This is a thread to allow discussions about how those lucky enough to have free will make decisions.
As materialism doesn’t explain squat, this thread is a place for explanations from those that presumably have them.
And if they can’t provide them, well, this will be a short thread.
So do phoodoo, mung, WJM et al care to provide your explanations of how decisions are actually made?
What a confused attempt at a loaded question.
The Brandenburg Concertos are the product of a human brain. All the evidence we have supports the position that human brains are material and their behaviors are material processes. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that anything immaterial exists?
More attempted proof by repeated assertion. Where is evidence that anything immaterial exists? You said there is “plenty”, produce it.
I understand, FMM, that, if necessary, you may send the package by UPS and Patrick will pay the cost of delivery.
Patrick,
Is randomness a thing Patrick? Where does it exist?
Where do you think human discoveries and inventions originate? I say from the minds of our greatest thinkers. And physics cannot explain how these minds are inspired.
Albert Linderman puts it this way:
If we trace the cause of the physical appearance of a machine such as a helicopter or a ship, it begins with an idea in a human mind and it becomes a reality through human will. Brain substance does not have ideas or will, humans do.
IMO Goethe discovered the urflanze through imaginative cognition. This is an inner vision through which he experiences an objective reality from within whereas outer vision lets us experience an objective reality from the world around us.
In other words he was using his brain as an organ of perception. And he experienced a realm that is not limited in time and space as is the outer experienced world. He did not invent the urpfanze he discovered it.
Yes, just like the people quoted in your link, it is clear that you think of the brain as some sort of isolated entity that has the ability to think, make decisions and act.
From your link:
and
They are not sure where exactly in the brain these talents lie, but for them one thing is certain, they must be in the brain somewhere. This IMO is a narrow, reductive thinking that leads us further away from reality, it doesn’t get us closer to it.
IMO synesthetes are having experiences from the same realm in which Goethe’s urpflanze resides. They are receiving more information than our normal senses give us. This realm is not separate from the world of our normal senses, it transcends this normally experienced sense world.
The difference between the synesthetes in the link and Goethe is that he reached his perceptions through strenuous mental effort whereas they reached their’s accidentally through brain injury. But they were both able to perceive more than the normal senses and the thinking that goes with them gives us.
I would say that it is a mistake to believe that this realm I am talking about is confined within the human skull.
Funny that.
Are there archetypes for everything? Plants that will never exist?
I would disagree. It’s not about involvement verses detachment. It’s about personal verses not personal (material)
Yes this only means that the personal is foundational and material is derivative.
This nothing but a restatement your own materielaistic presuppositions IMO. I would say that the biological and neurobiological are ultimately dependant and linked to the personal.
peace
The comedy never quits with you does it?
How about we do this, You summarize what’s been presented here so far and explain why it is not evidence then we will talk about what else is needed to satisfy the grand decider .
peace
CharlieM,
There is a massive difference between insisting that the brain is not isolated and insisting that the brain is connected to something that is immaterial. Just because it’s not isolated, it doesn’t follow that what it is connected to is not itself part of the natural world. Yet you argue as if it just can’t be the body and the environment that is doing the additional work of constraining how the brain processes information.
As with FMM and phoodoo, you are extremely confident in your beliefs about what brains can and cannot do, even though you lack the requisite knowledge of contemporary neuroscience to back up those beliefs. Is your confidence really warranted? I don’t see how it could be.
And that’s nothing but a restatement of your own anti-materialistic presuppositions.
This is why I use the US Postal Service. They are more than willing to mail a box of immaterial matter without bothering themselves over the fact that it has no weight.
Right next door to +2.
There is some debate on who lives to the left of +1 though. Some people claim it is zero. Other people say zero doesn’t live anywhere.
Right. In an excellent prior post you pointed out how “stuff” is undifferentiated and therefore there are no “kinds” of stuff. Kinds come from something other than stuff.
I would agree, how do we bridge the gap between us?
I don’t think this sort of thing will be empirically decided.
peace
Knowledge of contemporary neuroscience is only requisite if this is a question that can be solved empirically.
I can’t see how you can possibly make the claim that it is
peace
I think I’m best off ignoring someone who doesn’t see why his ignorance of how brains work should undermine his confident assessment of what brains can’t do.
