• Olivier5
    6.2k
    The same name can be 'materialized' in many different manners, but it's still the same name.
  • Isaac
    10.3k


    Yes. 'The same' as in similar enough for our purposes. There's not a unity there requiring a separate ontological existence. The names are clearly dissimilar in many ways too.
  • Protagoras
    331
    To think there is not a difference between a coffee table and your feelings is nonsense.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    To think there is not a difference between a coffee table and your feelings is nonsense.Protagoras

    To think there's not a difference between my coffee table and your coffee table is also nonsense. thankfully, no one is making such a claim so we need not concern ourselves with it.
  • Protagoras
    331
    @Isaac
    Nonsense. Materialists are saying feelings are Matter.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    Materialists are saying feelings are Matter.Protagoras

    Yep. As are both our coffee tables, and yet one is different from the other.
  • Protagoras
    331
    @Isaac
    Nope. Coffee tables have a similarity,they are both made from matter.

    Feelings are not.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    Coffee tables have a similarity,they are both made from matter.

    Feelings are not.
    Protagoras

    That's just restating your position, not addressing the argument. The issue in question is whether it can be demonstrated that feelings are not matter, that you believe they're not is not in question.
  • Protagoras
    331
    @Isaac
    Nope. You can never prove feelings are matter.

    My feelings say they are not matter.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    My feelings say they are not matter.Protagoras

    Why would anyone give a fuck what your feelings say? This is a discussion forum. If you've got nothing more to bring to the table than that your feelings say one position is correct and another incorrect then your contribution is worthless. We're discussing, not conducting a poll.
  • Protagoras
    331
    @Isaac
    Feelings are subjectivity you fool.

    If your in pain should you ignore it?

    You ignorant bigot.
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    The same name of the same city.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    The same name of the same city.Olivier5

    Yes. 'The same' as in similar enough for our purposes. There's not a unity there requiring a separate ontological existence. The names are clearly dissimilar in many ways too.Isaac
  • 180 Proof
    15.3k
    My feelings say they are not matter.
    — Protagoras

    Why would anyone give a fuck what your feelings say? This is a discussion forum. If you've got nothing more to bring to the table than that your feelings say one position is correct and another incorrect then your contribution is worthless.
    Isaac
    :100: This Dunning-Kruger troll is completely incorrigible on this point. S/He won't "feel good" about your reply either.
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    Not 'similar enough' but identical.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    Not 'similar enough' but identical.Olivier5

    Are you suggesting all seven of those names are the same in every way? I can see some substantial differences.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    This Dunning-Kruger troll is completely incorrigible on this point. S/He won't "feel good" about your reply either.180 Proof

    No doubt we'll have a sagacious aphorism to that effect any minute.
  • Protagoras
    331
    What's great about having a scientist a neuroscientist here is you get to see the full bigotry and unedited dogma of these guys that are doing all this "research" into the brain...

    And the image of the scientist as some unbiased observor collecting the data without any metaphysical assumptions or baggage is destroyed.

    Cheers @Isaac ,you have done a great service showing how researchers are human,all too human. You are religious in your beliefs and assumptions!

    As if a few expensive scanners and petty research disproves pain,or proves you are a bunch of atoms floating about!
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    Are you suggesting all seven of those names are the same in every way? I can see some substantial differences.Isaac

    The differences you see are not in the name "New York" itself, which is one name, but in the many different ways to write it down.
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    So which is more fundamental - neurons or shapes and colors? And are not shapes and colors a type of information?Harry Hindu

    It's a dialogue between mind and matter, a two-way street.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    The differences you see are not in the name "New York" itself, which is one nameOlivier5

    I count seven.
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    How many cities are called New York?
  • Wayfarer
    22.3k
    Ideas must be written down on something to exist, and to have any effect on things. An idea written nowhere, not even in some dude's memory, is not presently in existence or in any way active in this present world.Olivier5

    You're trying to locate ideas in the physical world, but I think they're real in a different sense to existent phenomena. They're real as principles, as ideas although not simply the casual thoughts that occupy our minds moment to moment. But the domain of ideas is not dependent on the physical domain, rather they are the organising principles which underlie and inform the physical domain. This of course goes back to the Aristotelian idea of formal cause, which was abandoned by early modern science, although some say it's making a comeback.


