On 7/11/2012 7:32 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:
In your work you seem to posit that numbers have minds (thus they can dream) and that their ideas are passive and yet can reproduce all phenomena that would be explained as being the result of physical acts in materialism. You argue that this reduces all phenomena to passive hypostatization, but I argue that this is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness as per the *fallacy of misplaced concreteness* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_%28fallacy%29>, since you have severed all ties to physical implementation. Please understand that it seems that the only place where there is disagreement between you and I is on the postulation of primacy. I am arguing that neither matter (atoms) nor ideas (numbers) can be taken as primitives as they are devoid of causal efficacy.
But you are assuming that is some fact-of-the-matter as to where 'concreteness' is placed. I think this is a mistake (a theological mistake). The scientific attitude is to hypothesize whatever you want as the basic ontology and to see if the resulting model is consistent and predictive of the epistemological (subjective) facts. So you may take tables and chair as basic objects interacting through gravity, electromagnetic, and contact forces - this is the model of Newtonian physics. It obviously leaves out a lot and ultimately was found to be applicable only in a limited domain of its own ontology. You may start with atoms of conscious thoughts (aka observer moments) and try to recover the intersubjective world from that. And there is no proof known that would prohibit these different bases from making overlapping or even identical predictions. There may be no *unique* basis.
Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
