36
The famous version of this is Twin Earth thought experiment, which explores two worlds which are identical, except one has no H2O. The H2O in this world is instead replaced with a substance XYZ. Denizens of both worlds call their substance "water." This thought experiment has countless arguments made on both sides.
Your particular argument presupposes ...
14
From what I have read so, atheism and materialism/physicalism are considered to be the same thing.
This is incorrect. Atheism is a view about the existence of God. Materialism is a metaphysical view about the kinds of substance that exist. Specifically, atheism is the claim that there does not exist a God, or Gods, in the style of the major religions. ...
10
According to John Burtnet, Thales believed that:
The earth floats on the water.
Water is the material cause
of all things.
All things are full of gods. The magnet is alive;
for it has the power of moving iron.
Aristotle said, in De Anima:
Certain thinkers say that soul is intermingled in the whole universe,
and that it is perhaps for ...
10
I tend to share your puzzlement. A lot of contemporary metaphysicians seem to have an outdated view of physics, not only about determinism but also about locality or mereology. (This was criticized by Ladyman and Ross in "everything must go".)
I think the main reasons are the following:
Generally, philosophers are not trained in physics (except ...
9
Being an atheist does not imply a materialistic worldview, it simply means one does not believe in (a) God.
Having said that, I think an atheist would likely have a materialist worldview simply because the same thing that caused an atheist to deny the existence of God (lack of evidence for this thing existing in another realm) would lead to a denial of ...
9
The threat of epiphenomenalism is indeed a major issue intensively discussed in the last decades. But while there is a broad consensus against it, there is no agreement as to what exactly blocks it. Burge in Foundations of Mind (Ch. 20) even says that the dominance of materialism in the contemporary philosophy of mind is a reaction (in his view unwarranted) ...
8
This argument is a variation on what Kitcher calls the "rational psychologist's fallacy" in Kant's Transcendental Psychology. It is a particular case of the argument from ignorance fallacy, and was addressed already by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason. In the OP version of the argument the fallacious reasoning is rolled into using premise 3. Sensations, ...
7
The word "best" implies value judgments, and can't be evaluated independent of your goals for your worldview. But there are clear practical and pragmatic reasons why science is currently a dominant worldview. These include:
Science is testable.
Science is replicable.
Science is attached to a large and growing body of useful, interconnected, internally ...
answered Jan 17 '18 at 17:13
Chris Sunami supports Monica
23.5k1 gold badge37 silver badges75 bronze badges
6
First, the constructive part. Crick, who is as physicalist on neuroscience as one can wish for, in Astonishing Hypothesis discusses "the processing postulate":
"It suggests that we may be using the words conscious and unconscious for two many somewhat different activities. They may have to be replaced by some phrase like "processing unit", or, in some ...
6
One should keep in mind two points. First, historical materialism in its traditional form is later Marx, taking final shape in Das Kapital, the theory of alienation is young Hegelian Marx of 1844 Manuscripts, and the "species-essence" is borrowed from his left Hegelian predecessor, Feuerbach. In 1845 Theses On Feuerbach Marx reinterprets him in the general ...
6
A relevant distinction here is between "ontological materialism" and "methodological materialism" (compare the discussion in the SEPh article on "naturalism"). Ontological materialism is the claim that only matter exists. (I'm assuming you're using "matter" in a broad sense that includes the kinds of energy and fields studied by physics. Otherwise early ...
6
Twin A experiences the perception, call it PR, of the color red (that is, the material event, call it MR, of photons of a particular wavelength hitting the retina and stimulating neurons).
Can you define "perception"? Is it a material event?
It is a valid materialist position, if not the materialist position, that "perception" is not an atomic concept, ...
6
You are asking one of the outstanding unknown questions in philosophy: do mental states supervene on brain states or not?
"Supervene" is a really great word. If A supervenes on B, it means that if you know everything about B, you automatically can deduce everything about A. For example, the value of a pile of $1 bills supervenes on the list of serial ...
