Timeline for What is the definition of physical? Is that definition clear enough to make a distinction between physical and non-physical?
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| S 4 hours ago | history | bounty ended | user80226 | ||
| S 4 hours ago | history | notice removed | user80226 | ||
| 22 hours ago | answer | added | Dcleve | timeline score: 2 | |
| Dec 9 at 16:44 | answer | added | Philomath | timeline score: -1 | |
| Dec 9 at 12:55 | history | edited | user80226 |
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| Dec 9 at 12:25 | answer | added | haxor789 | timeline score: 2 | |
| Dec 9 at 8:26 | answer | added | Mozibur Ullah | timeline score: 1 | |
| Dec 9 at 1:57 | comment | added | Hudjefa | Wikipedia article on physicalism: The view that all tjings are matter or energy (defined scientifically I suppose). | |
| Dec 8 at 18:12 | answer | added | mudskipper | timeline score: 3 | |
| Dec 8 at 16:21 | answer | added | TheMatrix Equation-balance | timeline score: 0 | |
| Dec 8 at 16:01 | answer | added | NotThatGuy | timeline score: 3 | |
| Dec 8 at 13:36 | answer | added | RodolfoAP | timeline score: 4 | |
| S Dec 8 at 12:54 | history | bounty started | user80226 | ||
| S Dec 8 at 12:54 | history | notice added | user80226 | Draw attention | |
| Dec 8 at 12:52 | history | edited | user80226 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 15, 2018 at 17:30 | comment | added | Dcleve | @Conifold -- it is not just rookies who make the "start with definitions" rather than "end with definitions" mistake. I find this in very many veteran published philosophers. Bravo to you for pointing out it is an error. | |
| Apr 5, 2018 at 6:12 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackPhilosophy/status/981776452499668992 | ||
| Mar 21, 2018 at 19:45 | comment | added | Conifold | By the way, this was Husserl's approach, to bracket in all presumptions and approach phenomena without worrying in advance whether they are physical or mental, real or imagined, etc. We do not have sufficient understanding of life or the mental for distinctions to be helpful. Think about how useless a definition of water would have been before molecular theory described its chemical composition as H2O, we are nowhere near that in those areas, so loose operational "definitions" are the best. | |
| Mar 21, 2018 at 19:39 | comment | added | Conifold | "Represented" means that even assuming physicalism we do not know what physical properties correlate with mental phenomena, therefore we do not know which laws apply and how. And may I suggest that instead of the negative quest of delimiting and separating physical/non-physical, which promises to be as futile as your previous quest for science/non-science, a more productive approach might be positive one, to look at concrete proposals for explaining phenomena, say free will or consciousness, with an open ("agnostic") mind. Physicalists have such proposals, and so do dualists and idealists. | |
| Mar 21, 2018 at 18:49 | answer | added | Juan Manuel Jones Volonté | timeline score: 4 | |
| Mar 21, 2018 at 18:38 | history | edited | Yechiam Weiss | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 21, 2018 at 18:32 | comment | added | Gordon | Very minor point, but I think you may mean "physicist" and not "physician". By physician, American English = medical doctor. | |
| Mar 21, 2018 at 15:59 | answer | added | Jo Wehler | timeline score: 2 | |
| Mar 21, 2018 at 10:05 | comment | added | Yechiam Weiss | If we don't take the physicalist approach and we agree to accept that the laws of physics aren't necessarily involve other types of natural phenomenons, this would means that we perhaps need to start thinking about them differently. And staying agnostic about this isn't the best solution, because if you stay agnostic about something that's basically out of the reach of your general scope (and not current scope!), you have no hope to find what you're looking for, at least not in the way it should be (you'll probably somehow force them into your scope). | |
| Mar 21, 2018 at 10:05 | comment | added | Yechiam Weiss | I'll only continue this here and not move to chat because it's important for the question. @Conifold so you're basically presenting a physicalist approach right? Now, first of all "laws of physics apply not to any physical but to particularly represented physical" - because we still haven't defined the laws well enough right? That still means there are (or at least we hope there are, or else science itself is moot) definitive laws that'll explain every physical phenomenon. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 22:31 | comment | added | Conifold | Laws of physics apply not to any "physical" but to particularly represented "physical". How exactly mental is represented as physical, if at all, we do not know, so laws are not much of a restriction, and even known laws already have "intrinsic randomness". As it is, staying agnostic on the issue is preferable, and "entirely different approach" is an idle speculation of little use unless it comes with a specific proposal. If so, it should be taken on its own merits, so again the distinction is moot. