/lit/ - Literature

>>22900887
Reject materialism. Live like a pathetic slave, be unable to provide for anyone, send your kids to public schools to be brainwashed by sycophants, live in a rented box, eat bugs and worms. I will own all the stuff you don’t.

>>22900903
Look out, the tripfag is going to make glib contrarian replies to every thread on the front page for a few hours! This is his character's big debut!

>>22900909
This place is as much an echo chamber as old twitter was. You should be thanking me for being here.

>>22900887
> How do I refute materialism?
Listen, there are almost unlimited angles of attack, but there are as many "materialisms" as well. The vulgar materialism of scientism has basically nothing in common with, for example, dialectical materialism. You have to be more precise about what you want to accomplish before we can advise you.

Cut off one of your arms and try to convince yourself that its an illusion you hypocritical idealist. It's all the same with you idealistic cowards, at least some hindus and buddhists live by this kind of practice, you on the other hand have to delude yourself by starting an argument with nobodies on the internet.

>>22900903
Metaphysical materialism, not materialism the vice, retard.
>>22900953
Oh boy, the second coming of the sam johnson refutation.

>>22900887
I see absolutely no reason to believe there's such a thing as the immaterial

>>22901036
double slit experiment

>>22901036
So you have no conciousness? Like a plant?

The problem is what constitutes material isn’t rigorously defined. Although widely believed to be a component of the philosophy of science, materialism is ironically not falsifiable at all since every new fact about the universe that the scientific method produces can be forced into the rather loose framework of materialism with enough word rearranging.

>>22900903
anon, this is embarrassing. thatbisnt what he is talking about at all.

>>22900903
>>22900916
>Hysto
more like Hylic
AHAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH

>>22900887
caveman44 already refuted that pic

>>22901036
Are math theorems still true if nobody is there to deduce them? If so how come? How do they maintain this state?

>>22900953
>the only alternative to materialism is idealism
I hate you anon.

>>22901071
Your consciousness is immaterial? So if I shot you in the head you wouldn't stop being conscious?

>>22901194
Well do you know for a fact he would or wouldn't?

>>22901199
I'm pretty confident that if your head blown off your not conscious anymore.

>>22900887
Values can arise from material causes. Everything you feel and think arises from material causes. The simple act of recognizing that divine or spiritual thinking is just a form of cope or manipulation does not diminish the wondrous things in reality.

Knowledge begins with the recognition that you can only know for sure that your own experience exists and that you can merely infer propositions that flow from this. Knowledge is being very careful and humble and ensuring every link of inference has a solid base and that the subsequent model of reality functions.

>>22901039
Even accepting the proposed conclusion that the double slit people put forward just means that material can have several potential states at once. This is just an observation of a potential trait that material things have, not the discovery of some immaterial phenomenon.

>>22901190
Math theorems are true in the sense that they are ways to conceptualize patterns in reality. Let me put it this way, does a snail mathematically calculate the Golden Ratio when constructing it's shell or does it simply arise from the laws of the universe operating over time?

>>22901194
Body sure is material, but the conciousness isn't. You didn't know your depraved (clearly read by others, youre unoriginal) thoughts are weightless?

>>22901199
If a surgeon opens your skull and does specific things to your brain, we can reliably predict alterations to your consciousness, moods, and behavior.

>>22901230
>Body sure is material, but the conciousness isn't
So you think that if your head gets obliterated you're still going to be conscious? What is it about /lit/ that attracts these schizos. I'm going to call you the Headless Horseman.

>>22901194
Matter only ‘exists’ via consciousness knowing it
Consciousness is always necessarily embodied
Idealism and materialism are both reductionist
Dualism with its harsh distinction between them, ignores the reciprocal and mutually-defining relationship between mind and body

>>22900887
>Are there any living philosophers who reject it?
Yes me.
>How do I refute materialism?
There is no stable definition of matter that does not dissolve into more ambiguous concepts. Moreover, the physical universe is 68% composed of non-baryonic "dark matter" which does not interact with light or with the rest of the material universe save through gravity. So even within physics, there is a schism in our understanding of matter. No universal blanket statement such as "everything consists of matter" is tenable even scientifically since most of the mass in the universe is non-baryonic. Furthermore the definition of a particle dissolves under scrutiny. Particles are also waves, and a wave is more of a process than an object.

>>22901255
>Matter only ‘exists’ via consciousness knowing it
An even goofier position. You think that if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it fall then the tree doesn't exist. Fucking retarded.

>>22901277
So your position is that modern science isn't materialist? Since all of what you said is part of physics.

>>22901207
You do not have a single proof of this.

>>22901233
We can also do similar predictions about them doing this to your stomach, or other organs.

>>22900903
I see you have no idea what sycophant means.

>>22901291
>You do not have a single proof of this.
Besides the death of every human that has had their head destroyed. To the extent that we can tell someone is conscious your head getting blown off stops you being conscious. Are you going to talk about spooky ghosts now?

>>22901307
You can use any names for it you want, neither you nor anyone has ever produced any proof that the dead aren't conscious.
All we have is proof that the dead can no longer communicate with us or use their bodies.

But we know that there are many non permanent versions of this (such as sleep).

Ultimately consciousness is mysterious, and your tiptoeing around this reality is frankly a bit ridiculous.

>>22901289
NTA but like I said in another post materialism just parasitically morphs itself around the discoveries of the sciences. It’s best to keep impotent metaphysical pontificating out of epistemology.

>>22901321
>Ultimately consciousness is mysterious, and your tiptoeing around this reality is frankly a bit ridiculous.
You brought up consciousness as an example of something immaterial. Now you're forced to admit you don't know what consciousness is. I'm not the one being ridiculous here.

>>22901289
I think that's where it's headed, yes. I'm a Machian in this regard (after the physicist-turned-philosopher Ernst Mach). I believe all physics can hope to do is describe the stable order of perceptions-- it is a branch of phenomenology.

Certainly quantum physics, specifically the Bell test, violates the principle of local realism, which at minimum disproves the classical materialist viewpoint of Newton. Newtonian materialism is the codification of common sense intuitions, an extrapolation of logic which does not hold up.

I can't prove it but I suspect consciousness has a more fundamental role in reality than once conceived. I suspect quantum mechanics and consciousness are weirdly connected in ways our brain is not evolved to intuitively understand. For the longest time this viewpoint has been dismissed in science as new-age quackery but there is no some inroads to it being accepted.

I also think the shadow of Kant looms large over modern science, although I disagree that the thing-in-itself is absolutely unknowable. I'm most attracted to Schopenhauer's panpsychist leanings, that the thing-in-itself has psychical properties (the perceiving subject is the flip-side of reality). I also like Schopenhauer's treatment of materialism. He doesn't outright deny the existence of matter, but matter exists only in representation, but there is a subject to every object, and every object is a subject, so matter is dual-aspected. This is not to say every atom is a little eyeball, but everything has "something it's like" to be it, no matter how minute and incomprehensible that sensation is to our minds.

Donald Hoffman is worth a listen he may be onto something. It's the whole idea that the empirical universe is one gian shared perception of enchained conscious agents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRa8r5xOaAA

>>22900887
If you are posting here you likely aren't going to be refuting it anytime soon. Rejecting it isn't equitable to refuting it, you can read the philosophies of idealist philosophers and profess yourself to be an idealist.

>>22901139
Fuck off retarded vagina

>>22901358
>you have to defend any position taken against me on an anonymous imageboard without ids
Retard.

>>22901390
>It's the whole idea that the empirical universe is one gian shared perception of enchained conscious agents.
This is basically the yogācāra buddhist ‘container universe’ theory

>>22901390
To quote Hoffman:
>Our untutored categories of space, time and objects would lead us to expect that two electrons a billion light years apart are separate entities; in fact, because of entanglement, they are a single entity with a unity that transcends space and time. This is a puzzle for proponents of faithful depiction, but not for interface theory. Space, time and separate objects are useful fictions of our interface, not faithful depictions of objective reality.

>>22901417
>I like to try and score points in arguments where I don't know what is going on
The post I originally responded to >>22901071. I assume you would agree that using consciousness as an example of something immaterial is stupid.

>>22901437
I'm a metaphysical skeptic, I don't think we know the nature of reality, nor do we have the means to know it, and that any model is a practical conceit.

Idealism and materialism are as true, which is to say that there's no way to know, but they both seem to work well for some purposes.

>>22901420
Basically. Eastern philosophy probably has the answers IMO, but modern science stems from very different philosophical traditions. It doesn't have a ready-made vocabulary to construct an ontology for this worldview. The matter is not made any easier by the fact that eastern philosophy and religion are not clearly differentiated as they so often are in the west.

It's no argument but it's still worth noting that many of the pioneering physicists of the last century, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Bohm, Oppenheimer were heavily influenced by eastern philosophy. Their intuitions told them this was the truth, though they lacked the conceptual foundations to unify the science with it.

>>22900887
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#CaseAgaiPhysIQualCons

>>22901435
Personally, I like ontic structural realism. Structure is ontologically basic. It's relations all the way down with no relata. That is what science points towards and explains things like entanglement.

>>22901447
I largely agree. Material is a useful tool for some models. I do believe that we can induce breakthroughs in the future which will allow us to recontextualize “reality” as we currently think of it. However, I believe that would require going beyond the bounds of consciousness in a manner that is necessarily impossible to imagine while still bounded by consciousness.

>>22900887
>How do I refute materialism?
Hard problem of consciousness. Materialism cannot account for qualia. According to materialism we should be p-zombies with no phenomenal experience.

>>22900887
Materialism is laughably false, Anon. It's completely absurd. Start with the Greeks, but here are some of the topics you need to research:
>realism
>nominalism
>teleology, especially as it relates to mind, called intentionality
>hard problem of consciousness
>qualia

Materialism isn't even complete. What are the laws and the objects of materialism? Nobody knows. Best we have is scientific models which are limited to their specific domain of applications and limited by their idealized assumptions. As long as no unified theory of everything has been accomplished, "materialism" remains an empty buzzword.

>>22901296
There is neural tissue spread across the body, yes this is true.

>>22901870
Should’ve been the first reply

>>22901881
>Every single topic discusses the properties of material objects
Whew

>>22900887

You don't have to refute it.

And just like that, it is retooted. Thank me later, allogator.

>>22901914
2 more weeks!

>>22900887
Materialists believe in shit like irreducible billiard balls flying around in space that came out of nothing and if you arrange enough of these balls in the right way you get a perceiver who is himself nothing but billiard balls perceiving billiard balls etc.

>>22901489
How do I refute this refutation of materialism?

>>22901321
You are still conscious when you sleep, dummy, your eyes and ears are just turned off

>>22900887
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq3HkiUOwCU

Matter is congealed and hardened spirit. There ya go kid.

>>22902597
Pierceian chad detected. Or as he put it, matter is "effete mind". Matter is a phase of mind and vice versa, echoing Spinoza's Deus sive Natura. Science has generally been playing catch up with Peirce for well over a century now, and I think his objective idealism, which dissolves the arbitrary distinction between mind and matter, is the way forward. According to Peirce, matter is just "mental substance" that has lost all its elasticity to habit. The laws of nature are emergent. At one point in the history of the universe the laws of physics might have been different. There is nothing immutable about them. They are merely the habits of mind which have become so regular as to be irreversible. His synchism or principle of continuity holds that all phenomena of nature are continuous, the subject interpenetrates the object, and so on.

>>22900976
so no rebuttal for this, just another lazy ad homnime?

>>22903065
What proof do you have they are irreversible? Do not paradigms of thought change over time? The impossible becomes the cutting edge? Is this solidity of thought an area of thought that can become an specialty of techno?

>>22901514
Sup Ace?

