibly complex in being a triadic process. — apokrisis
But the whole point - following triadic hylomorphism - is that whatever the material principle is, it can't be itself substantial in the kind of sense you have in mind. It can't already possess properties, as positive properties are the product of formal causes, or constraints. — apokrisis
A mystic. A pseudo philosopher. — apokrisis
Why can't we say that there are some properties that exist thanks to a history and some properties just are, brute fact? Saying that a "principle" exists and yet denying that abstract transcendental properties exist seems like word play. — darthbarracuda
You realize this is, as of now, an unjustified opinion? — darthbarracuda
Of course directly shared experience might be nonsense, but experience is obviously shared via language or we would be unable to communicate effectively about anything. — John
Personally I think your analyses are anything but true, but if you are happy with them, that's up to you. — John
Then I can safely disregard anything you say about principles, since they do not exist and are thus irrelevant. — darthbarracuda
You believe that nothing is real unless it exists - i.e., that there are only material/efficient causes and brute facts? — aletheist
No, I think they exist but they have be predicate-able. To me, it doesn't even make any sense to talk of something that has no discernible nature but somehow is causally relevant. — darthbarracuda
So you don't think that things can be predicated of formal and final causes? — apokrisis
"I myself always use exist in its strict philosophical sense of “react with the other like things in the environment.”
"I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched." — apokrisis
Naturalism assumes order, or takes it for granted - once it begins to try and explain that order, then it's dealing with a problem of a different kind.
Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.
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