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 22:20 | comment | added | Yechiam Weiss | @Conifold "treating physical does not attach to any set of rules" - so what are the laws of physics then? Do they apply to anything other than physics? Are they intrinsic, particular to physics? If so, then treating something different with those laws would be simply wrong. You may say that it'll just need an adjustment to the laws themselves, but what if what we're dealing with requires an entire different approach? Maybe something more dynamic than laws (just example)? Maybe something that has intrinsic randomness in its laws, maybe it doesn't even respond to a certain set of laws? | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 21:50 | comment | added | Conifold | You seem to be making a rookie mistake that one needs a "proper definition" of X to talk about X: we do not need to know lines, nor should we care. "Definition" comes at the end of inquiry, not at its beginning, and we definitely do not need any "clear" mental/physical distinction, nor are we anywhere near giving a useful one (it is similar with living/inanimate). No "valuable information" will be lost on behalf of it because vagueness excludes little ("treating as physical" does not attach to any "set of rules"), it is distinctions, especially "clear" ones, that restrict options prematurely. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 21:22 | comment | added | Yechiam Weiss | Without a proper definition and distinction between physical and mental (which is in itself requires heavy work on definition), we might lose valuable information of those apparently two different entities. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 21:20 | comment | added | Yechiam Weiss | @Conifold maybe this will be better phrased: assuming we have physical and non-physical (probably mental) causation, related to each other, how would we know where the line between the physical and the non-physical is? If physical is what's observable (for example), that means even those that apparently caused mental causation would really be physical, but what if there's a different set of rules that distinguish the mental from the physical? If we treat them as physical we might lose the whole point of why they were used to be conceived as "non-physical". | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 21:09 | comment | added | Conifold | That's just the problem, it is unclear what the purpose of the "definition" you want is. Such "definitions" are often used in descendants of medieval arguments for immateriality of souls, that something "can not possibly" be physical, but already Kant pointed out that those come uncomfortably close to appealing to ignorance. From the latest addition it seems that you may be interested in mental causation, but then the definition of "physical" is rather moot, and we have a multitude of threads on it already. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 20:11 | comment | added | Yechiam Weiss | @Conifold I'm not talking about those different sciences. And there's no real problem with calling those phenomenons physical, it just seems that the linguistics can easily confuse, so much that we simply don't know what we're talking about when we're distinguishing between physical and non-physical. We can go ahead and call seemingly mental activities physical, but that's not what we mean when we say those two different words right? | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 19:40 | comment | added | Conifold | Everything that can be studied in natural (or any) science is not everything, art and ethics have different purposes, for example, and ideals are typically studied in ethics. And even if everything science studies will be declared "physical" the point is to describe more precisely what it is and how it behaves, so I do not see a problem. As long as we do not yet have the full picture for the objective ideals, if any, what difference does it make if they will eventually be called "physical" or not? | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 18:31 | comment | added | Yechiam Weiss | @Conifold thanks, it is similar (although I pinpointed the answer more on the boundaries and the distinction between the physical and the non-physical, which is a bit more accurate than a general definition). But the answers to that question seems like what jobermark was complaining about in his question- almost all the answers say that either physical is undefined or that it'll simply encompass everything that can be studied in the natural science. In this way, there's no actual point in talking about ideals (non-subjective), because if they'll turn out to be real they'll be called physical. | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 18:07 | review | Close votes | |||
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| Mar 20, 2018 at 17:49 | comment | added | Conifold | Possible duplicate of What does "physical" mean to philosophers? | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 17:44 | answer | added | Geremia | timeline score: 2 | |
| Mar 20, 2018 at 14:14 | history | asked | Yechiam Weiss | CC BY-SA 3.0 |