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?
It’s a problem for all of us. We’re all locked in our own heads.
Your choice. Let’s see what you have.
Fear is a real phenomenon, an emotional response to stimuli. The flight zoneis a good model of how it works. There is a balance of risk between the need to eat and the need to avoid predators. But I suspect you are asking “why” rather than “how”.
This is a bit of a sidestep. Concepts are real. The act of thinking is real. What you think about is not necessarily real. I think you are falling into the trap of conflating “immaterial” with “abstract”.
Nope. I’m asking “what”.
As I see, you indeed continue behaving as yourself: No answer, no attention, just dodges and diversions. And soon you will say again you were provided no example and no definition.
It was fun as long as it lasted.
You’re finding this fun? You haven’t yet expressed any challengeable position. You’ve merely sneered at others’ expressed views. It’s not been fun, Erik. I find you disappointing.
If property rights are immaterial why is reproduction required? Simply reading a book should qualify.
You messed up answering a simple what-question. From here it looks like the challenge was too much for you.
Now now, Sir Pedant, be properly pedantic. Nobody said property rights were immaterial. The question was if intellectual property (i.e. the property, not the rights), were material or not. If intellectual property is material, then theft of it necessarily involves *what material* exactly?
You changed the subject. The question was what can be called both existant and also immaterial. Or if you prefer, just give me your definition of the “immaterial” and “existant”.
BTW Erik it would also be good if you could tone down the snark.
They were given to Patrick – and ignored on false basis as I already demonstrated http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/what-is-a-decision-in-phoodoo-world/comment-page-39/#comment-143836
Your last chance has gone by. I don’t entertain any hopes. But you can still shape up whenever you will.
Ditto.
Following your link, I find this:
When something is not physically real, but real nonetheless for some purpose (e.g. logical, theoretical, explanatory purpose) then it serves as an example of immaterial. Got that? And insofar as immaterial has its evident consequences, it’s undeniably real and extant. Also, it’s irrational to deny any concept that is logically inevitable to describe a reality exhaustively.
Is that it?
Bingo. Now let’s see if it’s digestible to you.
If something is real but not real then it’s immaterial?
Makes no sense to me, frankly.
Well, of course. This echos my contention with Keiths. Where are the consequences? You find me some consequences for something immaterial by your definition and I’ll concede you have a point.
You can’t help yourself, can you? 🙂
Examples were provided before you even asked. You, and Patrick, continue to ignore them. Why? For you, is it lack of respect for the people you disagree with, as it is with Patrick?
Hi mung
It’s late. Is it too much trouble to link to these examples of extant immaterial entities?
It seems to me that this thread is going like so many UD discussions go, on one side “material” is taken to mean just matter (as the term suggests, to be sure, but often is not so meant), and on the other side fields are thought to be “material,” energy is thought to be “material,” and information is thought to be “material,” as in information being an aspect of materials//space/energy/fields.
I don’t know, why isn’t it about things being “physical”? Wouldn’t it be likely that there’d be more understanding to argue that everything is physics–or not? Then yes, copyrighted material is physical, whether as digital, represented on paper, or in the brain. Even the other side often agrees that thoughts, sensations, etc., at least have a brain component, and just want to add in something that has absolutely no justification for it.
I have the feeling that this conversation will never get anywhere as long as “material” is the term being used, since it’s going to be understood differently across the divide, no matter what is written.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
It’s why I keep advocating “real” vs “imaginary”!
Here’s a bit of terminology to clarify: philosophers have, for a long time, talked about “the intentional object” (or “objective reality,” in the Scholastic terms). The intentional object is just what is that one is thinking about, when one is thinking.
Intentional objects are, in one sense, ontologically neutral: one can think about things that don’t exist, as well as about things that do. Traditionally, if one’s intentional object is also something that exists, then one’s thoughts about that object can be true.
But a thought about something that doesn’t exist isn’t empty; it still has content. It just doesn’t correspond to anything in the actual world.
Presumably — though I might be wrong about this — for a thought to have content, it must be true in some possible world. I’m not entirely sure we really can have coherent thoughts about square circles. Whenever I try to think of a square circle, I’m trying to combine two distinct intentional objects in one act of judgment, and they don’t fit together. Maybe your phenomenology is different here.