Cavitation is just bubbles.

>>22900916
Kill yourself.

>>22900887
Water: 35 liters, Carbon: 20 kg, Ammonia: 4 liters, Lime:1.5 kg, Phosphrus: 800 g, salt: 250g, saltpeter:100g, Sulfer: 80g, Fluorine: 7.5 g, iron: 5.6 g, Silicon: 3g, and 15 other elements in small quantities.... that's the total chemical makeup of the average adult body. Modern science knows all of this, but there has never been a single example of successful human transmutation. It's like there's some missing ingredient..... Scientists have been trying to find it for hundreds of years, pouring tons of money into research, and to this day they don't have a theory.

>>22901870
>Materialism cannot account for qualia
How can you be sure about this?

>>22900887
Read Abbe Bergier's refutation of D'Holbach. I hope you can read French haha.

>>22904284
Nothim but it's self evident. You don't perceive information directly like the frequency of a color, instead you perceive the color triggered by the frequency. Then memories don't need a trigger. Even black is a qualitative experience.

>>22905322
I get what qualia is, but I don't see how it's self-evidently something that cannot ever be explained by physical theory as an analogue. Also, theory is way less direct than experience.

>>22900887
God, I really wish I could understand why people want to reject materialism. As far as I can tell it makes literally no difference. The waves and particles bopping each other around continue bopping each other around regardless of whether there's any immaterial thing behind it or not. But you can directly study the waves and particles, while you can only pontificate about the immaterial thing. It's just complicating your ontology with no actual reward for it. You ultimately have to describe behavior and experience exactly the the same, but in one case you have an impenetrable-in-principle mystery box with no explanatory power and in the other you get to assume you have all the pieces, at least until you find out for sure that you don't.

>>22901870
>Materialism cannot account for qualia.
I keep hearing this and I don't at all understand why people think it's true. Under materialism qualia JUST IS being the brain or whatever being in a particular state. There's nothing over and above the material state, but since the brain is one discrete structure and other things exist than that, the brain "experiences" its state and no other system does. Experience though JUST IS being that object in that state. Objects not being other objects is an inevitable consequence of multiple discrete (material) entities existing.

>>22900887
I dislike that image so much. It's like it exists only so you can go hmm yes quite the first time you see it and then recognize it for how reddit it is the next time you stumble upon it. Well this is the hundredth time for me and I'm finally calling it out.

>>22906443
Your dislike isn't much of a rebuttal.

>>22905765
if that's true why haven't they been able to manipulate or provide a complete explanation of how one, at least one very simple experience is produced and show how it works and why it works. should be pretty easy if it's all in the brain

>>22905765
You're missing the point. Applying Occam's razor, there's no reason for an information system to perceive or be aware. Your "JUST IS" is a placeholder for an explanation for why something additional to the object's state is happening in parellel with it.

>>22900887
Bernardo Kastrup

who feels it knows it

>>22900887
The pic in the OP is not a regutationf of materialism, it is a refutation of nihilism. The stance Mickey proposes is actually very Nietzschean. Can we just permaban retards already?

>>22902523
Did you actually fail kindergarten?

>>22901870
>Materialism cannot account for qualia.
It is more so the case that language is insufficient to explain such experiences. Bu go ahead: be retarded.

>>22907482
>The pic in the OP is not a regutationf of materialism
Where does OP say that the pic is a refutation of materialism?
>Can we just permaban retards already?

>>22907498
Language is materialism. See Chatgpt.

>>22907526
Use your fucking brain for a change, retard.
Donald Duck:
>Nothing matters (aka nihilism)
Mickey Mouse:
>Actually it does matter

>>22907564
>Source: chatgpt
my sides

>>22907526
Forgot to add: there is no explicit mention of it refuting anything, which is precisely why retards think it is a refutation of materialism (see OP and dussin of other posts).

>>22901036
Are your thoughts material, retard?

>>22907619
(NTA.) Of course. They are the electrochemical activity of particles moving around. Is the movement of a thrown ball material, retard?

>>22907589
The fact that chatgpt is linguistically more capable than you shows how trivial language is.

>>22907636
Are you even aware of the central disagrement? You haven’t even made a single argument beyond ”muh chatgpt is more intelligent than you because it quite literally operates with 6 gorllion cores.” What I disagreed on was the notion that materialism could be disregarded based on subjective experiences that could not be accurately described to another through the use of langauge. The problem, according to me, is then not that materialism is false but that language is insufficient in explainging certain things.

>Language is materialism
Define both concepts firstly—and try to not use chatgpt, ok? Retard-kun?

>>22907633
As Schopenhauer pointed out, that constitutes a petitio principii by assuming that matter exists independently of the subject's cognition. This is a fundamental error. Materialism posits matter, and time and space with it, as existing par excellence, and skips the relation to the subject, in which all this exists in relation to. It further presupposes the law of causality as the guide by which it wishes to proceed, taking it as the intrinsically existing order of things, consequently skipping the intellect, in which the assumption of causality exists.

>>22907657
>is then not that materialism is false but that language is insufficient in explainging certain things.
Language supervenes upon the material and hence is limited by the same limitations as materialism. You fucktard don't even understand the p-zombie thought experiment. Chatgpt is unironically more insightful than you.

>>22907679
Pain is induced through a chemical reaction. Can you accurately describe pain without saying something like ”it hurts?”

>p-zombie
More like solipsism-lite. Have fun deluding yourself that your special or some shit.

>>22907676
>As Schopenhauer (1788–1860) flung bullshit at the proverbial wall and hoped it would stick, decades before Ramón y Cajal's drawings of neural arbors, a century before Hodgkin & Huxley's differential equation modeling a squid's axon, almost two centuries before artificial cognition
One frappuccino, boy, with haste, please.

>>22907690
>Pain is induced through a chemical reaction.
Not necessarily. You can experience pain without the typical physiological causes. But doctors will then just gaslight you and dismiss it as "psychosomatic".

>>22907903
The experience of pain is itself the chemical reaction of a spike train, wherever the spike train starts. The origin of the spike train may be endogenous to the brain, in which case we say it's psychosomatic, or it may travel along an axon in your extremity if you stub your finger or toe. It doesn't actually stop being a chemical reaction.

>>22907690
>solipsism
My man, you literally cannot believe that you even exist with your retarded ass electrochemistry autism.
Pain is an experience that is tied to you and not some hypothetical matter.

>>22906826
They have been able to do basic manipulations of brain, they know they can affect it with drugs for sure. That gay little neuralink project at least is able to map activations that are tangential to experience, but we don't have the pigs' attestation. But it's still a ridiculously complex system, and one that's considered extremely unethical to invasively study while it's still functional.
>>22906916
You're applying occam's razor wrong. Here's the right way to apply it.
1) a physical system exists
2) it reports having experiences
Therefore
3) having experiences is a property of certain physical systems.
Adding a whole inaccessible layer of ontology to account for something that MIGHT be accounted for by established facts is leaping to conclusions and adding complexity that's not called for at all
>there's no reason for an information system to perceive or be aware
What the fuck are you talking about? The information systems have sense organs to inform their internal logic and subsequent actions. Why would you assume perception is something "extra", when the absolute simplest explanation is that it's what-it-is to recieve that information and react to it.
Besides which, there's no reason for physical systems NOT to be aware either. Based on what do you assume computers lack qualia? Or if physical function and complexity isn't part of conciousness, why shouldn't a rock have qualia as well? Do you have direct epistemic access to the nonphysical components of all physical systems?
It seems like you're making a ton of unfounded assumptions to reach a predetermined conclusion.

>>22907913
It isn't even a chemical reaction as the feeling of pain is not present in these bits of matter.

>>22907927
I'm experiencing a little difficulty making sense of this retarded-ass statement, sorry! The feeling of pain is a way for the matter of a nervous system to be arranged. What bits of matter? I just arranged, through my actions, for a part of your screen to say the letter "א." Does that mean "א" is not present in the bits of matter that make up your screen? Is it useful in any way to claim that it isn't?

>>22907913
What is it about the "spike train" that causes the experience? If we replicated the same electric patterns with some wires and switches, would that circuit experience pain?

>>22907943
>replicated the same electric patterns with some wires and switches, would that circuit experience pain?
Yes, of course, if we replicated your entire nervous system as wires and switches that behaved identically, it would be carrying out the same computation as your nervous system is. If we programmed a simulation of the fluid dynamics of Lukyanov's water integrator, the simulation would be solving the same differential equation as the water integrator. If we ran a program on two different computers, it would be the same process. If we slid the beads of an abacus to compute two and two, it wouldn't matter whether the beads were red or black or rainbow-colored—the nature of the computation would be the same. The underlying substrate that computes the process of pain doesn't matter either.

>>22907958
How does it feel to be cognitively inferior to ChadGPT?

>>22907926
>Adding a whole inaccessible layer of ontology to account for something that MIGHT be accounted for
That's essentially what matter is.
>>22907942
No, everything you experience is in your mind. Do you know that pain you feel when someone pinches your arm? How can that be present in this "spike" or whatever? Or better yet, can you imagine a white car in your head? Is the white car literally printed on your brain? Where is it?

>>22907958
Of course, you don't really know that and you are evidently not a neuroscientist. The brain is very malleable. Also, where are your memories stored? Can you point that out for me?

>>22907703
You ignored the argument???

>>22900916
I'm not surprised that the retard who wants a name on a Siamese anonymous spice trading forum is this self-important. Your mother should have swallowed you instead.

>>22907489
Are you actually illiterate?

>>22907926
>They have been able to do basic manipulations of brain, they know they can affect it with drugs for sure. That gay little neuralink project at least is able to map activations that are tangential to experience
on a materialist level what stops them from
a) do a brain scan of someone while he sees "X" thing
b) recreate that "X" thing in an experiment
c) person should have the same experience and "see "X" without seeing "X"

how many years of Neuroscience to they need to say "hey maybe the premise is wrong and we need to change the materialist model"

>>22908004
>Do you know that pain you feel when someone pinches your arm? How can that be present in this "spike" or whatever?
Again, it's not "present in this spike." It literally is the spike train. A spike train is the pattern of rising and falling action potentials in neurons. The experience of pain is literally the pattern of these rising and falling action potentials across the nervous system. Rising and falling action potentials is literally the way a nervous system has an experience of anything—pain or mathematical thought or friendship or sensing a white car.
>Or better yet, can you imagine a white car in your head?
Sure.
>Is the white car literally printed on your brain?
Sure. Part of the brain arranges itself to reproduce the spike train that happens when the brain senses through eyes electromagnetic fields reflected off a white car. This is what remembering is. You can read this white car off the brain's spiking activity in the same sense your brain reads the letter "א" off your screen: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2023.11.024..
>Where is it?
Distributed across the brain: https://youtu.be/X5trRLX7PQY

>>22908015
You're retarded.

>>22908025
>You ignored the argument
Suppose you gave me a mathematical "proof" that one equaled zero. I wouldn't need to pay attention to this argument and look for the error in it to know the argument was erroneous—I would already know this from the fact that it proved a falsehood, and could just not spend the mental effort on looking for the error. Whatever Schopenhauer theorized, our subsequent success with... GPT... shows that his argument has some kind of error, an equivocation or other mental blunder of some sort. I don't need to find this error to know that the argument can be safely ignored—it "proves" something that contradicts observable artificial cognition built upon materialist premises.

>>22905739
Anti-materialists are just the vitalists of our time. Just the wheel of history turning.

Materialism is nonsense given that metaphysics is nonsense.

>>22908004
You are aware of the fact that Ai can actually read minds know, are you not? Thoughts and all.

