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?
For example, thesauruses are composed by listing synonyms and antonyms so you can delineate the semantics. Definition is filling a word with specific semantic content. This is most clearly seen when talking about abstracts. If you don’t see it, then you are probably making baby steps in talking about abstracts.
What does “detect” mean?
And, while you’re at it, what does “indirectly” mean? E.g., I take it I detect quarks indirectly. What about chairs? Do I detect them indirectly? What about numbers, pains, patches of color, dark side of Mercury, antipathies and national interests–detected? Directly or indirectly?
What if they’re inferred rather than “detected”? Are they imaginary then?
walto,
All of it. Except unicorns!
FWIW, I’ve never heard anyone refer to unicorns as immaterial. I take it that they’re horses with horns. Both horses and horns are material, no? Aren’t immaterial things supposed to be invisible? Unicorns are usually depicted as having colors (sparkly ones even).
Don’t get me wrong. I love semantics, linguistics, etymology.
Is it? I think, when you define a word, you should be explaining what you mean by it.
Most probably. Where does that leave us?
Demonstration weighs a lot, but moral concepts and abstracts etc. are a tough case. You see, Patrick thinks he is demonstrating respect, while in truth he is demonstrating the opposite of it. To demonstrate the truth takes a debate between two intellectually qualified persons. No material evidence, no matter how heavy or weighty, would work.
walto,
Does a unicorn that’s lost its horn still qualify as a unicorn?
FWIW, perhaps because of the absence of bullying there, the discussion on the thread about free will was much more fruitful, IMHO.
Nonsense. We can count the horses teeth.
How big is the stump?
To be half-serious for a moment, that’s an important point if you are trying to imagine a mythical creature. The point of attachment over the nasal cavity defies physics, if you use the dimensions of a typical narwhal tusk.
I think he was saying that the teeth alone wouldn’t be sufficient. You’d need the competent counting too.
Is nonsense material? If yes, then tell the size and shape and other material characteristics of it. If no, then you have gotten lost into imaginary world by your own definition.
They’re tricky.
“Nonsense” is an expletive. I’m prepared to defend my Venn diagram, nonetheless. It’s possibly the one dichotomy that I’m convinced exists.
Maybe your conviction is imaginary…..or should be.
Maybe I’m imaginary and being fed down into your brain-in-a-vat! 😯
Then it’s an acorn.
Glen Davidson
I think the way to not get you wrong would be to approach cautiously your assumption that you know what those words mean.
You think so? In order to be able to explain to another what a word means, isn’t it necessary to think it through by oneself first? i.e. comprehend the word, fill it with semantic content, so that explaining the meaning to someone else would become possible.
Now you hopefully see that you should have thought twice before saying you love semantics, linguistics, etymology…
It leaves us with an overwhelming burden of education to be done.
There’s more than one of you?
I think it would be worthwhile to try to use words that whoever you are trying to communicate with understood. But only if you have a point to make.
🙂 🙂
I still don’t know what “material” is supposed to mean here.
Are forces material? Fields? Quarks? Love? Justice? Experience?
I have no idea.
Even though I’m sometimes referred to here as a “materialist,” I don’t know what “matter” is supposed to be. It’s not really one of my words.
I have a pretty good non-specialist’s awareness of what contemporary fundamental physics is about, but I can’t see how the structures and relations referred to in our best theories of fundamental physics count as “material” in a sense that connects with, say, ancient Greek and Roman atomism, Aristotle’s notion of hule, or Descartes’s res extensa.
I also don’t understand how the guilt-by-association between atheism, materialism, mechanism, and empiricism is supposed to work. Lots of atheists aren’t materialists, some materialists aren’t mechanists, and lots of empiricists have been vehemently opposed to materialism.
But that’s none of my business, I guess. Well, back to writing about animal minds for me.
that explains a lot
quote:
And he said, “Go, and say to this people: “‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’ Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”
(Isa 6:9-10)
end quote:
peace
Except when it comes to cumulative selection, walto. Then he’s content to simply assert, without evidence, that IDists don’t understand it.
Something like this, material is what you can measure empirically. Things like iron and carbon
Immaterial is everything else.
Things like love and decisions
peace
Can you measure them empirically then they are material. Seems pretty simple to me
materiel:
-forces-
-Fields-
-Quarks-
Immaterial:
-Love-
-Justice-
-Experience-
next question
peace
I don’t think there is guilt by association.
OTOH what often I see is any nontheist of any stripe banding to together to defend any position that they believe might be apposed to the Christian God no matter how ridiculous it is
peace
In my own case, that’s because I feel bad for Ba’al (and his followers) and Goliath and his fellow Philistines.
Is a mousetrap a decision-making engine?
(I hope engine is the correct word. I only browsed the first post for a page or two and this monster is beyond my time.)
