On 26 September 2013 10:56, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 9/25/2013 2:57 PM, LizR wrote: > > On 26 September 2013 08:23, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > >> There seems to be a lot self-congratulatory bashing of reductive >> materialism on this list without noticing that it has provided all the >> knowledge of advanced science, while metaphysical Platonism has provided >> speculation. >> >> I don't know about any self-congratulation, but I do know that > "reductive materialism" hasn't provided all this knowledge of advanced > science. What has done so is *reductionism. Materialism *is a theory > about what the fundamental nature of the universe is. *Reductionism *is a > theory about how the fundamental components, whatever they may be, relate > to each other. It's only reductionism that has been wildly successful. > Materialism remains a metaphysical speculation, often riding on the > coat-tails of reductionism, but in fact it been looking less and less > likely since early in the 20th century. This happens (mainly) when you look > closely at quantum theory (or even, in my case, not so closely). When you > see supposedly material objects behaving like little pieces of information, > the whole edifice of "matter" starts to look a bit shaky (for example all > electrons are identical except for a few properties - position, momentum, > spin axis, anything else?) Ditto for space and time, where we find a fixed > information contents in black holes, indeed they often look like large > fundamental "particles" - and the Beckenstein bound, the Holographic > principle, and so on. > > > That's why I said the 'materialism' of 'reductive materialism' doesn't > really mean much except that it's not 'idealism'. > > Oh. OK :)
However there are definitely *some *people out there who conflate the two, and talk as though we've "proved" (with the usual caveats) materialism via our technological successes. I would think Bill Taylor (on the FOAR list) is one of them, for example. (As far as I can tell, a lot of the people who attack comp - when not merely arguing from incredulity - seem to do so from a basis that "obviously" materialism is correct, hence there "aren't enough computational resources for the UD to ever exist" - or similar arguments). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
