To think there is not a difference between a coffee table and your feelings is nonsense. — Protagoras
Materialists are saying feelings are Matter. — Protagoras
Coffee tables have a similarity,they are both made from matter.
Feelings are not. — Protagoras
My feelings say they are not matter. — Protagoras
:100: This Dunning-Kruger troll is completely incorrigible on this point. S/He won't "feel good" about your reply either.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
So which is more fundamental - neurons or shapes and colors? And are not shapes and colors a type of information? — Harry Hindu
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
The same name can be 'materialized' in many different manners, but it's still the same name. — Olivier5
Neutral in English, feminine in French. — Olivier5
What is the materiality of such a thing as the scale of a map? — Olivier5
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
Then what use is the term, "physical" if it doesn't distinguish from something else? — Harry Hindu
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
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 — Pfhorrest
We casually accept that this is something that 'evolved', as if that amounts to an explanation for it. — Wayfarer
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
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.