This is tricky in real life, because it’s not easy to know the vocabulary of the other person before you already communicate. Unless you are a mind-reader, in which case you know before communicating what vocabulary the other one is able to bear.
In real life, the fact that people assess their own capacity wrongly adds to the complexity. For example you were trying hard to leave the impression that you knew what the words semantics, linguistics, and etymology mean. In truth you have no idea.
On the same basis, there’s a serious problem with Patrick’s allegedly respectful demand to get a clarification of what immaterial means. Immaterial is a priori excluded from his vocabulary by his preconceived notions, so his demand is actually an intellectual insult. And when I say this, I am not being insulting to him, even though he may claim so. In truth he has no clue what respect is, so his claim has no basis.
You see, KN here openly admits he has no idea even what “material” means and this admission by him makes for a far cooler discussion, because he knows where he stands and he is not overestimating himself. Quite commendable behavior by him.
Certainly, I’m not one though we do have one or two adepts among us. 😉
I’m sympathetic to Patrick regarding the immaterial. I define anything real as having some detectable attribute that can be measured or at least observed, however indirectly. So immaterial “things” in my view are anything that exists only in the particular or collective imagination. I’m not insulting anyone by saying this. It’s merely what I think. I don’t see how Patrick’s view differs except that he may be more persistent in seeking answers from those who disagree.
fifthmonarchyman,
So is that “material” means “measurable”? Or that being measurable is a criterion of being made of matter? Is only matter measurable?
We can measure interest rates, right? Are interest rates material?
At the very least, abstract ideas exist as thoughts in the brain. So long as there are brains that have them!
ETA I’m enjoying Big Gods. Like some of the tests on behavioural variance, depending on who’s watching!
This is not a matter of mere disagreement. There are logical problems with your statements that were recognized already by philosophers before Plato, but which you (and Patrick) are not recognizing, and insofar as this is so, you are not in a position to say much about this so-called disagreement. Logically speaking, you don’t have a position. Instead, you’d have to fix your terminology to live up to some minimal logical standard, so as to be able to communicate a position, i.e. to start to make sense. But if you are speaking illogically, then carry on.
Two problems just for taste. You say you define anything real as having some detectable attribute that can be measured or at least observed. Next you say, “immaterial “things” in my view are anything that exists only in the particular or collective imagination”.
Given your earlier equation of “real” and “material”, you must mean “unreal” when you say “immaterial things”. The problem is that you end up saying something like “unreal things exist in imagination”. One of the problems: Are you really saying that unreal things exist? Another problem: Is imagination itself real? If yes, then isn’t it existent and we should take careful note of the fact that it exists and how it operates and not be too dismissive about it? But if imagination is not real, then why on earth do you keep blabbing so much about this unreal thing which should merit no attention because it doesn’t exist? Besides, in the latter case you manage to say that unreal things “exist” (!) in that unreal thing called imagination…
I’d ask a slightly different question. If there were no humans would there be interest rates?
The exact same question applies to Alan Fox concerning imagination. He says that real means having some detectable attribute that can be measured or at least observed and that immaterial things exist only in particular or collective imagination. Now, does imagination have detectable measurable attributes? Measured from a third-person view, what do these attributes look like? Do any of those attributes have the form of “immaterial things”? If not, then in what sense can he say that those immaterial things “exist in particular or collective imagination”? Also, how has he detected the thing he calls collective imagination so that he can bring himself to talk about it as having immaterial things inside?
Are all those statements by him just a grand web of metaphors? Are metaphors material or immaterial, real or unreal, existent or non-existent? Are they just hot air for fun and entertainment to increase the virtual activity on the website or should they be taken seriously? Why? How? These are just a few initial questions.
I’m not sure where you think he has got it wrong. Here is his reference from the link I gave:
I’m sure Holdrege has access to the book too
And the point Holdrege is making is that particulars and universals always interpenetrate one another because they belong together. The universal is not something we think up and then add to the particular. We are only putting back together what we have torn apart in the first place due to the fact that our senses give us an incomplete picture.
Well Goethe was not interested in philosophy, he was interested in nature. And I agree with Holdrege that what he was doing was bringing his thinking to life. He was perceiving through his thinking.
Cut a rose blossom from the plant and study it. You have before you something dead and static. But let your mind behold the changing form of the plant from seed to blossom and back again, with its spreading roots, the shoots, the expansions and contractions. This is the real life of the rose that only thinking can give us. This is the universal, not as a series of sense perceptible snapshots, but as the living reality of the plant. This reality which we cannot grasp with the senses does not belong inside our heads, it belongs to the plant.
I am not in the business of trying to prove anything, but I will ask you this:
How do you explain the placebo effect?
That’s a good question, especially once we note that many things that humans create could survive the death of our species. I’ve mentioned in connection with values before that it’s easy to forget that just because something is created by–or in some other sense dependent upon human beings–doesn’t entail that the thing must be “subjective.”