It’s a different question as to what the ontology of intentional objects is, given that some intentional objects correspond to actual objects and some don’t. And there’s the closely related question as to how we determine which intentional objects have real correlates and which ones don’t, which is to say, how we determine which thoughts are true.
The difficulty for a naturalist can be made simpler in some ways (though harder in others) by noting that individual concepts do not refer to individual objects.
Rather, if concepts are inferentially articulated, such that to be a concept is to be a node in an inferential nexus or conceptual framework, then the question is rather twofold: which statements are true in a conceptual framework, and which conceptual frameworks are true of (in a different sense of true!) the world? (A clear case: “there is absolute motion and absolute rest” is true in Newtonian mechanics, though Newtonian mechanics is not true of the world.)
We know that any natural language must contain empirically meaningful terms, where to be empirically meaningful is to be (1) noninferentially deployed in response to occurrences in sensory consciousness and (2) used as constituents of volitions terminating in actions. (E.g. “look, a robin!” is both a response to having occurrent sensory episodes of the seeing-a-robin kind and directs others to do something, namely, to direct their attention to the robin.)
It’s a further question whether the posits of our scientific theories are empirically meaningful in that way, but I think that they are. “Look, a muon!” is to a physicist and “look, an australopithecine!” is a paleontologist what “look, a robin!” is to someone who is acquainted with robins.
I do not think that naturalism requires one to insist that all meaningful terms in a language are empirically meaningful terms. That would be an absurd restriction, since it would mathematical and moral discourse impossible — not to mention all myth, storytelling, art, literature, and poetry!
But this much seems right: naturalism does have to be committed to the idea that empirically meaningful terms are somehow ontologically privileged over all other terms. Empirically meaningful discourse is where the rubber of language hits the road of reality.
Giving up on that is giving up on the only defensible version of naturalism. And indeed non-naturalists have always wanted to deny that — they’ve wanted to say that true mathematical or moral assertions correspond to non-observable reality in exactly the same sense that true empirical assertions correspond to observable reality.
In other words, naturalism can only work if we can really make good on this idea that empirical discourse has a different relation to the world than non-empirical discourse does.
And while I do have some ideas about that, I think it’s clearly going to take a lot of work and it’s definitely not easy.
Agreed — though to be a bit more pedantic (but you know me, can’t resist), I’d prefer “publicly verifiable” over “physical”. The existence of brains can be publicly verified, regardless of whether we can understand brains exclusively in terms of the quantum mechanical properties of their subatomic constituents.
(Assuming here that most brains are small enough or slow-moving enough that we don’t need to worry about relativistic effects.)
Sure I can. I honestly think you should be called Major Indigestion from now on, but since that would be snark, I won’t call you that.
If you want me to unpack the intellectually insulting fallacies in your attempted response, then ask and I’ll be happy to be of service again. Else I will make my final point right now: .
So you don’t really know anything one way or the other.
Got it, that is after all the point
peace
are concepts material things?
peace
Reproduction is not necessary only use. I can steal a copyrighted song with out reproducing any of the actual notes in it If I change the key and use a different instrument .
It’s not stealing to read a book anymore than it’s stealing to admire a car. It is stealing to make an unauthorized copy of a car or book
Something that would be impossible if songs or stories were material things
As Ive said before I think the problem is with the term “immaterial”
“Personal” is a much better term for what I’m advocating
peace
Kantian Naturalist,
A truly commendable effort to get the discussion back on track.
Two propositions in KN’s post that I think merit deep contemplation by everyone* in the audience:
1: But a thought about something that doesn’t exist isn’t empty; it still has content.
If a thought about something that doesn’t exist can be said to have content, then the thought itself must exist, along with its content, despite being about something non-existent. Follow-up questions: What’s the content? Is it physical/material? If yes, then doesn’t it follow that the (representation of the) non-existent thing ends up materially existing anyway and thus cannot be said to be really non-existent? If the content is not material, then hasn’t it been conceded that physicalism** is untenable?