>>22908081

This guy explains the obvious step by step to the retards but they continue to beat their retarded drum. Anyone who isn't a materialist either:
1. has a very limited interdisciplinary understanding of the world
2. is larping as a le Greek or le 1800s philologist
3. has a religious bias they're arguing in favor of
4. is incapable of understanding evidence when it goes against their retarded views and has to use semantics and gaps in language to support them

>>22908086
Truth. For the retards: if there is some secret third thing, which there is just as much reason for there to not be as there is for there to be one, if we are completely unable to access it then it's a dead concept not even worth serious discussion. it's just an exercise in using guesswork to obscure what we can know.

>>22908062
Again, trying to do this type of thing really bumps up against ethics, but I also think you grossly overestimate how solved material problems are.
Further, brains aren't all manufactured to spec at some factory somewhere, they're meaningfully different. It may even be impossible for two people to have the same experience. Either way, that would be a long way off.

>>22908004
>That's essentially what matter is.
Oh, gotcha. Didn't realize that was your position. Well there's literally no way I can produce contrary evidence, all I can tell you is in my experience it's way more useful to act as if the world I experience exists in itself and I'm part of it than that it's all something I imagine. It gets me better outcomes.

>>22905739
people don't "want" to reject materialism. it's simply a wrong and outdated worldview.
>As far as I can tell it makes literally no difference.
you are defaulting to a position that can't explain the only thing that you know: your experience. you say there is material quality to the world when materialism rejects all possible qualities from the thing you want to explain, it's ridiculous. and then you try to explain your experience in terms of that thing you could never access, and in turn creates your qualities.
you are the one complicating your ontology trying to remove the very own thing reality is made of.

>>22908270
>Again, trying to do this type of thing really bumps up against ethics
anon, don't look up trans surgeries
if they could do it, they WOULD do it.

>>22908293
No matter how much I reject it, the material world continues to appear to exist. It presents complicated patterns that admit of logical and experimental analysis. When I act as if it is real, I can interact with it, as part of it, and arrange circumstances in predictable ways. I can even investigate and discover underlying principles that were always there.
When I try to affect my experience without treating the external world as if it exists, I can't do it. The hypothetical external world bashes its way back in sooner or later, no matter what I try.
So it seems to me that I have very good pragmatic reasons for accepting that material exists, and having accepted that, no pressing reason to believe that I am not part of it.

>>22908345
rejecting materialism doesn't deny an exterior reality to your senses, you also call it an appearance. you can interact with the appearance, but the stuff is made out of is not the appearance.

>>22900927
What’s the common trait all those “materialisms” share, retard?

>>22900887
Yes, very many. "Materialism," is hardly a thing anymore because it is demonstrable that not everything that exists in matter. Now we talk of "physicalism."

Physicalism has significant coherence problems. Check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles on physicalism for an overview. Key difficulties are Hemple's Dilemma and coherently formulating definitions of superveniance and the casual closure principle.

Further, there is the issue of reductionism and smallism, the latter being the claim that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller, "fundemental" parts. The claim here is that anything that is "fundemental" must be very small. There is a problem here in that there is not good empirical support for this being true and there is no rational reason why it must be true.

It strong emergence exists, then strongly emergent things would be "fundemental." Jaegeon Kim pretty much shut the door on strong emergence given a substance metaphysics, but not a process metaphysics. Physicalism in most of its forms is a substance metaphysics. But we have many reasons to suggest a process metaphysics describes reality better; pancomputationalism is a process view and is embraced by most of the whose who of physics, many of whom also argue for strong emergence (there is also the idea that universal fields, not particles are fundemental in QFT).

Without reduction, physicalism starts to become meaningless. The causal closure principle becomes moot because mental events are fundemental, and have causal efficacy. You end up with a mono process that gives rise to both mental events and external objects, and it is not clear if it is in any way coherent to claim that such a process is "physical," as opposed to mental. Physicalism is very much defined by what it is not, not idealism, but in a process metaphysic it is unclear if idealism vs physicalism is even a useful distinction. There is no substance to be physical or mental, and there are no sui generis substances.

Physicalism is popular by inertia but even it's proponents recognize it is an ontology in crisis.

Also, conciousness makes a very good case for strong emergence, and Kim's work seems to show that strong emergence will be a death blow for most types of physicalism.

>>22908402
Also, you need to distinguish between naturalism and physicalism. People often conflate these. Naturalism might also fall victim to Hemple's Dilemma.

The Dilemma is this. Let's say we say "physicalism is the claim that all things reduce to physics." This claim is not currently true. Many phenomena, even basic ones like molecular structure, have not been successfully reduced to physics. So it can't be that current physics explains everything that is.

So the claim needs to be "everything will reduce to a complete physics."

Well what does this mean? Suppose empirical research ends up demonstrating that panpsychism is true, that souls and ghosts have physical being, etc. Then we would have to say "souls and spirits are physical." The problem is, this makes the term physical completely vacuous. Physical just ends up meaning "whatever we have good reason to believe exists," in which case, the label isn't doing any explanation. It becomes "real things are real."

People also often conflate physicalism with science. They are not the same. The former is a philosophical position.

Then people conflate physicalism in philosophy of mind, the idea that the mind emerges from the interaction of the body and the environment (no sui generis soul) with physicalism as an ontology. The former is much easier to support than the latter and also much easier to formulate coherently.

>>22908424
>Many phenomena, even basic ones like molecular structure, have not been successfully reduced to physics.
Bobby has read a list of the rules of chess but hasn't found how to win at chess. Therefore, claims Bobby, a game of chess isn't reducible to the rules of chess. (No, Bobby is just retarded.)

>>22908138
>"If I can't think up a good solution to something it is meaningless, should be eliminated, or is a pseudo problem."

Why did he and Russell think this was a supportable position? It led to things like Russell claiming causation doesn't exist and was anti-scientific. Really, this was because he couldn't come up with a good theory of cause.

So then he makes the claim that "cause isn't used in the advanced sciences," and so is useless. By the advanced sciences, he meant physics. Papers have since shown that this is completely untrue for modern physics, and also seems to be untrue for when he developed the theory. But because that whole clique had built up so much influence the idea was influential for like 40 years despite being based on something Russell just made up.

Wittgenstein pulled the same sort of shit all the time. "Oh, there isn't an adequate explanation of x despite it being worked on for a hundred years? This shows it is meaningless and useless."

If we follow their logic, then we'd have to conclude that Dennette is right, because there is no good explanation of conciousness, and that we are all P zombies. This is where that type of pseudry lands you.

>>22908437
Way to completely misunderstand the problem.

Your analogy doesn't work. It isn't that there "aren't rules to Chess." Denying there are rules would be the equivalent of denying metaphysics as a whole. Denying physicalism is like denying that someone who doesn't know all the rules of Chess somehow knows all the rules of Chess.

The claim is "Bobby doesn't know the rules of Chess, so when he invents the term 'oplubable' and claims that Chess is intrinsically 'oplubable', and then plans to define 'oplubable' as "whatever characteristics Chess reveals itself to have," he isn't saying anything useful with the term.

Second, reductionism is a claim about the way the world is that can be empirically tested. Chemistry is not an immature field. Chemistry has yet to be reduced. Reductionism is a thesis grounded in philosophy. How is it not a problem when statements about the world based on philosophy fail to match up to reality? You could just as well claim "spirits are real," and then when someone says "but spirits haven't been demonstrated," pull out the same stupid Chess analogy.

It's begging the question to suppose that the real rules of Chess are the rules that the person who doesn't know Chess speculates about.

>>22908138
Has Wittgenstein ever explicity written about materialism?

>>22907676
>assuming that matter exists independently of the subject's cognition
But it does, when you go to sleep everything still exists, I don't magically disappear every time you close your eyes

>>22908449
This is what it's like when a homeless schizophrenic starts yelling at you incoherently.

>>22908491
but how do you know? oh yeah you opened your eyes next day and experienced the world again.

>>22908475
The claim is that we know the relevant rules of chess, and your example is irrelevant because simulating "molecular structure" from first principles is just intrinsically computationally hard, the same way as finding a winning move is hard when you have just learnt the rules.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07884.pdf

>>22900976
isn't that natural consequence of rejecting metaphysical materialism that you end up materially impoverished

>>22908502
And while I was sleeping the Earth still rotated and the sun still rose, these events would not have happened if they were tied to my being conscious

>>22901870
>p-zombies
i never found this thought experiment to be convincing. it takes as axiomatic the notion that a person could exist in the world as normal but have no phenomenal experience, yet many aspects of psychology and sociality are inextricably tied to our inner phenomenology ... unless Chalmers wants us to exist that a T.S. Eliot or a Joyce could have existed as just a mere mechanization.

>>22903065
Based. The Peirce->Whitehead continuum has not been fully taken up by modern science.

>>22908531
>unless Chalmers wants us to exist that a T.S. Eliot or a Joyce could have existed as just a mere mechanization.
Chatgpt can perfectly imitate their style.

>>22908505
Maybe. It remains an open scientific question. The door on strong emergence is far from shut and there is no prima facie rational reason why reductionism or smallism must be true. For example, Paul Davies, a physicist, believes he has a proof that strong emergence must exist, although it relies on certain things about information theory and its relation to the world being true. If I recall correctly, a poll of chemistry PhD's found about 60% didn't think their field could be reduced to physics. Which is not to say that reductionism is false, it's just to say that it is far more the "default" with the laity than with professionals. Pancomputationalism would seem to preclude reductionism, and it is very popular indeed. But, old paradigms don't get replaced until something convincing comes on as a replacement (Kuhn).

In any event, your argument again assumes that your belief is true from the outset. It might be hard to demonstrate something precisely because it is not true. You can't just assume you are right and then look for reasons why current evidence doesn't preclude you're being right. See Quine on the "web of belief," you can literally do this for any belief no matter how absurd.

>>22908508
Nah, lots of pro athletes are rich as fuck and believe in ghosts and shit.

>>22908525
>to my being conscious
nobody said "your" conscious, and there's no requirement for the world to be material to keep functioning while you were asleep. you can see the world because you're made of the same stuff which is not physical (the appearance). you claim that world is material because it's separate from you, but you are in the world just the same as everything else that "you" don't control

>>22908544
yes, the LLM's latent structure has internalized the "Joyce stylistic space" but it is derived information, not sui generis. anyways my point is that certain aspects of the human experience are irreducibly "phenomenal", so the p-zombie thought experiment seems nomically impossible

>>22908562
>anyways my point is that certain aspects of the human experience are irreducibly "phenomenal", so the p-zombie thought experiment seems nomically impossible
But that's exactly the point of the thought experiment. That qualia are not reducible to the material.

>>22908573
You misunderstand what I mean. The idea of the p-zombie is a perfectly ordinary human being who engages in perfectly ordinary behavior. My claim is that this behavior necessarily involves phenomenality, which is what the p-zombie removes. It is simple enough to think of any number of social scenarios in which mental introspection is implied.

>>22908552
how come i don't feel like earning

>>22908586
Show me one behavior that isn't fully explained by deterministic input - neurophysiology - output.

>>22908606
>Show me one behavior that isn't fully explained by deterministic input - neurophysiology - output.
Not that Anon, but show me that:

A. It is.
B. That deterministic input + neurophysiology doesn't necessarily have conciousness as one of its outputs.

Even if allow A for the sake of argument, B does not seem possible if physicalism is true. How could two systems be physically identical but have different mental outputs? This would imply that mental life is not caused by or superivened on by the physical.

>>22908650
So you can show me no example? You can't show me that phenomenal experience either? Well why should I accept that you have "qualia" if you can't show me their effects?