Steiner gives an account of how Goethe reached his understanding of the archetypal plant. He writes of Goethe in Goethean Science
If we take the concept “triangle” as the archetypal triangle, we can see how all particular triangles conform to the concept but do not exhaust the concept. We can imagine an infinite number of triangles having one apex anywhere between approaching an angle of zero to approaching 180 degrees. Obviously not all of these particular triangles have existed but any of them could exist and still be an example of a triangle.
Think of the archetypal triangle as a constantly changing, dynamic form with the relative sizes of the sides and angles moving between the extremes. Nothing is ever static, Things appear static to us, not because of objective reality, because of our limitations.
The material brain that you are talking about is just one aspect of it. It is that part which is available to human senses and our instruments which are based on these senses. There is more to the brain than this.
And I would say that you have an unjustified belief in a science which is based in materialism and tries to limit reality to that materialism.
For me Goethean science provides a complementary understanding of nature which extends our current natural science in a positive way.
Craig Holdrege writes
Our current natural science is extremely important for understanding the physical world, but it gets misused when it is used as an excuse for limiting reality to the physical world of the human senses.
Perhaps instead of ignoring you might explain how a question of ontology can be addressed by empirical evidence.
We know that what ever brains do it will be in the realm of the materiel and as such it will be irrelevant when it comes to understanding a phenomena that is personal.
It would be like studying the dynamics of human group interaction to understand the causes of down syndrome
peace
I have seen none, that’s why I keep asking you to describe what you see as “plenty” of evidence for anything immaterial. You’re the one making the claim, support it or retract it.
Certainly no progress will be made so long as you refuse to provide evidence to support your claim that anything immaterial exists.
Prove it.
I suggest someone send Patrick a thumbtack he can sit on. Then, when he cries out, you can respond, “We see the blood and the rip in your pants, and we heard you yell. But what is the evidence for the pain? How much does it weigh?”
I sort of see your point there, though I’m not sure how much it works against Patrick’s style of evidentialism.
My own approach here would be to pick up where Wittgenstein and Ryle left off, and especially Wittgenstein’s remark that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul”.
I connect that with the Germanic distinction between the body as Leib and the body as Körper — a distinction that was introduced by Helmuth Plessner and gets taken up by Max Scheler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
The basic idea is that the body as Körper is the body as anatomy and physiology, as the object of scientific knowledge and medical intervention, whereas the body as Leib (“the lived body”) is the body as expressive of intentions, thoughts, moods, feelings, and sensations.
It’s a significant reworking of the traditional subject/object distinction, because — as Plessner and others argue — it is the body as Leib that is experientially primary. The body as Körper is produced by treating the body in specific ways, turning it into an object of medical intervention and scientific knowledge. On this view, the Cartesian concept of the cogito is constructed as a reaction to the parallel construction of the body as machine.
A further elaboration of this approach is taken in Finkelstein’s nice book Expression and the Inner, where he argues that linguistic utterances like “I’m in a good mood today” are expressions analogues to smiles. There’s a continuum, he thinks, between saying “ouch, that hurts!” and vocalizations such as grimaces, moans, shrieks, and screams. The difference between nonhuman animals and us just comes down to the fact that we supplement expressions of pain with linguistic utterances.
I think there’s got to be an important differences between expressions of that kind and claims. Claims are third-personal — to claim that P is to say that P is the case, and that anyone ought to believe that P.
But when I say, “I’m in pain!” I’m not making a claim; I’m expressing a part of my own phenomenology. Someone else can use my saying “I’m in pain!” as evidence for their claim “he’s in pain”, but when I say “I’m in pain” I’m not making the same kind of speech act as when I say “he’s in pain” only that “he” refers back to me. (This ultimately turns on the distinctive character of indexicals such as “I”.)
I fully endorse Cassirer’s remark here, as far as it goes.
(By the way, Holdrege’s citation is not quite right — the quote is from The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel, 1919, English translation 1950. I know this because I have a copy of it on my desk right now.)
But from the fact that particulars and universals always interpenetrate one another, and there’s no clear demarcation between the factual and the theoretical — a claim familiar to those of us who got it from Quine and Sellars — nothing further follows about the ontology of universals.