2: In other words, naturalism can only work if we can really make good on this idea that empirical discourse has a different relation to the world than non-empirical discourse does.
Any physicalists/naturalists here up for the challenge to make this idea good?
* Except Alan and Patrick. Else all is lost.
** Theses such as: All real/extant things are physical/material. There’s no evidence of immaterial.
I’m not sure that’s right. It seems to me that all discourse depends on shared understandings, and those shared understandings vary with the circumstances.
Nice little argument there, Fifth.
For one term to be used to define another, you need a two-way equivalency (at a minimum). I’m guessing everyone will concede that what is non-existent is immaterial. So, all you need to do to defend this definition is show that everything that is immaterial must be non-existent, since that is controversial. You have yet to give any support for that contention, except to indicate that it appeals to you.
Since the mind-body problem has existed for millenia, you might understand why your druthers might not be terribly compelling to anybody else.
That one is Erick’s. I would want not to steal his intellectual property 😉
peace
In my view, every single thing in the universe could be physical without it being the case that there is nothing that is non-physical. Seems paradoxical, maybe, but physicality is a property as is being a mental entity. Unless one has a reduction handy–and nobody does, you’ve got properties of matter that can’t be explained in the terms of physics. Maybe they will be someday, but maybe not. Thus, we currently have non-physical properties around. Are such items correctly called ‘immaterial’? Depends what that term is supposed to mean.
Plus it is, for reasons set forth above, hard to make a case for the non-existence of abstracta. Will a great case ever be made? Again, who knows, but it hasn’t been made to date for the eliminability of sets, sentence types, etc. Are these items immaterial? Again, it depends on what’s meant. But it’s pretty clear that, like ideas and pains, they’re not imaginary.
So we wait for partick to say what he means by ‘immateriality.’ he refuses, just keeps saying that nothing has it. Ok, whatever. He is Napolean, after all.
Oops. Sorry, Erik.
You can use it all you want but until there is a physical representation you haven’t stolen anything. How could anyone know?
Correct, property rights require physical property, intellectual property rights require some physical manifestation.
The songs on my iPod are not material?
Obviously I skipped over the whole question of what being “physical” might be. KN went for it, but I doubt that his is a great term to use in having a discussion, even if it would be inevitable that it would get to that point eventually. A mere prelude to the point that I could agree or not, depending on what anyone might mean by “physical,” although I doubt it, since I would certainly be hard to convince that physicality is a property.
I wouldn’t think that either one is a property at all, nor that they are actually different. That is, I think that physicality comes down to being a “mental entity” when all is said and done, if an abstract “entity.”
I consider information to be the unavoidable reduction. How else can we abstract information from experience, except that it be a “mental entity” every bit as much as it is a physical abstraction? Separate the two, and I have no idea how we would have any capability of gaining abstract knowledge.
Maybe we do, maybe we don’t, but “subjective experience” is what gives us information in the first place and then we construct physics out of the abstracted information. If that abstract information is to mean anything, however, it has to be consistent with “mental information,” hence we ought to have the mind agree with physics as well–or to have some reasonably convincing information that it in fact does not. We do not seem to have that, and when drugs and preachers can turn minds as much they sometimes can, the physics/mental compatibility seems the best hypothesis at the present time.
Are they “material” enough to ground physics? Since I can only view physics as an abstraction of thoughts/sensations/etc. in the first place, the only real question I’d have is if there is something else involved in mentation than the “physics” that became apparent via thoughts/sensations/etc., not at all whether the mental can be reduced to physics. It’s physics that necessarily reduces to mentation anyhow.
And I don’t think there’s good evidence for anything other than physics going on in the mind, hence the working hypothesis is physics.
I’m really not sure what that means. Abstracta seem indeed to exist, which explains physics. To my mind, at least.
If we’re going to have computers deal with sets, sentence types, etc., we’re going to have to go for something physical. Program them in. Sure they exist. But I’m no Platonist or other idealist, so I hardly think they’re “out there” anywhere beyond the brain and whatever we program to utilize them (and representations of various kinds, of course).