>>22908590
maybe you have no drive, not trying to insult, I feel the same

>>22908729
but i do lots of other things

>>22908145
How does that in any way support materialism lol? Are you retarded? You're still just experiencing all these things as qualities in your mind and without these qualities they may as well not exist. Stop coping

>>22908284
If it "exists in itself" then do you still seriously believe that you experience it as it is in itself? Either just accept that you are a crypto kantian or have fun with skepticism (assuming you are capable if critical thinking that is).

>>22900887
This is a response to the OP's image. The first element in Chemisty, element number 1, is H, hydrogen, which makes up water. Any regular water drinker will know that even though, yes, everything is made out of chemicals, drinking water is preferable towards drinking strong drink. Drinking water is more sustainable for the body than drinking spirits: there is less chance of dying prematurely. This preference to survive, this will to live, might be chemically based, and likely it is, but it is this constant struggle against ourselves not to indulge that in my opinion refutes materialism. It is this core of the being, this eager will to live, this will to thrive, that makes me post on an anonymous Nepalese coat-making forum and proclaim! Preach! about the wonders of drinking water and its basis for live, even though my Greek is little and my Chemistry even less. Also, the image makes me laugh, and I wanted to respond.

>>22901220
If the state of matter can be a wave then that means matter can be not matter. That's retarded.

>>22901228
>conceptualize patterns in reality
And these patterns are not physical things. They exist, yet are beyond material reality.

>>22908941
>do you still seriously believe that you experience it as it is in itself?
No, of course not. Except of course the part of "it" that I am, and even then interpretations are bound to be wrong. Only the perceptions themselves are absolute truth in that they are a real thing absolutely happening and I'm getting to experience them by being them in almost real time.
Practically though, yes, I'm more of a skeptic. I don't believe most of the things I interact with to be absolute reality, just functionally useful models to be revised as they produce good predictions or fail to.
And then there's math I guess, which is more or less absolute, but maps onto the sensible world only if you apply it right.

>>22908941
>>22900887
Move aside. Global skeptic-Chad coming through.

>>22901870
>According to materialism we should be p-zombies with no phenomenal experience
those certainly exist, just go anywhere outside of europe

>>22909710
I got a concussion where I don't remember anything, but people tell me I was walking around talking to people. I've also been the person talking to someone who just had a concussion and later they don't remember the conversation. They seemed a little off but still mostly coherent.

It seemed more likely something about memory got messed up, but maybe their consciousness got turned off for a while.

>>22909294
A wave of what?

>>22909392
>They exist, yet are beyond material reality.
They are properties of groups of material, not beyond it, rooted explicitly in it.

>>22901870
>According to materialism we should be p-zombies with no phenomenal experience.
This is ass backwards. Materialists don't believe in qualia so p-zombies can't lack them. P-zombies are a problem for people who believe in qualia

>>22900887
Consider that materialism requires as a foundation certain rejection of skepticism, and being able to assert about the nature of reality.

Now, based on those same principles, consider we understand life and evolution through natural selection under such view. In this view, human sensorial experience evolved as to provide us the most optimal way of navegating our environment as to survive. This is not the same as being able to know the true nature of reality.

This is equivalent to navegating through the web, or using any piece of software in a OS. We have an UI that allows us to use it, yet we do not know from it what is going in behind. Trying to assert knowledge about reality from our sensorial experience, is like trying to deduce the existence of code, or furthermore, of digital electronic bits in a microprocessor, just from the UI of some software. This all, on the basis that one supposes that knowledge about reality can be asserted, granting us the facts about natural selection that disprove the same way we get those facts in the first place.

>>22910322
All that materialism requires it that it reliably produces results and literally no other worldview can compete with it. If you wish to gather reliable knowledge, you must use a materialistic, mechanistic approach. Again, it's not to say that there definitely is no other realm of existence than material, but it is to say there is no reason to believe it, for if such realms did exist, it would not influence us at all since, as I have mentioned, all methods of gathering knowledge outside of materialism fails to produce results. No technology is generated except through materialistic exploration.

>>22900887
Umm yeah? Follow Dharma. Especially the Varnaashram way of life.

>>22900887
Follow Dharma. Especially the Varnaashram way of life. Life is about fulfilling your Dharma, i.e, your duties, responsibilities, the roles you play in various stages of your life, your biological imperatives, and the debt you owe to your ancestors and future generations. Materialism, hedonism, faggotism, trannyism, none of them matter.

Ultimately the only thing that matters is Dharma, the natural order of things. Everything in the universe has its Dharma allotted to it. From the sun, the moon, wind, water, mountains, trees, every animal living in its ecological niche, to humans and every role they play in life. Live according to the Dharma allotted to you based on your innate nature. Everything else is secondary. Even material wealth is only a means to that end.

No amount of hedonistically indulging in materialism will make you "happy" if you don't live according to your innate nature and fulfill your Dharma towards not just your family, society, nation, but even yourself. And that is something your own mind and body are wired to do. Realizing that and fulfilling those roles dispassionately is how you live a fulfilling life.

>>22910714
Actually materialism was adopted by the midwits in modern society, they use the science and technology created by people who were mystics and had a non-materialist inclination, like Newton. You don't need to know anything about the nature of reality to do science and indeed most scientists blindly follow the consensus and don't think much about the implications of what they study. In their daily life they certainly don't act like materialists, how many of them deny simple facts about evolution everyday? the majority are still materialists only in the name because they have a surface level understanding of metaphysics.

No, it's not that no other worldview can compete with materialism, but materialism requires a kind of ignorance that is present in the general population and it's precisely why you call it successful.

This appeal to "success" (if you can call the modern society that) is not an argument.

>>22910816
Newton is remembered for his work in mathematics which maps on to material reality. In so far as his inclinations veered from materialism, it is remembered as a quark of personality which hampered his real work, his obsession with alchemy wasted a good deal of his time due to his misplaced belief in the occult powers to convert metals. He was also obsessed with certain books of the Bible and worked extensively on attempting to gain insights from them, none of which bore any fruits in the slightest. Thus, your own example cements my point, any scientist or mathematician who spends his time on anything deviating from the strictest materialism simply wastes his own time.

I say again, when producing anything of merit, a scientist must do so in the context of materialism. Had Newton attempted to add some metaphysical element to calculus, it would no longer map onto material reality and would be injured as a result. I am reminded of Laplace when he presented his book on the workings of the universe (a work which contained no mention of God) to Napoleon. Upon meeting Laplace, Napoleon remarked that he had written such a large book on the universe without mentioning it's creator, to which Laplace responded "I had no need of that hypothesis".

It's telling that you even seem to admit that materialism is synonymous with "success". However, you make an equally telling error in assuming the ills of modern society bear somehow on the truth of certain propositions. My entire point to begin with was that materialism is the only avenue to actual knowledge, when propositions are matched against reality itself, all other considerations are burned away entirely and only the material portions remain. In short, humans everywhere and throughout time invent false metaphysics which invariably fail the test against reality.

>>22900887
>How do I refute materialism?
A good start is looking at the current Nobel prize winning research demonstrating that the entire universe is not locally real, and only becomes certain when observed. Prior to that it exists across a probability waveform.

>>22911153
>I say again, when producing anything of merit, a scientist must do so in the context of materialism.
Science will never be able to tell you what reality is. how would you add some METAphysical element to a physical equation? you are confusing calculations for the thing in itself.
A person can believe literally anything and still do science. You could be a marxist, or a Christian, or a Hindu that believes in Shiva, or a Muslim who prays 5 times a day. doesn't matter.
In Laplace's case you don't need a creator to do science but to say that science and physics is all there is to reality is absurd.
>My entire point to begin with was that materialism is the only avenue to actual knowledge.
this sentence has so many assumptions in it I won't even bother.

>>22900953
>Cut off one of your arms and try to convince yourself that its an illusion

Tons of people perceive 'phantom limbs', so this is doable.

>>22900903
>t

>>22911153
>"Materialism" is whatever inquiry suggests to be true about the world.
>Oh wow! Look guys! All success comes in the form of materialism.

Makes you wonder why absolutely no one who works on this stuff calls is "materialism" anymore. Materialism is a term used by the laity who don't understand the discussion or by people who are trying to slander materialism.

Why did "materialism" get abandoned by materialists in favor of "physicalism?" Why did earlier "mechanism" get abandoned in favor of "materialism" before that?

In both cases the ontology, and materialism and physicalism are very much ontologies Anon, were falsified over and over and shot through with so much error that even its biggest proponents decided it was so dead it needed a full rebrand.

The idea that the entire world is little balls of stuff bouncing into each other has been falsified. The idea that everything is matter inside space has been falsified. Science BTFO these theories. They are not success stories, they are failure stories.

We now have "physicalism" which has fields, etc. instead of just matter. Many forms of physicalism now have strong emergence, which means that the defining feature of materialism/physicalism, reduction, is getting jettisoned by its own advocates.

Personally, I think physicalism will meet the same fate as materialism in our lifetime. It is still, very much a substance metaphysics, trading off the very same assumptions that underlying Empedoclean Atomism. This increasingly seems wrong. Philosophers of physics and physicists increasingly think this is wrong, Rovelli is just one big name example.

But when physicalism crashes like mechanism and materialism before it, some other ism will arrive. And people like you will claim that model has "never been wrong, and every last success comes through this model."

The problem is that this claim is absolutely vacuous when the model is so malleable as to change as much as it needs to in order to fit the evidence. In this respect, it shares a lot in common with religion.

>>22901220

probability isn't a state, it means the matter exists, doesn't exist, and exists in multiple places all at once. when matter is in a probabilistic state it is immaterial

>>22911304
fuck off

>>22910263
>They are properties of groups of material
They are still explicitly immaterial

>>22901870

>>22911249
>Science will never be able to tell you what reality is
Did you not read my post? Nothing will ever tell you what reality is, it can only strengthen your inferences and produce results. That's the best we can hope for
>>22911345
>materialism and physicalism are very much ontologies Anon, were falsified over and over and shot through with so much error
Tell me how materialism was "falsified".
>We now have "physicalism" which has fields, etc. instead of just matter
Materialism includes matter and energy. The fact that fields exist does not falsify it. Nor does emergent qualities at high levels of complexity, since these things are rooted firmly in the material itself.
>But when physicalism crashes like mechanism and materialism before it
Like any advancement, whatever "replaces" the current model of thinking will have to include why the current models worked so well. You still failed to address the fact that all advances in knowledge rely on material precepts.
>it shares a lot in common with religion.
This can mean anything itself. Some religious people are hardcore dogmatists, while others are wishy-washy spiritualists. In short, you have chosen an incredibly poor comparison even for the point you were trying to make.

>>22911804
Patterns are our recognition of the position of matter or energy. It is an abstraction in our brain which maps on to the position of matter and energy. All of which is material. Thoughts inside your head are material, anon, they are chemical and electrical signals of a high level of complexity.

>>22911489
Probability is an equation that has yet to be resolved. In other words, it's incomplete knowledge in the literal sense. Also "probability isn't a state" followed by "when matter is in a probabilistic state", you might want to reword your post, anon.

>>22900887
Diogenes of Sinope

>>22900887
>How do I refute materialism?
You cannot refute the existence of atoms because they are supported by strong empirical evidence. You can even observe the atoms by yourself if you visit your nearest lab with an electron microscope. >Are there any living philosophers who reject it?
Thomas Nagel but he has been debunked by neuroscience.

>>22900887
>How do I refute materialism?
It's scientifically self-refuting. Go look up the Christian arguments against their religion and their creation myth of evolution if you want the many, many, many specific ways it's impossible and absurd.

>>22901036
That's because you cannot see.

>>22901870
Materialism cannot account for science.

>>22901914
It's the state religion, the materialists even have their own creation superstition they falsely call science and indoctrinate into kids in government schools.

>>22905739
>God, I really wish I could understand why people want to reject materialism.
lol, did you even read what you wrote?

