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?
The meaning. Go re-read.
It follows from my definition that gravity is a real phenomenon.
Alan Fox,
I see. And real equals material, yes?
Alan Fox,
Can you tell me some of the properties of this material? Can you touch it? Look at it? Does it have color? Weight?
Fair point.
I realise that. If you are a theist, as I think you have said, then I guess you are a dualist. Being a physicalist (reality is all there is – or might as well be) I find it hard to hypothesize on the concept of non-physical reality.
Always comes back to the interface for me. If something is non-physical, how can it impinge on our reality?
I can only repeat that the point boils down to definition. My view is that theoretical concepts and the like are aspects of human thought which is a real phenomenon.
It seems we will have to agree to disagree on the definition of “material”.
Depending on the definition, yes.
If you are talking about the effects of gravity, you’d notice if it weren’t there.
I am beginning to think even the material is immaterial.
Alan Fox,
No, I am not talking about the effects. I am talking about gravity.
Or else we would have to call love material by looking at its effects. Or creativity. Or hope.
Love is real!
Just google ‘type-token’ distinction.
Agreement is absolutely irrelevant. It’s just a matter of noting whose theory has more explanatory power and equivocates less.
I’m unaware that either of us has proposed a theory. I’m suggesting the need to invent imaginary explanations for real phenomena is premature when real explanations are unsatisfactory or incomplete.
And I’m not sure what theory you are suggesting as having explanatory power.
Alan Fox,
Ok, but let’s really get real. What’s the definition of real? I don’t know what makes gravity real, and a thought not real?
I’m sorry if I’m not making myself clear. My view, based on my definition of “real”, is that gravity is real and thoughts are real. The subject of thought may be real, concrete, abstract, imaginary but the thought is always real.
Yes, the meaning of the word dog is immaterial , right but when I think of the word dog it is immaterial, the meaning of the letters I spell dog with are immaterial,the patterns formed by the letters are immaterial. The properties of the dog,the letters, of everything seem immaterial, even the meaning of material is immaterial. The patterns of the elements that make up the dog are immaterial.
Is there such a thing as the material world?
I
Alan Fox,
Hm. So now I am really confused. What is NOT real then? Thoughts are material?
Thanks
I know you are unaware of this. But I certainly did to explain several aspects of the immaterial. And I exercised methodical analysis throughout. It’s how things work for me.
Again, I know you are unaware of this. It’s how things work for you.
The thought, the process of thinking, is real. The content of the thought is not limited to reality. Imagination (rather the subject of imagination) is not limited to reality.
There’s a missing word. “Try”, perhaps? In this thread? Perhaps, if not too much trouble, you could link to it.
You can think about the material world too. You can even have a life, or something.
You notice stuff. How unexpectedly kind!
No, it’s an ellipsis that you need to fill from your own sentence that I was responding to. (My native language is highly elliptical, prone to drop parts of sentence.) The complete sentence would be:
But I certainly did propose theories to explain several aspects of the immaterial.
For example in this post I set forth a theory of language acquisition http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/what-is-a-decision-in-phoodoo-world/comment-page-41/#comment-144056
Whereas my last long post is a theory about the nature of language.
Everytime I hit my thumb with the meaning of the word hammer.
Glen got into this question in a lengthy post or two (way) above. I admit I didn’t understand much of them myself, but maybe you’ll find them helpful.
At first glance, there’s quite a bit that sounds reasonable to me but the evolutionary process that took the human species from it’s bifurcation from the last shared ape ancestor involved the development of large brains, auditory and vocalising adaptations. I suspect these language-friendly adaptations developed because language was also evolving from the already sophisticated vocal communication that was already present and is found in other extant ape and monkey species (macaques being an excellent example).
Whether one can separate the flowering of human thought and imagination from the evolution of highly complex language is possibly getting somewhat off-topic for this thread.
And nothing there suggests to me that we need an immaterial element to explain the process.
Indeed, nothing suggests that. Except logic, if that matters.
You write words to express meanings, right? So meanings pre-exist the words. Where? How? Can you touch them? See them? If not, then they are non-physical, by definition. Sure, meanings exist in association with written words too, but we know this is not exclusively so. Let’s not be unscientifically reductive and illogically conflating and equivocating. Let’s be thoroughly analytical.
ETA: Some say meanings are just representations. Does it follow from here that they don’t exist or unreal? They work, don’t they? Even more, they are inevitably in use. There would be hardly any life without them. So they exist. But where and how? If not materially, then they must exist immaterially. Simple deduction.
Some say meanings are like perceptions, impressed on us by outside world. But this is not quite so with human concepts. Human concepts are formulated in the mind, then spoken and written as words, so instead of being impressions from the outside world, they are instead used to impress the outside world. They exist in a very serious consequential manner.
Though I have no idea what you mean either by ‘there’ or by ‘process,’ I do know that as you’ve defined ‘immaterial’ it’s definitely true that nothing immaterial is needed to explain any process anywhere.
There’s no evidence that I’m aware of that could ever be found about the precise details of language development in humans but there is enough indirect evidence to draw some inferences. And I’d hazard the guess that the development of language occurred in parallel with the change from sociality to eusociality.