I don’t know, I guess the fact that I like Nietzsche and Continental philosophy (despite the considerable rubbish) must show here, but I don’t know how much it’s that, either, and how much it’s the fact that I’ll take empiricism and science over any philosophy at all. I can’t even imagine “physics” being separate from “mental entities,” and it seems to me that there can be no difference between information in consciousness and abstract information (like physics), and that the latter would be in serious jeopardy if the information contextual to the abstracted information were affected by anything other than physics (can go awry for various reasons, including GIGO and poor development).
Of course one could say “prove it” and there’d be no way, but it does seem to be a coherent treatment of brain and physics that allows the latter to be accounted for by the former, and then the latter is reciprocally “true” simply because physics is abstracted from “crossed-checked” (intersubjectively sound) mentation. That’s where I’m coming from, at any rate.
Did Napoleon have a Patrick complex?*
Glen Davidson
*Just cracking a joke, Patrick, I have no intention of getting into this feud.
Whoa, whoa, whoa there Patrick, take it easy! Don’t go putting Glen on your hit list now too, he didn’t mean it!
You already have enough enemies whose posts you try to censor and hide. Glen’s on your side, try to remember. Whew, that was a close one! I think you are safe for now.
“intellectual property rights. Is intellectual property material or not? If the work of an author is, given work-instantiation identity theory, necessarily physically instantiated, then it can be stolen only by stealing a physical copy of the work, and not by reproducing the work as a separate physical instance, right? ”
Sorry, so an author creates a specific pattern as a product of his intellect ( intellectual property)the author claims ownership of the pattern legally. So unless you are including patterns of matter as immaterial then it seems like material.
And that would be a specific pattern of matter, right? In other words, if someone takes an English novel (one pattern of matter) and publishes it in Spanish (a different pattern of matter), there’s no theft of intellectual property, right? And it would be okay to rewrite a copyrighted paper manuscript (a specific material) on a laptop (a whole different material, no connection to paper whatsoever). And fashion creators have no right to say “My dress has been stolen” when someone else replicates it – not just with a few changes (this goes without saying), but there’s the fact that the fashion creator still actually has his original dress. Nobody has taken it away.
If these cases still pose a problem in terms of intellectual property rights, then you did not answer the question.
If you concede that we are talking about fundamentally unspecific patterns of matter, then it should be clear that “patterns of matter” is not all there is to it. More emphatically, “patterns of matter” is not what is really at issue.
The brain.
What rot.
Indeed.
I’m not sure naturalism as it stands today needs defending. It’s too useful to discard.
That interface again. Dualism can’t have consequences unless there’s an interface.
And when you say:
Just because stuff is the product of human imagination is not to dismiss it. Even I can appreciate the beauty of the language in the Song of Songs.
So, theft of intellectual property necessarily involves theft of a brain.
Good conclusive answer. Can’t argue with that. We can all go home now.
ETA: Oops, and Alan is back doing the undescribable. Over and out.
I could ony do that if there were consensus on what “immaterial” means. I tend to think it synonymous with “supernatural” – things like souls, gods, minds could be so described. I’m not really wanting to win a debate on dualism vs physicalism. One either thinks the evidence for physicalism is compelling but lacks any chance of providing answers to why is there a universe and so forth, or one is drawn to dualism. Fine, if that is what rocks someone’s boat. They have as much need to justify their position as I have to listen to those justifications.
Absolutely. A problem that has so far been unresolved for millennia might be a tough nut to crack. Some do not appear to have noticed post-enlightenment developments in science though.
That seems reasonable to me, too. (FWIWWAAWL)
Don’t leave on my account, Erik. There’s always the ignore button.
You asked what material it involved.
Are you seriously arguing that ‘intellectual property’ is not tangible? When I make a copy of a computer program, which is ‘intellectual property’ I update the states of many many bits which are states in a physical system. I have take the set of states of one set of bits and cloned them onto another set of bits. To do that I have used many things, one of which was a physical brain.
Those ‘fashion creators’ if asked to demonstrate their ownership of the original designs when they complain about their ‘intellectual property’ being copied will point to physical materials containing those designs. That you can’t ‘touch’ a CAD of a dress with your hands does not make it immaterial. It’s still electrons in particular states. At no time is there a representation of the dress without electrons being involved.