Do you really wish to understand? It would seem you'd rather wish to preserve your beliefs at any expense. Rather than seeking to understand the arguments, you call on God for some reason then you claim you want to understand the people but you clearly don't as you have no intention to understand the arguments (or even hear them, for most of you brainwashed into the materialist state religion).

>>22910714
lmao, you're just indoctrinated into the state religion, one which makes good slaves who "trust the experts" and "trust the science", one where man is the supreme authority rather than God Almighty. All you did was recite mantras and baseless assertions.

You wouldn't even have modern science without Christians seeking to understand God's creation. There's no reason a materialist should think they could rationally study something that was irrationally made. But Christians understand the world is rationally made by a rational mind and can be rationally understood because God has given us a rational mind.

>>22911345
>Makes you wonder why absolutely no one who works on this stuff calls is "materialism" anymore. Materialism is a term used by the laity who don't understand the discussion or by people who are trying to slander materialism. Why did "materialism" get abandoned by materialists in favor of "physicalism?" Why did earlier "mechanism" get abandoned in favor of "materialism" before that?
Because the idiotic worldview is false and they need to keep moving goalposts and playing semantic games to keep deceiving people. They'll adapt one bit here or there (e.g. "inflation theory"), change the terminology, then act like anyone who doesn't use the latest cope terminology "just doesn't get it" (for not drinking the same koolaid).

>>22912624
>Go look up the Christian arguments against their religion

Ah yes, the people who believe in a fairy tale book half written by desert goat herders and half written by a bunch of brainwashed morons by a cult leader decades after he died. The source for your entire made-up nonsense is literally "It was revealed me to in a dream, just trust me bro"

>>22912624
>lmao, you're just indoctrinated into the state religion, one which makes good slaves who "trust the experts" and "trust the science", one where man is the supreme authority rather than God Almighty. All you did was recite mantras and baseless assertions.
Actually the exact reverse. I never took the coff jab exactly because there was insufficient evidence and a blatant corruption of the process of science in order to serve political and capital interests. All you know is indoctrination, so you project it onto people you know nothing about. Telling.
>You wouldn't even have modern science without Christians seeking to understand God's creation
The real gift from Christianity is it's propensity to tolerate heretics, who are actually the ones who advance knowledge. That's the best thing Christianity can recommend itself for, that people can leave it.

>>22911345
>Makes you wonder why absolutely no one who works on this stuff calls is "materialism" anymore.
>Why did "materialism" get abandoned by materialists in favor of "physicalism?"
Because "materialism," "physicalism," and "queernormative nomological phallocentrism" is the vocabulary of effete popinjays trying to impress each other with autistic language games in lieu of their awkwardly tiny peacocks. The process is not unlike a euphemism treadmill where one has to come up with *clap* new and artistic *clap* ways to abuse language that other popinjays haven't thought of, yet. The words displace each other because for popinjays the lingo is the point, not any underlying reality. People who care about the truths of reality are intuitively materialist or physicalist, or whatever the new lingo is now. And these mean the same thing, contra your goofy attempts to draw distinctions that aren't there.

>>22900887
What materialism? Donald is arguing about determinism. Mickey correctly counters by touching the heart of the issue, Donald's cowardice

>>22900887

>>22912650
>>Go look up the Christian arguments against their religion
>Ah yes, the people who believe in a fairy tale book
No, the people who think lying is a sin and deserving of hell, you lying sodomite.

You believe the fairy tale book of Darwin on blind faith. You have no arguments all you have is slander and lies. You're a loser.

>>22912665
>Actually the exact reverse. I never took the coff jab exactly because there was insufficient evidence and a blatant corruption of the process of science in order to serve political and capital interests.
I never said anything about injections. Learn to read.

>All you know is indoctrination, so you project it onto people you know nothing about. Telling.
Projectception, projecting your projections. You think everyone isn't exposed to your retarded religion in the schools or mass media? I grew up believing the same nonsense you believe now, sorry you're incapable of critically analyzing your own beliefs or learning like the other lying troll.

>The real gift from Christianity is it's propensity to tolerate heretics, who are actually the ones who advance knowledge.
Ever since you godless heathens hijacked science and imposed your religion of materialism and its creation myth of evolutionism on it where "evolutiondidit" is the unironic answer you people give half the time, now "science" says boys can "evolve" into women and the surgeons will mutilate people's genitals for this delusion. Yeah, that's "progress". That's all your camp's doings, you're all lunatics.

Besides, you Godless heathens all hate white people, so eat shit.

Reminder that algorithms can analyze your brain scans and correctly identify what images you were dreaming about. Algorithms can transduce your premoter cortex signals of intention into functional physical locomotion

>>22912665
>>22912916
Let's not forget revoking awards from people who ended up with "politically incorrect" conclusions that upset liberal academics and suppressing and erasing countless papers. Yeah, great job progressing science.

>>22911153
>>22911345
He isn't even arguing for materialism. But some naive realism with no understanding of the history of thought.

Anon, why should anyone treat you seriously if you don't even know these very basic notions under discussion?

That depends on what you mean by materialism. The notion that the body isn't being piloted/controlled by an ethereal soul, quantum spookiness, or hard determinism like in that cartoon? Very different issues. Even the Bible says that life is in the blood and the soul is the breath (pneuma).

>>22912369
Truly based post

>>22900887
Its truth conditions are self-defeating.

Instead of reading this shit thread,
why not read a book instead?

https://archive.org/details/metaphysicalfoun00burtuoft

>>22913208
How so?

>>22913255
Whether or not something is true would rest on contingent activity, so a true result would be just as likely as an untrue one, including that of materialism.

>>22913231
>Hey /lit/, read this theologian's take from the 1930's on modern science.
I... Hmm. Well, we do talk about Spengler a lot so I guess that's true to form.

>>22912491
>Patterns are our recognition of the position of matter or energy
"Recognizing the position of matter/energy" is just a single observation. Patterns inherently require multiple observations of multiple different instances.
If the position of matter and energy are the sole determinants of outcomes, then patterns shouldn't arise because the matter and energy always have different positions.

>Thoughts inside your head are material, anon
This is an unfounded assumption. The human mind is so complex that it's not fully understood and is capable of things that a computer is not, despite being much slower. Computers still aren't sentient, and at best produce mimicry.

>>22912369

>>22912916
>I never said anything about injections. Learn to read.
You directly referenced the blind following of "experts". The most obvious example of that being the recent misadventures in healthcare. Even if you didn't mean to reference it, it proves a perfect example of how wrong you were in your impression of me
>Besides, you Godless heathens all hate white people, so eat shit.
You're a bitter, ignorant fool

>>22913125
You have nothing to add to the conversation, I see. Either engage with what has been said or lurk more.

>>22906936
This

>>22914406
You've no idea what you are talking about, blabbing on in a thread that should be deleted. No, I'm not going to engage with you. Go read a book, possibly even one on metaphysics

>>22914588
>Literally nothing to add to the conversation
Ah, so exactly what I said, thanks for replying twice anyway, idiot

>>22900887
>How do I refute materialism?
Refute it by being not of its morphic resonance. Until you '''vibrate''' on the channel that you are provided – you are materialism. Practical steps? Create more unique energy than you receive, refute the logic practically. That's in the Gospel, in that envelope.

>>22913703
the only thing true to form for /lit/ is someone dismissing one of the most singular classics in an entire field (in this case history and philosophy of science) based on a quick google --> wikipedia --> shooting from the hip about what the "correct" snarky interpretation to have of the work is --> excusing himself from reading it --> another day, another no books read

>>22914783
Aww, what about the nice pic I gave you to get started on your journey. It's really all you need to understand you're talking out your ass.

>>22914857
Just doing my part. In pointing out no one in the entire field has ever heard of your singular classic. Are you the guys grandson? That's cool. Good on you.

>>22914857
>thinks Spengler had an impact in history or philosophy
/lit/ always amuses

>>22915814
Spengler? I hardly know her!

refuted

>>22915834
retard

>>22915863
not an argument. Right back at you. Feel free to explain the error

>>22915834
The funniest part of this image is if I took something heavy and hit you in the skull so hard that your brain (and the chemicals in it) could no longer function then there would no longer be any evidence whatsoever you have a soul.

>>22915952
you would never do that because you're a pussy with noodle arms

>>22915809
>Aww, what about the nice pic I gave you to get started on your journey. It's really all you need to understand you're talking out your ass.
>I posted a jpg which excuses me from actually thinking
kek

>>22915952
It also assumes chemicals are incapable of producing intrinsic value, an unfounded assertion.

Question: what, if any, is the materialist explanation for supernatural phenomena?

I'm talking about ghosts and such. Psychic abilities, spiritual occurrances, immaterial beings such as fairies, and so on.

I realize the obvious move is to deny that any of it is real, but for me this is not sufficient. There seems to be ample evidence that there's something to the influence of the immaterial on the material world. Sure, there are plenty of false examples and frauds, but the stuff that can't be explained away as a fraud or a fake constitutes such a significant body of evidence so far that I feel like it has to be accounted for.

Is there a materalist explanation for supernatural happenings?

>>22916377
>magic is totally real guys
>that means materialism is false
About the caliber of argument I've come to expect from /lit/. Y'all really are just rejects too stupid for STEM

>>22916386
You didn't answer my question.

>>22916377
Why are there no multi-billion corporations based on psychic ability? This may sound flippant, but if someone had genuine supernatural ability, wouldn't they be able to leverage that in a business sense to dominate mere normal companies? Could you imagine a fairy zoo? Why is it always shady carnie types that are literally synonymous with scams, cheats, and frauds who claim to be psychic?

>>22916391
The explanation is that humans are prone to be suggestible. We are prone to jump to conclusions and answers to things we do not understand. There are stage magicians who openly say "this is a trick, no magic involved" and tons of people will still believe they are an actual wizard. In short, when people have a gap in their knowledge, way too many people are content to insert magic when, in reality, there is zero evidence for any supernatural phenomenon.

>>22916405
There's plenty of evidence for ghosts, even physical evidence.

>>22916412
There really isn't

>>22916412
No, there isn't. If there had been any, it would have been published in Nature or Science or a similarly splashy journal. If this isn't obvious to you, consider how topsy-turvy your entire understanding of the world must be to miss the obvious incentives of the editors, each of whom would want to be the first to publish such a thing. But then, conspiratorial & magical thinking is nothing new for people who would believe in ghosts.

>>22916377
Better question: where are those supernatural phenomena now that everyone has a camera in their pockets? Where are the pictures of fairies? Where are the tiktoks and youtube shorts showing ghosts? Where is the livestream coverage of a large scale miracle such as the ones claimed by most major religions?

>>22916396
Or why didn't they just do James Randi's challenge?

>>22916501
>Better question: where are those supernatural phenomena now that everyone has a camera in their pockets? Where are the pictures of fairies? Where are the tiktoks and youtube shorts showing ghosts? Where is the livestream coverage of a large scale miracle such as the ones claimed by most major religions?

We literally have hundreds of eyewitnesses from the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima yet that's clearly not good enough for you guys, right?

>>22916521
>eyewitnesses
Worthless. Picture or video is what is needed. Did miracles just stop happening after everyone got a smart phone?

>>22916521
>eyewitnesses
Just like every miracle. Or UFO sighting. Again, where is it on youtube? There are millions of churches and temples to lots of different deities, all claiming miracles are possible, all over the world, doing services every single day. Yet the only miracles you can find footage of are televangelists pretending to heal paid actors.

Nagel's bat.