Well, exactly. Whether you decide to call words immaterial or not is dictated by the definition you choose to work with.
I’m not a reductionist but I am a physicalist so I would say that words are physical when existing only as thoughts.
Yes, but you choose your definitions in the way that makes sense and based on how reality works. Or not.
One who adheres to the equation material=real=existent is worse than a reductionist. He is eliminativist.
But you may have some nuance with which you can surprise people.
“There” refers to the content of Erik’s theory. “Process” – the process whereby language evolved in humans.
Sorry if that sounds trite. It just seems to me that people leap to supernatural/immaterial/imaginary explanations before exhausting the possibility of a real explanation. There has been some conflation with abstract ideas that hasn’t helped.
I’ll work on it! 🙂
For successful communication, it’s helpful to make available one’s working definition. (Not aimed at you specifically, just a general observation).
Not trite, it follows as night does day that if ‘immaterail’ means ‘unreal’ then immaterial items aren’t responsible for anything whatever.
Which brings us back full-circle. How can God kick a football? If God intervenes in the real world, what mechanism does she use?
Presupposition?
Glen Davidson
Half circle, tops.
I don’t have a firm commitment to what the conceptual contents are of a newborn’s mind, though there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that conceptual development starts happening very soon after birth. (See The Philosophical Baby.)
However, I do not think that we come into the world with a fully-fledged conceptual system already “installed” and that just needs to be associated with words in order to be communicated. I think that picture ultimately rests on conflating what it is like to learn a second language with what it is like to acquire one’s first language.
On my view, acquiring a first language is acquiring a conceptual framework. Whereas some might think that we first have the capacity to notice universals, particulars, resemblances, sorts, kinds and then talk about them, I quite thoroughly disagree; on my view, to even have the capacity to notice such things is to be able to talk about them. Nonhuman animals and human infants can certainly discriminate and classify in fairly rudimentary ways, but it’s only as human neuronal connections are shaped and pruned by social interaction that the concepts expressible in language are acquired.
In short, we are not born with minds fully equipped with conceptual contents, but we become minded, in the normal human ways in which human beings are minded, as we acquire language and culture. To steal a line from Beauvoir: one is not born, but rather becomes, a rational animal.
That seems right to me. Tomasello has a really interesting account of the transition from sociality to eusociality in what he calls “shared intentionality”. He thinks that at least the great apes, and probably most mammals, have “individual intentionality”: they can think, reason, and infer, but they do so only implicitly and only in order to satisfy strategic goals.
To get at uniquely human cognitive abilities, such as the ability to distinguish between what is subjectively apparent to oneself and what is truly real, one needs the ability to share perspectives and thereby become aware of one’s perspective as one’s perspective. That requires at least “joint intentionality” (two persons with distinct perspectives and roles with a joint goal) and probably also what he calls “collective intentionality” (being able to think of oneself as a member of a social group, a “we”).
In his account, there’s a nice feedback loop between the evolution of language and the evolution of shared intentionality. I think that something like that is the best account we presently have as to how human rationality evolved from animal cognition.
Either way it’s intellectually insulting.
Did someone finally define “material”?
Yep. But for Alan, it is precisely that immateriality that makes it material. Go figure. 🙂
And the objects of thought, what are they?
Bingo. I tire of doing Alan’s thinking for him. It’s thankless, and entirely ineffective. Kudos to Erik.
Alan:
Erik:
Alan:
Erik:
You can make that clear in English by simply placing a comma after “did”:
Alan:
Erik, revised:
phoodoo,
You didn’t even have to click on the link, phoodoo. I quoted the relevant part:
Surely even you can follow that simple logic.
LOL!
You mean like understanding the law of identity? Or the law of non-contradiction? Or the law of the excluded middle?
Atheists fail at simple logic.
That’s not what I said.
Think of your own earlier post: There’s thought and there’s content. On my view, when we think, we take a pre-existing, fairly unshaped content and we shape it. The content is at first vague, but with some working, a structure (a conceptual system) is born. This conceptual system can be enhanced, it can correspond to the outside world, it can be taken and applied to anything by a flexible mind, or it can be stuck operating with its preconceived notions in a sluggish mind.
The conceptual framework does not come preinstalled, but there has to be something to build a conceptual framework from. It is called mind.
Thus for you, conceptual framework is learned entirely from others. Nobody can be innovative. In my view, conceptual framework can also be formed by thinking by oneself. There can be original thinkers.
Actually, it suffices to compare one’s own earlier insight/view/impression with a current one. It requires an ability to retain impressions and to keep psychological distance from them as objects of thought. A prodigious mind can progress even when other people have nigh nothing to teach him, even though everything is of course easier sharing in cooperation.
keiths:
Alan :
Erik:
Or to recognize how ineffective it renders his argument.
Questioner: How do you know that the immaterial doesn’t exist?
Alan: I’ve defined it that way.
Questioner: How do you know that supernatural entities don’t exist?
Alan: I’ve defined ‘supernatural’ to mean ‘unreal’.
I suspect that in Alan’s World there is no such thing as effectiveness of an argument. He assumes that everybody is as irresponsible with definitions as him. Perhaps even that there’s no such thing as irresponsibility with definitions. It’s a libertarian free world and definitions are free game!