6
There are several questions here and there are several different domains of philosophy involved. One major question is about ontology: is what we call 'free will' a 'real' experience and what's the difference between that and it being 'only a perception'? There's a broad range of thoughts on this, some of which veer into theology, but also things like "...
5
Especially given what you observe about electromagnetic forces, not to mention atomic theory post 1911 (c.f. the Rutherford model) and gravity post 1916 (c.f. general relativity theory), the notion of what is "material" becomes a rather significant question. To say nothing of special relativity and the Einstein equation linking matter to energy...
I would, ...
5
There has been a vast literature critiquing Searle's viewpoints, enough to be collected,
e.g.,
John Searle and His Critics. Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick, eds.; 1991. (Wiley link)
There are also collected criticisms of his Chinese Room Argument; see the excellent Wikipedia article, and this collection:
Views into the Chinese Room: New essays on ...
5
Berkeley gives two arguments in the quoted passage, and the first one does resonate with Kant's later arguments. But Berkeley's came before Kant's.
First, he says that the notion of matter is "inconsistent". This is roughly because it is usually defined in terms of attributes (extension, color, sound, etc.), which only make sense as perceived (by their ...
5
Welcome, October !
Some contrasts between Marx and George are drawn out in an article by John Haynes Holmes. Holmes' plain and sometimes undiscerning lack of sympathy for Marx and extolling of George, and his over-use of exclamation marks, do not prevent some helpful points from being made:
It is unlikely, had Karl Marx and Henry George ever met,
or ...
5
The position is that of eliminative materialism, or of delusionism, relative to consciousness. The two are somewhat different.
Qualia are often cited by non-physicalists as direct evidence against physicalism. Many physicalists try to accommodate qualia and physicalism, and argue that the reasoning from qualia to non-physicalism is in error. For a ...
4
I believe Marx proposed Dialectic materialism by "reversing" the Hegelian dialectic idealism so to make it stand with "the feet on the ground".
As i know "material" for Hegel is an idea. But "idea" is not something just in man's head, but the whole spirit of the world, so some times an "idea" is pure materialistic. Correct me if i 'm wrong.
4
Henri Lefebvre wrote a book Dialectical Materialism to attempt to divorce DM from its vulgarization by Stalinists and official Communist party philosophers and develop it as a form of "logic." I consider this book to be a little too Hegelian and philosophically concerned for it to be in the tradition of Engels' Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature. A more ...
4
According to wikipedia, physicalism is now-a-days the preferred term to materialism in order to better include physical phenomenon which might be considered immaterial, e.g., fields or space itself. I'm not sure how important this distinction is, but it does help to emphasize:
That the physical world contains many complex phenomenon that are not, at least ...
4
They are belief systems. Any conjecture on a situation that has no proven answer is a belief. No exceptions. Nobody knows for certain the meaning or lack of meaning in the universe and thus any opinion on the matter is exactly that, opinion, belief, idea, or philosophy.
4
There's no inconsistency between the reality of qualia and materialism unless one has an excessively reductive conception of "the physical" -- using things like Locke's inverted spectrum and "Is your red the same as my red?" to try and prove the mind has its own special reality (i.e, with its own special laws unrelated to the physical) is this kind of ...
4
Its a matter of definitions. Whether it is possible to be an atheist and not be a materialist/physicalist depends on how you define atheist and materialist. Generally speaking, they are different words because people have found them to not define the same thing.
Your challenge as an athiestic substance dualist will be accounting for how your freewill ...
4
Searle's argument fails because there's nothing specific to consciousness in it. As such, if you replace "possesses consciousness" with "plays chess" then his argument still stands but is patently wrong.
The reason why the weather simulation won't make you wet is that the computer that Searle is implicitly assuming doesn't have the actuation ability of ...
3
Thought experiment:
make digital photos of single colored surfaces (as far uniform as human would call it uniform), create artifical neuron network and train it to distinguish collors.
Do it multiple times. You WILL end with different NNs that almost always will say the same color (just like people would do).
So internally these NNs percieve (as far as ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
