Agree entirely - in fact I'd go further and say that I could not even imagine a human life at all, horrible or otherwise - as being one driven by necessity. Having said that, the fact that I cannot imagine X does not mean that X is false, of course.Couldn't imagine a more horrible kind of life, one driven solely by necessity.
You are missing the point. Just because the relata of a relation are constantly changing does not entail that the relation itself is constantly changing. Counting relata and counting relations are to count two different kinds of things.So "objective relations," as the ways in which particular things/properties interact with other things/properties, are constantly changing, through time T1, T2, T3, and so on.
As I understand it, the basis of your original argument is that one and same piece of information can be born by numerically distinct material states/processes/events. So, whatever it is that we are counting when we are counting items of information cannot be those material states/processes/events. My argument is, in the nutshell provided by @jkg20, even if particular material things are bearers of truth, since numerically distinct material things can share one and the same feature of being true, whatever we are counting when we count the feature of truth cannot be those material things.But actually, there’s a straight line from your argument, to the premise of the OP - have another look at the first post, and see if you agree that there’s a connection. — Wayfarer
He's been doing philosophy for too long to be more strident I guess. Clearly he's plugging in to a line of thought we're both sympathetic with, but I think even he'd agree that he's not presenting anything else than a challenge for materialism to come up with some account of meaning. @numberjohnny5 has been trying to meet that challenge, at least I suppose that's what he or she has been trying to do, not only from a materialist perspective, but also a nominalist one. I hope what I've done is pinpoint a problem any such attempt will have with the bare notion of truth and falsity of thoughts. Non-particular, non-material things need to be introduced, but whether those things that need to be introduced have to be thoughts (either conceived directly as information or as information bearers) I don't know. Some extremely clever people (cleverer than I am anyway) have been materialistic nominalists up to a point (I'm thinking here of Quine) and they believed they could get by with just one type of non-material, non-particular thing in their ontology: sets (or classes).seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. — Ed Feser
However you define and conceive the relationships between, for instance, brain and mind, mind and individual behaviour, and individual behaviour and social and cultural phenomena, the nature of our brains must be implicated in some way and possibly in quite important ways
Sure. Behaviour involves the (autonomic and voluntary) motor movements (exhibition/inhibition of muscles via efferent pathways) as processed by nonconscious and conscious phenomena. Mentality refers just specifically to the conscious phenomena. There is a relationship between voluntary motor movements and mentality, of course, but they ain't the same. One major distinction is that motor movements occur in multiple sites in the body e.g. limbs, hands, feet etc., whereas mentality only occurs in the brain.
And I'm strictly a physicalist.
If your aim is to align with conventional practice, then those practices themselves provide the objective grounds for whether you succeed or not.On the other hand, if a person is attempting to "understand" what the intention behind a piece of writing was/is, then they might assume the writer/speaker is using language conventions, and then assign language conventions to what the writer/speaker is expressing. In the latter case, though, because meaning is not a non-mental event/thing, there's not any objective (as in, non-mental) thing to try to match.
I think time is something that simply can't be ignored. It flows whether you acknowledge it or not and it's part of the definition of almost everything. For instance ''prove'' meant ''test'' in the good old days and that's the reason for much confusion over the adage ''the exception proves the rule''.
I'm not sure. I want to say "of course an instant in time makes sense as being some specific point in the temporal continuum" - and to prove that these things exist, I might show you a video of some event or another and then press pause and say - what is represented by that frozen frame is a specific instant in time. Having said that, it does not seem to make sense to view the continuum itself as being made up of such point instants, even if they do exist, since no matter how many such instances you have, since they do not last for any amount of time, you are not going to create a duration of time by adding them together (0+0=0). Could there be a way of taking an instant in time not as a thing itself, but rather as a way of thinking of a duration of time?Another thing. What do you make of the idea of an instant of time? Does it makes sense?
If the idea is that realm C contains the necessary and sufficient conditions for causal occurences, the passing of time won't cut it. Time passing might be necessary for causation, but since we can imagine nothing happening over a period of time, it is not sufficient.Do you agree, that the passing of time satisfies the conditions required of the place holder (realm C)? We do not need the realm C as a place holder if the passing of time is real and common to both A and B, allowing for causal relations.
I've nothing against speculative philosophy, as opposed to the dry analytic kind that jkg20 seems more focussed on, but there's some terminology in what you say that does cry out for clarification before someone like me could even begin to understand what you're talking about. I suppose for "finite locus of mind" you mean something like the traditional "subject of experience"? But what is this "Mind-at-large", you mention, and what are its emanations?Yes, to elaborate, it implies that what a 'finite' locus of mind can only know as experiential phenomenal appearances, by definition, is a limitation imposed upon what would be the potentially infinite emanations of Mind-at-large. As if it is the trade-off, so to speak, for the sake of this relational experience.
Doesn't that miss jkg20's point? After all, the way you make this statement assumes you've already settled that there are two realms for different attributes to apply in. Jkg20, as far as I can tell, is posing some very abstract metaphysical questions (metametaphilosophical ?) concerning making the kind of divisions that some people are kind of helping themselves to.I don't see how "self-containment" is even relevant. I would think that if the descriptive terms used to describe the properties or attributes of the members of one realm are distinct from, and not reducible to the descriptive terms of the other, then the two are distinct.
Now I'm confused. I thought your position was that the very term "consciousness" was drivel, by which I presume you meant "devoid of content". If it is devoid of content, there is nothing to explain, by QM or by anything else for that matter. Perhaps, though, you do not believe that the term is literally devoid of content.That said, I don't see any problem with saying that quantum processes might play certain roles in 'explaining consciousness'.
Berkeley denied the existence of substance - so whatever account you have of it cannot possibly accord with Berkelean idealism. You might need to revisit what you believe to be the difference between idealisms and realisms (and notice that there are several versions of both).That doesn't necessarily commit to what the nature of this or that substance is - and so may accord with, say, a Berkelyean idealism in many respects. But conceptually, the stuff comes first, the awareness of that stuff second.
You are not wrong, but you are just giving one of a number of interpretations of what is going on. There are some interpretations of QM that explain the so-called wave function collapse whilst actually allowing for a real particle to exist all the time (it is supposed to be 'riding the wave').So up until that moment, there is no 'actual particle' - it's not as if it's somewhere in some definite place that hasn't been determined yet. Up until the measurement is taken, it's not in any place - literally all there is, is a field of possibilities (which is what the so-called 'super-position' describes). Then at the instant the measurement is taken, one possibility becomes 100% and all the others become 0. That is what 'the collapse of the wave-function' describes...Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that. — Wayfarer
By subjective idealism do you mean the idealism of Berkeley? Who refuted it? I know Samuel Johnson thought he did so by kicking a stone, but he was just an overweight and overrated lexicographer."Subjective idealism, which appears to be what you are proposing, is refutable on a number of levels." — jastopher