>>22901914
From a human perspective it should be all about reproduction and spreading DNA as far and wide as possible

>>22900887
>How do I refute [atomists]
There is a fundamental particle hydrogen, observed as ejecta from black holes but even that is merely and obviously hyper-condensate light. The MUH QUANTUM reification coomer cultists of frotting particles cannot explain fields, much less the dielectric & magnetism's relation water to ice

>>22916700
What twaddle. No, that's from evolution's perspective. Humans are mesa-optimizers with regard to evolution and don't share its objective.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers

>>22916726
Uh-oh, actual schizo alert. Meds, now!

>>22900903
but my lived experience, inner life, and my truth though

>>22916736
The mechanism for whether you exist or not is solely dependent on whether your chain of ancestors were successful in reproducing. That's unavoidable, it's the central question of existence or non-existence. You may be a branch which fails to reproduce, which has aims that harm your competitive ability to reproduce, but that simple confirms your aberrant genes are unsuccessful when tested by reality as to whether they continue to exist.

>>22916838
You don't understand the point at all. Are you a /lit/cel or something? My objective as a human is not to reproduce. That's evolution's objective. I don't give a shit whether my genes are successful or not other than to the extent that the genes are tied up with my quality of life as a human. If I find a way to live a good life without reproducing, too bad for evolution, should have worked more on alignment.

>>22916856
You are your genes. Whatever thoughts exist in your head are facilitated by your genes building the structure of your brain and having in-built preferences and dispositions. If you life "a good life without reproducing" the genes which compelled you to do that or which didn't allow you to reproduce will cease to exist. The conditions that created you will have been proven a failure in the test of existence, and the future will be populated with genes unlike you, genes which create people who reproduce.

>>22916873
>You are your genes.
You're retarded. Evolution created these genes. This doesn't mean I'm obliged to share evolution's objective. From the point of view of evolution, I'm an unaligned AI. Evolution failed at producing a set of genes that gave rise to an agent that was aligned with evolution's objective. Too bad for evolution. All the words you have written don't change this. Since you're retarded, I remind you of the point you're arguing for:
>From a human perspective it should be all about reproduction and spreading DNA as far and wide as possible

>the will cease to exist
So? I'm a human, not evolution. I don't care about spreading my genes. I care about enjoying my life. How does this show that "from a human perspective it should be all about reproduction"?
>failure in the test of existence
So? I'm a human, not evolution. I don't care about spreading my genes. I care about enjoying my life. How does this show that "from a human perspective it should be all about reproduction"?
>future will be populated with genes unlike you
So? I'm a human, not evolution. I don't care about spreading my genes. I care about enjoying my life. How does this show that "from a human perspective it should be all about reproduction"?

You're retarded.

>>22916873
not him, but i would like to point out how evolution, in fact does not point towards what could be a desirable/pleasurable outcome.

Civilization is the work of elites, DNA doesn't need it to keep spreading although a comprimise could(?) be made

>>22916268
>Can't even be bothered to read an image.
Are you a bot? My excuse is this is an off topic thread and I already did enough thinking when I got my philosophy degree. Just trying to help out, anon, but I don't really care

>>22916922
The civilization that spreads to the stars did a lot more spreading.

>>22916501
Randi got stumped by some people and refused to pay out. It doesn't make ghosts real but makes his test/claims useless.

>>22917013
did/will do. Sorry, posting from the future.

>>22916903
>Evolution created these genes. This doesn't mean I'm obliged to share evolution's objective
It literally does. The only reason you exist is the overpowering fact that genes only exist because they propagate themselves. If they didn't, they wouldn't exist. You can't be "an unaligned AI" when you are literally programmed by your genes to think and act in certain ways. In your case, it's a retarded way though, so I'm not surprised you've accepted your genetic inferiority and won't be reproducing.

>>22917013
>I already did enough thinking when I got my philosophy degree
Imagine admitting you've just decided to not think any more because you did it enough to get a degree. An embarrassing self-burn. You've now continued to reply even though you at first said you weren't going to engage with me. If you have this big a stick up your butt, why reply in the first place? Comes off as a little insecure, anon. Just trying to help.

>>22913125
>>22914588
nta, but if you are going to accuse someone of not knowing the basic notions being discussed, you need to actually demonstrate what basic notion he isn't getting, not just spout the unforgivably vague "you just don't know the history of thought". you end up sounding like a lunatic feminist who says "it's not my job to educate you, just go look it up". this is a discussion board, if you include in your post that you don't intend to discuss, why are you even here?

>>22917201
I'm not going to engage with "materialism" (naive realism, I suppose maybe scientific realism to give you the benefit of doubt,) because it is dumb. But also, because effortposting here isn't worth it. I've gotten burned by deletion in offtopic threads too many times. So instead I just taunt people and collect (you)s. Also it does get tiring walking people through intro philosophy over and over. Scientists seem to be the worst. They are always coming along with some ideas that was disproven a thousand years ago thinking they've just solved philosophy.

>>22917196
>can't be "an unaligned AI" when you are literally programmed by your genes
Oh, I see, an AI that is literally programmed by its code to destroy the world can't be an AI whose goals are unaligned with humanity's goals. Because it's literally programmed by its code, you see. And because the only reason the AI exists is that humans wrote that code, you see.

You really are retarded.

>your genetic inferiority and won't be reproducing.
I'll enjoy my human superiority, and have children when and if I want that experience. Because I, as a human, may find the experience interesting according to my objective, not because I was retarded enough to neglect my own objective and take up the objective of an inhuman optimization process because YouTube influencers told me so. (And reproduction is taken care of, ever heard of sperm banks?)

>Creatures extrude or vent eggs; larvae fatten, split their shells, and eat them; spores dissolve or explode; root hairs multiply, corn puffs on the stalk, grass yields seed, shoots erupt from the earth turgid and sheathed; wet muskrats, rabbits, and squirrels slide into the sunlight, mewling and blind; and everywhere watery cells divide and swell, swell and divide.

>>22917196
NTA but you should stfu, pseud. Genes provide a "field of potential" that can develop in a multitude of unpredictable ways based experience-dependent neuroplasticity, diet and nutrition, and so on. Even the expression of genes can altered based on diet and experience (called epigenetics like deacetylation). Genes aren't like the script of a computer program, which is more rigid and less fluid; rather, genes are more like a "field of potential" that is only actualized in the interaction with the environment. There's even research showing exposure to smog can adversely impact morphological development.

Faggots like you should unironically be executed. Pompous uneducated pseuds acting like they have everything figured out. Life is a lot more dynamic and professional than you think. I'm not saying genes aren't important, but your generic determinist view is complete garbage. Kys in all sincerity.

>>22917255
You are a credit to the field of philosophy. All the negative stereotypes, that is.

>>22917237
Yeah you're right, but also this >>22917255

>>22917273
kek, you are literally incapable of understanding what I said. It's not just "so and so wrote the code" it has to do with the mechanism for how the selection of propensity is selected for. You can't escape this paradigm because it controls what biological forms get created and how they are orientated. Denying this is the highest level of cope, like you expect to be treated like a special little boy immune to how reality operates. Embarrassing.

>>22917275
Genes are, indeed, very plastic. Do you want to know how they came to be that way? IT LEADS TO MORE PROPAGATION. Every single aspect of the gene is forced through the thresher of selection, either it benefits replication, and continues to exist, or it impedes relative replication and peters out. And of course, your inability to understand leads to outbursts of anger which are connected to violence. You have no argument against the genetic view of behavior and predisposition. All you can do is rage at it. In short, I'm right again.

>>22917282
I'm pretty good at keeping my beard clean. Have another pic

>>22917283
Oh, my apologies, I didn't realize you continued to say you won't engage but instead just called the other anon dumb. I find in these moments, people reveal who they really are. Is this who you really are, anon?

>>22917305
>To wake from a dream is to plunge back into reality
>"But-but-but what if instead of dreams being dreams, reality was the dream and the dream was reality!"
>"ooooh so deep, so true"
Nigga are you for real?

>>22917305
Are you the dude who was thinking of naming his cat Lucifer?

>>22917303
The primary driver of evolution is symbiosis and not natural selection. Natural selection is secondary and applies more to multicellular organisms and their competition for resources. The first eukaryote emerged from endosymbiosis/symbiogenesis of one bacteria devouring another (or virus), and this led to a cascade of novel symbiotic events that eventually yielded multicellular organisms.
Life is an autopoietic system ("self-making"), even the human body's cellular relations (or the gut-brain axis) can be said to exist in relatively persistent symbiosis, thereby yielding the organism.
Mankind, however, no longer exists in symbiosis with the Earth due to mechanization.
Other systems, such as physics or a car produced in an assembly line, are allopoetic ("other-making"), so life and the mechanistic world are two different orders of logic.

>>22917196
NTA but you're talking as if because genes (which I'm made of) have an objective, that I have the same objective. You could make me out of something else, like for example, a perfect computer simulation of me in a virtual world where I'm made of something else other than genes. In that case, copy me would still behave in the same way as real me.

>>22917364
>their competition for resources
and, thereby, increasing reproductive fitness*
Wanted to correct that quickly.
Regardless, the primary driver of evolution is symbiosis with natural selection being secondary for multicellular organisms.*

>>22917314
Yeah, I'm an ass online. That's been true since before the mosaic browser was released. I'm not going to try to deny it.

>>22917319
You see how those weren't all weird if me right? It's just a pic. Here's the newest one I saved.

>>22917348
Sorry, no. I don't like cats.

>>22917392
Damn autocorrect is clearly my worst sin.
"You see how those weren't all quotes of me right". Please accept this picture of a cat.

>>22917237
Not him and I'm having a hard time following the discussion but from what I'm getting, there is an anon who made a bunch of effort posts explaining why materialism, which from what I understand is the view that everything is made out of matter, was abandoned by philosophers who now argue instead that everything is physical, which is physicalism. Then he gave his opinion that physicalism has it's own share of problems. He also posted this dumb pic:
>>22914588
Which is useful but only because I somewhat understand what it's talking about, but it confusingly lists both philosophical positions and the names of philosophers as if they were the same thing, which you can only get if you already know the subject anyway. The other anon is arguing as if naive realism, mechanism, materialism, physicalism and similar positions about science are all the same. What I think he is actually arguing for is some sort of scientism. But as I said, they had a big reply chain with too many posts that I'm too lazy to read. I will answer this though:

>>22910714
>If you wish to gather reliable knowledge, you must use a materialistic, mechanistic approach.
The problem with calling that "reliable knowledge" is that if you followed it in the past you would think that space is full of aether, which is ok to have as a personal belief, but we know now that it's not true. Thinking that just because science says that atoms (or aether in the past) exists it means that they exist is naive realism, and that is a major problem with this view. Science now talks about fields, potentials, virtual particles, particles entangled at a distance, relative space time and other things that give trouble to a purely mechanistic approach to science. You can see alternative views in that picture. But unlike that other anon I'm not a philosopher or scientist, so I might be getting some detail wrong.

>>22917364
>The primary driver of evolution is symbiosis and not natural selection.
An intriguing claim.

So, there is a body of literature detecting signatures human evolution over the last 2,000 years in our genomes. Field et al. (2016) and Song et al. (2021) are large papers, for example, and there are plenty of smaller focused ones that detect human evolution over smaller timescales. I remember one in maybe the PNAS which showed that the polygenic score for educational attainment/intelligence evolved to be lower among Europeans over the last century.

The symbiosis of humans with what, exactly, was driving these evolutionary changes over the last 100–2,000 years? Let's take the top ones from the table in Song et al. (2021)—dermatology (skin and hair color), PGSs for psychiatric disorders, PGSs for cognitive abilities.