So I’d say your question was more than “slightly” different.
Actually, I’d say that, whether you at first realize it or not, you do NOT have something dead and static before you. You actually come to agree with this in the last sentence I have quoted from you, which flatly contradicts the first one.
Thoughts are in the brain? How did they get there? How much do THEY weigh? Is there a unicorn in your brain? How about the keyboard you’re typing on, is it in your brain?
I’m fine with the idea that measurability is a criterion of ontological acceptability in ‘scientific theories’. That is, if one is constructing models of causal processes and wants to assess and evaluate those models by non-arbitrary criteria, then we do what we can to judge the model by the data (rather than the other way around), and that involves collecting the data through measurement.
That all seems fine to me.
I’m slightly less comfortable with the idea that the ontology of science is all there is in metaphysics.
I would prefer to say something like this: in the process of constructing, testing, revising, and rejecting scientific theories, objective reality gets a voice in what we say about it. (My argument for that claim would have to go through a long-winded exposition of Peirce, which I shall spare you.) But that does not entail that our pre-scientific, naive phenomenology has no ontological status at all.
For after all, scientific theories are normative social practices, carried out by persons, on the basis of reasons; it is precisely as rational beings that we collect relevant data and test theories against that data as rigorously as possible. If we were not rational agents, we could not do science.
In short, there are basic constitutive facts about rational agency — facts about what is to for something to be a rational agent at all. There’s no exhaustive and definitive list of these facts, though I think that a brief characterization would have to involve notions like reasoning, awareness, choice, correctness, justification or warrant, and truth.
Which is to say: if a scientific theory were to entail that there are no agents, or that there are no reasons, then we would have a very nice self-undermining of science itself.
This point is often raised by the folks at Uncommon Descent. That’s why they are always saying that science must rest on foundations that cannot be established scientifically. The constant attacks on “materialism” coming from over there are all based on this idea that science entails a strictly reductive materialism that is incompatible with rationality or free will.
(There are many different ways of parsing “reductive materialism,” but I’m using the version developed by John Dupre in his The Disorder of Things: reductive materialism states that
(i) there are ultimate ontological constituents of reality (monism);
(ii) these constituents can be understood in terms of mechanics (mechanism): (iii) the mechanic constituents of reality are microphysical structures;
(iv) any theory that does not belong to fundamental physics can be related to fundamental physics through bridge laws that specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for translating any term from the non-fundamental theory into a term from the fundamental theory;
I agree that reductive materialism is incompatible with rationality and free will, but disagree that reductive materialism is the best way of understanding the metaphysics of science. Indeed, I think that (i)-(iv) are all false. And that means that all putative conflicts between science and constitutive facts of agency are going to be piecemeal and local.
So: if there is a conflict between some particular scientific model and a a particular constitutive fact, then it’s a complicated question which is going to yield, since that involves careful assessment of the claims of each.
In some cases we might find that the constitutive fact is really quite central to human self-understanding and to lose it would be to lose all sense of what one is, whereas the scientific model has problematic conceptual framework or that there are alternative explanations of the phenomena that have yet to be ruled out.
In other cases we might find that the constitutive fact is better understood as a theoretical construction of its own from centuries of pre-scientific metaphysics, and we’re better off scraping off as much theological excess as we can.
And those are just the extreme positions; actual cases involving intentionality, consciousness, rationality, and agency will fall on a continuum between those extremes.
I think you are looking for a grey area where none exists.
Empirically measurable is the key.
Coins and green backs are materiel “value” is immaterial.
Interest rates are immaterial my mortgage check is material.
We have as a community agreed that material coins and greenbacks and checks have a certain value for our community regardless of any intrinsic quality they have .
When you measure interest rates you are measuring value that is a personal immaterial thing. There is nothing empirical that is being weighed or quantified.
When you pay interest OTOH you pay in material cash that we as a community have “decided” has a certain value.
long story short
greenbacks are like brains
value is like minds
peace
All,
With a few notable exceptions this is an enjoyable discussion.
Thanks
It restores my faith in humanity a little bit
fifthmonarchyman,
So what’s Bitcoin?
Are you asking about the immaterial concept of Bitcoin or what an actual material Bitcoin is?
From Your Logical Fallacy Is:
“The burden of proof lies with someone who is making a claim, and is not upon anyone else to disprove. The inability, or disinclination, to disprove a claim does not render that claim valid, nor give it any credence whatsoever. However it is important to note that we can never be certain of anything, and so we must assign value to any claim based on the available evidence, and to dismiss something on the basis that it hasn’t been proven beyond all doubt is also fallacious reasoning.”
It appears that the foolishness is on your part.
Asking for claims to be supported in a skeptical forum. How crass of me.