    The same name can be 'materialized' in many different manners, but it's still the same name.Olivier5

    The key thing here, is 'equals' or 'means' or 'same as' or 'different to'. We see equivalences between many different strings of characters or symbolic forms, which is what makes language possible. What are we seeing, when we say that 'this equals that' or 'this means that'? We take for granted this ability, but really it is at the foundation of rationality, it is an awesome power. We casually accept that this is something that 'evolved', as if that amounts to an explanation for it.

    This, of course, touches on the whole question of universals, which I describe as 'the ligatures of reason'. It goes without saying that naturalist philosophy is invariably nominalist, so it never sees the causal connections between reason and being that underlies traditional philosophy.

    (I will acknowledge that nobody else here believes these ideas.)
  • Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    Neutral in English, feminine in French.Olivier5

    That's the grammatical gender of the words for "table" in those languages, not the gender-as-in-not-quite-sex of the actual table.

    What is the materiality of such a thing as the scale of a map?Olivier5

    What is the "materiality" of my height in meters? They're the same kind of thing. Relational properties aren't metaphysically spooky, they're normal kinds of things that normal physical things have all the time.

    Beside, a map can be printed on many copies, each of which is a different material thing, but the map itself is one. It's the same map on all copies. A map can be translated into another language, and it will look differently on paper but essentially it remains the same map. So the map is more abstract a form than just the paper form on which it is printed. This abstraction of maps vis-à-vis both the territory and the map's physical support is very difficult to think in a monist logic.Olivier5

    That's the form-substance distinction again, which as stated already is not something anybody is denying: you can have multiple things of the same form. The question at hand is whether there's more than one kind of underlying substance, such that you can't in principle trans-form one kind of thing to another because those kinds of things have to be made of different stuff, e.g. such that you can't in principle transform a bunch of CO2 and H2O and misc other chemicals into a self-aware thinking person.

    Then what use is the term, "physical" if it doesn't distinguish from something else?Harry Hindu

    Some people suppose that things that aren't physical exist, things that (as above) you can't get by changing the form of some physical stuff. It's only the supposition of some other kind of stuff, that's fundamentally discontinuous with all of the ordinary stuff we're familiar with like that, that calls for the need of a term for that ordinary stuff.
  • khaled
    3.5k
    You're trying to locate ideas in the physical world, but I think they're real in a different sense to existent phenomena. They're real as principles, as ideas although not simply the casual thoughts that occupy our minds moment to moment. But the domain of ideas is not dependent on the physical domain, rather they are the organising principles which underlie and inform the physical domain.Wayfarer

    But this still wouldn’t make ideas a substance. Do you think a triangle (the idea, not a physical triangle) is a substance? A holder of properties?

    If so, what would happen if you removed the “triangle substance” from a dorito?

    Incidentally, I agree with the above. What you mean by “organizing principles” is what I meant by “structure” and “pattern”

    Pfhorrest put it really well as I was typing this:

    That's the form-substance distinction again, which as stated already is not something anybody is denying: you can have multiple things of the same form. The question at hand is whether there's more than one kind of underlying substancePfhorrest

    A form/structure/organizing principle is not its own a substance. Or at least, doesn’t need to be.

    We casually accept that this is something that 'evolved', as if that amounts to an explanation for it.Wayfarer

    Sight is an awesome power. It is also evolved. I don’t see why patter recognition or reasoning would be any different.
  • Wayfarer
    22.3k
    But this still wouldn’t make ideas a substancekhaled

    You still don’t show that you understand the meaning of ‘substance’ in philosophy. You’re thinking of ‘substance’ in the everyday usage.
  • khaled
    3.5k
    Care to explain then? Because last time you said a substance was a holder of properties. That’s the definition being used here.
  • Wayfarer
    22.3k
    Do you think a triangle (the idea, not a physical triangle) is a substance? A holder of properties?khaled


    Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Feser

    It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ...In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea'...also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.Bertrand Russell, The World of Universals
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    How many cities are called New York?Olivier5

    One, I think. Are cities non-physical now too?
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    How many cities are called New York?
    — Olivier5

    One, I think.
    Isaac

    One city, one name: New York. This unique name (aka concept) can be written down in an infinite number of different ways.
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