• Field, Y., Boyle, E. A., Telis, N., Gao, Z., Gaulton, K. J., Golan, D., Yengo, L., Rocheleau, G., Froguel, P., McCarthy, M. I., & Pritchard, J. K. (2016). Detection of human adaptation during the past 2000 years. Science, 354(6313), 760–764. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aag0776
• Song, W., Shi, Y., Wang, W., Pan, W., Qian, W., Yu, S., Zhao, M., & Lin, G. N. (2021). A selection pressure landscape for 870 human polygenic traits. Nature Human Behaviour, 5(12), 1731–1743. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01231-4

>>22917433
This is a good effort, Thanks anon. I'd add Kuhn scientific revolutions might be the place to start. Well, after wikipedia.

>>22917364
>The primary driver of evolution is symbiosis and not natural selection.
An intriguing claim.

So, there is a body of literature detecting signatures of human evolution over the last 2,000 years in human genomes. Field et al. (2016) and Song et al. (2021) are large birds'-eye papers, for example, and there are plenty of smaller focused ones that detect the evolution of specific human traits over smaller timescales. I remember one in maybe the PNAS which showed that the polygenic score for educational attainment (or intelligence) evolved to be lower among indigenous Europeans over the last century.

The symbiosis of humans with what, exactly, was driving these evolutionary changes over the last 100–2,000 years? Let's take the top categories from the picrel taken from Song et al. (2021)—dermatology (skin and hair color), PGSs for psychiatric disorders, PGSs for cognitive abilities. Awaiting your take on the symbionts here.

• Field, Y., Boyle, E. A., Telis, N., Gao, Z., Gaulton, K. J., Golan, D., Yengo, L., Rocheleau, G., Froguel, P., McCarthy, M. I., & Pritchard, J. K. (2016). Detection of human adaptation during the past 2000 years. Science, 354(6313), 760–764. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aag0776
• Song, W., Shi, Y., Wang, W., Pan, W., Qian, W., Yu, S., Zhao, M., & Lin, G. N. (2021). A selection pressure landscape for 870 human polygenic traits. Nature Human Behaviour, 5(12), 1731–1743. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01231-4

>>22917364
Symbiosis and natural selection are not mutually exclusive. For instance, why do organisms which engage in symbiosis continue to exist? It's because they are selected for. It's true that even our own cells possible formed by distinct organisms joining together for mutual benefit, but this is simply another dimension of natural selection. I don't really see why you would view it as primary and natural selection as secondary. Not to mention symbiosis is not universal, where as natural selection is.

>>22917371
You are made from your genes' instructions. If a computer replicated these instructions, you would still end up as a being with aims in line with what has been selected in the lineage of genes for which you originated.

>>22917392
>You see how those weren't all weird if me right? It's just a pic. Here's the newest one I saved.
You posted a bunch of quotes which boil down to what most pot heads come up with while hotboxing. Did you post it to dunk on how dumb philosophers can be?

>>22917493
Kuhn was a hack

>>22917433
>The problem with calling that "reliable knowledge" is that if you followed it in the past you would think that space is full of aether, which is ok to have as a personal belief, but we know now that it's not true. Thinking that just because science says that atoms (or aether in the past) exists it means that they exist is naive realism, and that is a major problem with this view. Science now talks about fields, potentials, virtual particles, particles entangled at a distance, relative space time and other things that give trouble to a purely mechanistic approach to science. You can see alternative views in that picture. But unlike that other anon I'm not a philosopher or scientist, so I might be getting some detail wrong.
I think you misunderstand me. What you reference (going back to the idea of an "aether" are models of reality which have varying degrees of usefulness. At no point will any scientist with integrity say "ah, we now know with 100% certainty that this is how things are and nothing will ever change that!" This would be a betrayal of the principles of science. What is natural to ask of a proposed new idea is "does they explain natural phenomena better or worse than established models?" Whenever metaphysical answers are provided, they fail this test.

This may end up being a misunderstanding of terms. For instance, what exactly do you mean by "scientism"? Also, you made the distinction between "materialism" and "physicalism", which would require a differentiation as they can mean different things under different contexts.

>>22917577
Your view is:
>All that materialism requires it that it reliably produces results and literally no other worldview can compete with it.
But materialism or physicalism only say that everything is physical. Theories like idealism or even Christianity can produce the same results, because scientists don't subscribe to any specific philosophical view when doing science. They just do it.

>Also, you made the distinction between "materialism" and "physicalism", which would require a differentiation as they can mean different things under different contexts.
I said "from what I understand". But looking at both wikis here it seems like not everyone makes that distinction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#Term
Still, physicalism is the term that I usually see being used nowadays.

>At no point will any scientist with integrity say...
The thing is, if we can't be certain that atoms exist, physicalism exists on shaky ground. If reality comes from the evolution of a universal wavefunction for example, is that a physical thing? When an electron's position can only be described as a probability distribution, is that a physical thing? Scientists do a lot of useful work using virtual particles, do they exist or are they just useful constructs? What about math itself, is is just a thing in our minds or are mathematical Platonists right? Science doesn't require materialism to function, which means other worldviews can compete with it. Hell, what if God made everything or we live in a computer simulation? Does that change any of our science?

>Whenever metaphysical answers are provided, they fail this test.
They aren't provided to answer scientifical questions, but to answer questions about science itself. For example, according to your view then we can never be 100% certain that whatever knowledge we got from science is true. That in itself is a philosophical view.

>>22917546
I just like posting images because imageboard. Also it's mostly poets and the religious.

>>22917555
Are you this guy? >>22913231 never give up on Grandpa!

>>22917692
>is that a physical thing?
(NTA.) Everything we can have a causal effect on, or that affects us causally, is a physical thing. I don't need to, nor should I circumscribe the set of physical things in advance—"these are physical, and these, of whose existence I learn later, are not." Not how a materialist works.

If souls were real, they would be physical things. For how else would they interact with the physical matter in our brains, such as the brain's electrons? There would necessarily have to be a term for it in the Dirac equation:
>you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?

Thing is, all the terms in the Dirac equation, or any equation describing the behavior of known particles, are completely known at everyday energies. There is no remaining gap for new physical things, which interact with our brains, to squeeze into. All of those gaps are not relevant at everyday energies—the remaining gaps are in our knowledge of neutron stars and dark matter, which have no relevance for brain matter. Everyday physics is completely known: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07884.pdf

>>22917774
>Everything that exists is physical, and physical means everything that exists.
That just makes physicalism redundant, and it's Hempel's dilemma that the other anon talked about:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#HempDile
>if physicalism is defined via reference to contemporary physics, then it is false — after all, who thinks that contemporary physics is complete? — but if physicalism is defined via reference to a future or ideal physics, then it is trivial — after all, who can predict what a future physics contains? Perhaps, for example, it contains even mental items.

>>22917852
Sure, it's trivial—and correct. "Two and two makes four" isn't deep philosophy either, but for that it's no less correct. People who have an axe to grind with physicalism often, however, insist on entities which don't physically interact with us while somehow... exerting a physical effect on us.

If you're a physicalist, when you propose ghosts or souls, you also propose laws of physics that are consistent with the ones that completely describe the world at everyday energies, and how to study those effects. If you aren't a physicalist, then you're a mental onanist spilling words upon the screen, words about entities which don't physically interact with us while somehow... exerting a physical effect on us.

>>22917900
Nta. Sure it could happen: the possibilities are endless. Maybe each ghost has a tripartite mind which gets it's own Leibnizian monad to stare into because God magic lines up the clockwork universe just so. We'll probably never know. Our scientific instruments merely help predict likely outcomes in whatever kind of universe this is. And don't give me any Occam's razor is truth. It helps simplify models, not give any relationship to truth.

>>22918039
>Sure it could happen: the possibilities are endless.
And all of them are causal interaction. There would be a causal arrow from a god to the universe. Seeing a ghost or having divine inspiration is not an exception for causality, there is a causal arrow from the ghost or the god to your brain. This is still stuff that makes stuff happen, the domain of physicalist science.

>>22901103
Empiricism makes all monism the same thing. It doesn't matter if it is materialism or not. There is just one type of thing and it functions in the observed ways.

>>22918051
Sigh. This is the kind of uninformed surety of opinion that is tiring. A Leibnizian monad. And it was a purposely bizarre schema, why are you arguing against the specifics?! Your actions do not have a casual connection is such a world. They just appear to because God is good. Now you're going to say why should I listen to some crazy pothead ideas, but this is also the guy who invented calculus, among other things. Maybe worth taking at least a bit of time to consider his ideas.

>>22917900
The problem is that if it's trivial then everyone is a physicalist and you're arguing against nobody. Even hippies and shamans are physicalists in that sense. Enlightenment and talking to spirits would be physical processes after all. Everything is a physical process. Which makes "physical" a useless word as it's opposed to nothing.

I refute it thus
>smells the roses

>>22903270
Sorry for never responding to you maybe you are long gone by now.
In any case everything predicating your questions has a mental attribute. Physical attributes are precisely what lose that capacity for decidability. The laws of physics are not objects of thought according to Peirce, but descriptions of universal habit which have become vanishingly improbable to violate. Our understanding of the laws of physics, which you equate to it, is another matter altogether. Paradigms of thought change over time, because the very essence of thought is this changeability.

>>22918194
No worries, been bumping this thread and hanging with my sophianoob buddies, >>22917255

I see how I was conflating the two senses of 'thought' earlier, and this world for most of my questions. But I'm not seeing how it answers the first of those questions: What proof is there that these habits of mind have become so regular as to be irreversible? Does Pierce give an argument for this?

>>22900887
You can present meaningful refutations to materialism when it is shown it is absolutely impossible to explain phenomena as interactions between matter. Not one person currently alive will be there to witness this moment and it might be possible that no human ever will.

I could make guesses on why you would want to refute an approach that is very useful, to break a tool when it's still actively in use, but I won't.

This picture is so fucking Reddit

>>22917541
Read this:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5761296121

>>22917498
>>22917541
Read this:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5761296121

>>22918352
Depends what your standards of "proof" are. According to Peirce a law of physics is a habit of mind which has become so rooted as to be irrevocable. Matter is mind that "freezes", becomes so still as to be incapable of reanimation.

"Irreversible" was my phrasing, not Peirce's. He was a fallibist, so I suppose nothing is foreclosed once and for all as "irreversible", though the laws of nature might become so engrained that the probability of them ever deviating over time is so remote that the "choice" they made to behave with that regularity is irreversible.

Probably the best answer I can provide for you is what Peirce thought about final causes. Remember that for Peirce the only fundamental distinction between purely mental and purely physical is choice. Mind is matter that retains the capacity for choice and matter is mind which has lost the capacity for choice. Matter is the fully most entropic state of mind.

I'd point you to recent work abou the "autodidactic universe" , an approach to cosmology in which the universe "selects" its own laws out of a pool of possible laws which echos Pierce's thinking about natural law. https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03902
For him natural law as never necessary, it was the product of the entropic reduction of choice-possibilities which all future phenomena must inherit as its causal structure.

>>22918632
based

>>22918746
No, if it's worth reading you'll actually post the relevant text.

>>22918777
>Matter is mind that "freezes"
When you begin to believe this kind of thing, it's time to medicate yourself

>>22918098
>Your actions do not have a casual connection is such a world. They just appear to because God is good.
Sure they do. If a god arranged for one world to appear so, and another world appear thus, there are necessarily causal links from the god to both of those worlds; and, in addition, if no matter what I do my actions are reflected in the other world by such an arrangement or vice versa, in what sense is that not causal entanglement of my actions with that other world?
>also the guy who invented calculus [...] taking at least a bit of time to consider his ideas.
Sigh. Anyone who went to school can spot contradictions or gaps in Leibniz's idea of calculus, or indeed anyone's idea of calculus before the late 19th century. Many people who went to school are aware also of Pearl's do-calculus or other relevant ways to think about causality, of which Leibniz hadn't the slightest clue. I needn't be stumped, like Leibniz, by paradoxes in calculus the resolution of which we know; nor need I "take a bit of time" to, strain, veins turgid and gas passing, and eventually to "find" the idea wanting, having found it so right away because moderns do have a better idea of causality than Leibniz did.