Please make your case.
1) Does someone else have to know for there to be a crime?
2) If materialism was true you have never stolen anything the original physical representation is still intact and probably still in the position of the author
You are still attacking a strawman.
No one said that that matter was not involved. It’s just not all that’s involved
peace
You iPod does not contain songs it contains electronic data that we interpret as songs.
peace
What material specifically is essential here or always involved? Is it “states of bits”? Is it the physical brain? Is it the process/fact of cloning?
Among other things, GMO is considered intellectual property. It may fly to the other guy’s field just so, without any cloning, physical brain, or “states of bits” involved, yet it could constitute a theft of intellectual property. So, none of what you say is essential to intellectual property. Everything seems to be involved somehow, which amounts to ultimately nothing being involved as a matter of essence. Which makes the case for the fact that intellectual property, whatever it is, is no specific instantiation/copy/pattern of matter, but ultimately unspecified and unspecifiable materially.
Highly disputable point. When you can’t touch something, this is what intangible means.
Before being committed to CAD, is the dress already material? Tangible? Yet it is, by your own words, intangible after being committed to CAD. And intangible is one of the characteristics of immaterial.
Another example of immaterial here, let this be my last one: Meanings of words.
We all know what the word “dog” means. It means a dog. Presumably nobody disputes that the word has this meaning. But where is the meaning of the word? Is it materially present in the sequence of the letters d-o-g? If yes, then how come that French “chien”, a whole different sequence of letters, and a different number of them, has the exact same meaning? So, it cannot be that the meaning is materially present in the sequence of letters.
Is the meaning in dogs? Yet we comprehend the meaning of the word without any materially present dog physically attached to the word, so the meaning cannot be in dogs either.
The meaning of the word is a mental association. What is a mental association? It is a trained connection of the word to a specific mental concept or thought content. What is that? How does it work?
Let’s assume, as per physicalism, that mental concepts are necessarily instantiated in brains. We already saw from the example of written words that even if it be granted that words always be materially written, it stands proven that there is no fixed shape in which they must be written in order to have a specific meaning. Any arbitrary shape may have the same meaning, and the same shape may have a different meaning in different contexts. Thus meanings are fundamentally separate from specific words.
We already saw that a specific meaning is not tied to a specific shape when words are written or spoken. On the same analogy, specific thoughts are not tied to specific neural instances. Any thought may need a neural instantiation in the brain, but the connection is fundamentally as arbitrary as with words and meanings, i.e. there is no essential connection whatsoever. Instead, there is a fundamental distinction.
Moreover, different people think in different ways about the same things. The most sluggish and tedious way is to think in terms of words of one’s own native tongue. A faster way is to think in terms of pure meanings, without reference to words. We already saw that meanings are fundamentally distinct from words, so this point should not be contentious. And a still faster way is to think in terms of abstract mental shapes a la geometry or topology with all the advantages of logical shortcuts and metaphysical insights. Those who think this way know what I mean.
Yet all the different ways of thinking about things – and the fact that different people think about them – don’t entail that different things are being thought about. There is another fundamental distinction: The thought and that which it is about. That which the thought is about is the meaning, and the meanings are shared across the community of thinkers, being specific in and of themselves, without a logical necessity of manifestation, but whenever physically manifested according to someone’s will and intention, the relation of the meaning to the physical manifestation is known to be arbitrary and fundamentally distinct from any particular instantiation.
This is why and how meanings are fundamentally distinct from matter, i.e. they are immaterial. Just like intellectual property.
I’m willing to endorse the first option: representations are real things, regardless of whether the object represented exists or not. The concept of “golden mountain” is perfectly real. The question is, of course, what a naturalistic explanation of concepts is going to look like.
It seems this may not be the case.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/r-is-for-red-common-words-share-similar-sounds-in-many-languages/
It just seems as if the meanings are separate from the words (sounds), given how far we are away from the origin of speech.
As demonstrated by that study, it’s not arbitrary at all. The meaning and the physical manifestation are linked.
The link is there.