Good neo-Kantian that he is, Cassirer tells us only that universals are indispensable to cognition, not what universals are. A nominalist can happily say that Cassirer is perfectly right, but that universals themselves are just intersubjectively recognized norms of a public language.
Kantian Naturalist,
But you don’t understand, KN. Patrick demands the production of hard, empirical evidence. Something he can weigh!
Since I don’t understand what anyone here means by “material” and “immaterial,” I don’t understand what FMM is insisting can’t be or must be the case or what reasons he has for saying that something can’t be the case or must be the case or whatever.
The whole debate looks to me like it depends on accepting outdated science as bad metaphysics.
I have a functional idea of what I mean by “material” but I have no idea what FFM, phoodoo, and others mean by “immaterial”. Hopefully when he finally produces evidence to support his claim that anything immaterial exists, it will clarify his meaning.
As it stands, I don’t see any difference between “immaterial” and “non-existent”.
Patrick,
Could at least tell us what your functional idea of “material” is such that you are entitled to assert that nothing material exists?
Dear KN,
Please ask Patrick what his ‘functional idea’ of what he means by ‘material’ is.
Many thanks and Good Yuntiff,
Walto
Seems…unlikely…at best.
Glen Davidson
Ach, you beat me to it. Never mind then!
W
I’m not making that assertion. I’m noting that fifthmonarchyman, among others, is claiming that something immaterial exists and I’m asking him to support that claim. This being The Skeptical Zone, I don’t see that as an unreasonable or unexpected request.
I’m fine with discussing inconsequential ideas. I’ve tried before to suggest that we can make a definitional distinction between reality and imagination. A claim involving imaginary concepts is an amusing dinner-table discussion topic. When there are entailments, when the claim entails a real, observable effect, what is the point of a discussion? We can count the horse’s teeth. (Or we can google).
Perhaps this is another instance where you don’t know what you are asking. You probably would, as per your character, be unhappy with absolutely any answer you get, while insisting you are merely skeptical.
This does not preclude that FMM likely does not know what he is saying. Whatever became of his great program that was supposed to measure or detect intelligence or information or design or such?
At least you’ve found a way to insult both of us, Erik.
I get the distinct impression that fifthmonarchyman, phoodoo, and at least one or two others don’t consider “immaterial” and “imaginary” to be synonyms. Perhaps when one of them produces the evidence supporting their claim we’ll get more insight into exactly what they mean by the word.
And you think it’s not intellectually insulting to ask somebody to define immaterial while keeping absolutely away from any commitment to any definition of material yourself? Opposites define each other, you see. They are most easily defined in contradistinction.
Anyway, ordinary examples of immaterial things are universals and mathematical objects.
As you must know by now, Erik, he’s simply a bully, intoxicated with what constitutes power here. For him, denial of inquiry is an idea. (And it might as well be, since for him, ideas don’t exist anyhow.)
Oh, he says things (presumably types) are instantiated in brains, but they’re not universals, they’re material.
The raison-d’être of this blog is to avoid insulting fellow members. Let’s all set out our stall and see what sells.
FWIW, I note that even Patrick’s goddess, Ayn Rand, apparently wrote this:
What she meant by “a-ness” I have no idea, but fortunately she’s not MY goddess.
In terms of algebra, she must have meant “a” as in a+b=c.
Missed this. No, I don’t see. Could you explain?
On the contrary, it demonstrates respect for someone’s claims to pay enough attention to ask them to support them.
You seem not to understand that the burden of proof is on the person making the positive claim. fifthmonarchyman and others are claiming that some type of “immaterial” things exist. It is incumbent upon them to provide reason and evidence to support that claim.
Nope. Your ideas about burden of proof are foolishness in every way, to put it mildly. And your behaviour cannot be put mildly.
Anyway, if you think you have an idea what respect means, then right there you have an example of immaterial, and all your talk is plain silliness.
Another opportunity to inject my proposal for a dichotomy (yes, I know but I think this one works) between the real and the imaginary. Anything we can detect, however indirectly, is real and the else is imaginary. I’m happy to consider “material” as a synonym of “real”.
How about the “demonstration”? How much does that weigh?