>>22918145
>The problem is that if it's trivial then everyone is a physicalist
Is that a problem? This is fine with me.
>Even hippies and shamans are physicalists in that sense.
Naturally. Everyone lives in the physical world. Hippies and shamans are just bad at it, failing to notice how the world really works and its causes and effects. This failure of theirs doesn't mean that the world they inhabit is not physical.
>you're arguing against nobody
There is still the matter of people who are failing to notice how the world works, and feel the need to speak of souls or Leibnizian monads or any such. The argument is that they are poor physicalists and should do better.

>>22918098
>Your actions do not have a casual connection is such a world. They just appear to because God is good.
Sure they do. If a god arranged for one world to appear so, and another world to appear thus, there are necessarily causal links from the god to both of those worlds; and, in addition, if no matter what I do my actions are reflected in the other world by such an arrangement or vice versa, in what sense is that not causal entanglement of my actions with that other world?
>also the guy who invented calculus [...] taking at least a bit of time to consider his ideas.
Sigh. Anyone who went to school can spot contradictions or gaps in Leibniz's idea of calculus, or indeed anyone's idea of calculus before the late 19th century. Many people who went to school are aware also of Pearl's do-calculus or other relevant ways to think about causality, of which Leibniz hadn't the slightest clue. I needn't be stumped, like Leibniz, by paradoxes in calculus the resolution of which we know; nor need I "take a bit of time" to strain, veins turgid and gas passing, and eventually to "find" the idea wanting, having found it so right away because moderns do have a better idea of causality than Leibniz did.

>>22918145
>The problem is that if it's trivial then everyone is a physicalist
Is that a problem? This is fine with me.
>Even hippies and shamans are physicalists in that sense.
Naturally. Everyone lives in the physical world. Hippies and shamans are just bad at it, failing to notice how the world really works and its causes and effects. This failure of theirs doesn't mean that the world they inhabit is not physical.
>you're arguing against nobody
There is still the matter of people who are failing to notice how the world works, and feel the need to speak of souls or Leibnizian monads or any such. The argument is that they are poor physicalists and should do better.

>>22900887
The scholarly literature on NDEs has already done so, so if you read that and bring to the debates you will win. Pic rel for instance has yet to be refuted. Bernardo Kastrup is another modern philosopher who argues totally against materialism.

>>22919172
Excerpt from review; "Furthermore, he argues that symbiosis, which can be traced back to bacterial-archaean combinatorics, drives evolution. In fact, Earth's first 2 billion years were characterized by horizontal gene transfer, showing how Darwinism must be supplemented with Lamarckism. Natural selection is merely an editor, not a creator of novelty. As a process of ceaseless creativity, life carries all organisms in its flow, and symbiosis facilitates this ceaseless creativity."

It is worth reading, but it is too dense and paradigm-shifting to post all here. It basically applies Whitehead's process philosophy in an ecological context.

"If organisms are mirrors of the universe, the biosphere is the composite mirror at the heart of which is symbiosis, as the way of projecting the authentic (more than human) reflection of the universe -- just as Archimboldo's Flora... represents the equality of the parts in the diversity of the whole."
- Predrag B. Slijepčević

>>22919187
Your actions don't cause anything in reality. Both are effects caused by God. Do you not even know the meaning of causal?
Obviously Leibniz isn't always right, he invented monadism. But he's also obviously, not an idiot either. I'm beginning to wonder about you though.

>>22918777
Ok l check it out. Does the entropy of matter have a direct relationship to entropy as understood by thermodynamics? It would be interesting to connect up with modern physics, but such would also make me very suspicious.

>>22919187
>the matter of people who are failing to notice how the world works
>I'm smarter than every philosopher ever!
>Science is the bestest foreverest!
Dang, anon. Some heavy stuff.

>>22920367
I'm always a bit cautious when a person makes a claim like "symbiosis is the main driver of evolution" especially when, as your excerpt states, this effect was most relevant in the early stages of evolution (seemingly admitting it's effect became less pronounced as pure natural selection of discrete organisms took precedence).

I'll consider the book.

>>22920438
>Your actions don't cause anything in reality. Both are effects caused by God. Do you not even know the meaning of causal?
"Causality" is not just a word to play tedious language games with. When we are interested in causality, we are interested in the effect of an intervention. Is an action always necessarily associated with some change in reality? If the god in your hypothetical arranged for interventions in one world always to result in associated changes in the other world, the causal structures "the god caused both" and "an action in one world caused a change in the other" are identical. They are just different and equivalent ways to view the same reality, not unlike switching between reference frames. Thinking otherwise, as if "causality" has some mystical meaning over "an intervention results in a change," is muddled thinking that contributes to tedious language games.
>But he's also obviously, not an idiot either.
>I'm smarter than every philosopher ever!
Are you genuinely confused by the difference between the statements I make about Leibniz's ignorance of modern tools such as the do-calculus and causal DAGs, and the statements on Leibniz's supposed stupidity which you attribute to me? Do you think Leibniz would have been on your side, had he the fortune to have been born a few decades ago and to have learned of causal DAGs? I don't think you're genuinely confused.

Platonism totally refutes materialism. So does the TAG argument. To even arrive at a materialist paradigm, you necessarily have to accept the existence and usefulness of immaterial “things” as referents. Show me logic as a material item. Oh, it’s just an emergent product of communication or materially originated thoughts? For it to even be communicable, it would have to refer to some real thing, which necessarily exists outside of the context of communication. Else communicability would not be possible as the referent would be necessarily subjective and communicated only incidentally. I mean, think about all of the ridiculous ideas you’d have to just baselessly assume are the case as a result of random coincidence for this to be true, which by the way, could not necessarily be true since the very thought and communication of it would imply the same problem.

Materialism is retarded imo. I think if you can’t grasp that communicability implies a real referent, material or immaterial, I think you really have no business engaging with philosophy at all.

>>22920628
>For it to even be communicable, it would have to refer to some real thing
You gonna hop on your fucking unicorn and ride away to Narnia after typing that? Or jump in a flying saucer and fly to Arrakis? YOU CAN TALK ABOUT NON-EXISTENT THINGS. The level of stupidity that arguments against materialism demonstrate is an argument in favor of materialism

>>22920605
Like a walking talking causation==correlation error.

>the matter of people who are failing to notice how the world works
This part anon. Where you say all (living?) philosophers don't understand your little argument. That's the part I'm calling you a pompous fool about.

>>22920628
But according to this anon:
>>22919187
all those immaterial things are actually material, everything is.

>>22900887
Waste of words, Anon
Touch grass
Real recognize real

As far as I know, Bernardo Kastrup is the first philosopher to successfully defend analytical idealism in his thesis.

>>22920681
>causation==correlation error
That's an error only insofar as a correlation eventually stops predicting the effects of an intervention out-of-distribution. This is not relevant in the 1god2worlds hypothetical—the worlds are arranged for all eternity to mirror each other. That you think this is relevant only shows you have but a popinjay's understanding of the phrases you use, "correlation ≠ causation" among them, and of course it misfires out-of-distribution.

>all (living?) philosophers don't understand your little argument.
Sure many of them do. You have just now given us a great example of this, when you perfectly understood my "Leibniz was uninformed" but insisted on putting "Leibniz was an idiot" in my mouth. The issue is of incentives, not of cognitive ability: >>22912769

Seconding Bernardo kastrup, ecspecially if you don’t have a huge background in philosophy. He refers to neurological studies as evidence for the decombination problem of idealism while materialism and panpsychism have the unsolvable hard problem and combination problem respectively. He uses a never before done study of Disassociation Identity Disorder where a woman’s brain scan showed physiological signs of blindness only when one of her identities appeared which she claimed was blind, this proves a unified consciousness can split off. And a study of people’s brains while on LSD where their brain activity decreased the more perceptions and experiences they were having instead of the prediction that it would increase.
Also Iain mcgilchrists the matter with things.

>>22920794
>>22920724
My only problem with him is that he uses what is commonly understood as multiple personality disorder as a central concept in his theory. Buy that is just a meme disorder from the very suspect field of psychology. As far as pointing out the problems in materialism and giving other arguments for idealism though, I think he is legit.

>>22920702
The only good post. Real ones will recognize the futility of these types and simply walk away

>>22900887
Go to PhilPapers and you'll see many old and contemporary papers for and against physicalism.

Pic-related is me thinking of all the papers you're missing out on.

/thread

>>22920659
Damn, you’re retarded. “Unicorn” still refers to a real thing. It just not a material thing. It is the real conceptual unicorn, which is nothing more than a sort of modified horse, which is very real.

>>22922572
>“Unicorn” still refers to a real thing.
This what opponents of materialism actually believe. How can you argue with someone who thinks anything you can make up is real?

>>22920694
It’s not though. If constructs of the mind were strictly material, they would necessarily be incommunicable. The fact that they’re not is evidence of the fact that they are not material but are very real.

Materialists are because they just hand wave this problem. They just insist that concepts and principles like logic and mathematics are emergent or evolutionarily derived, like one human came up with this thing and started communicating it to other humans. But how could you communicate something which exists in your mind and your mind alone? You couldn’t. There has to be a referent outside of your mind. Think if caveman coming up with a word for mammoth. One guy doesn’t just imagine a mammoth and mouth “mammoth” and somehow the others get it. Instead, he points (refers) to the real mammoth and mouths “mammoth”. The mammoth has to be a real referent before it can be communicable. That’s an oversimplification but that’s basically it.

>>22922587
>But how could you communicate something which exists in your mind and your mind alone? You couldn’t.
This nigga thinks fiction doesn't exist

>>22922578
>How can you argue with someone who thinks anything you can make up is real?
isn't everything made up though

>>22922622
Based solipist. I reject your reality and substitute my own.

>>22920732
>some Flat Earth conspiracy tier bs
>absolute unlearned, arrogant naivete
Academic philosophers, in their publish or perish environment, have no interest in publishing such notions as yours of a concise solution to all of ontology? Instead they are incentivized to jack each other off for decades. That is where you're going with this?

Everyone can see why I was right to not really bother with you and just call you names. Eventually, do try reading some philosophy. I don't hold out much hope, but maybe you'll understand why it's more complicated than you thought.

>>22922739
>to not really bother
I'm not sure you could wrap your little mind about the concept of causality if you bothered; since struggling to do so and failing to defend the usefulness of Leibniz's construct—which you dragged in—was your entire argument.

Suppose a solution is published. (I'm sure it has been, decades ago.) And then what? Is the incentive of philosophers to agree with it and pull up stakes, according to you? You know even in hard science, with actual experimental evidence, people barely change their minds and instead keep looking for faults in the other's reasoning and then die, still wrong? Evidently you struggle to wrap your little mind about the concept of incentives, too.

Try going easy on the fart-sniffing and reading something that is not most philosophy, perhaps this meagerness of mind is reversible yet.

>>22922537
Does this mean ESP is real? Why aren't people using it then in front of cameras?

>>22922934
Try reading a philosophy book before deciding you've solved philosophy. That's the whole of my argument.

>>22923933
>Try reading a philosophy book before deciding you've solved philosophy.
Thanks, tried! Your turn:

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/LcEzxX2FNTKbB6KXS/train-philosophers-with-pearl-and-kahneman-not-plato-and#More_Pearl_and_Kahneman__less_Plato_and_Kant

>>22923986
>Lesswrong fanzine
sigh.jpg