On 5/30/2018 3:18 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2018-05-30 11:27 GMT+02:00 Lawrence Crowell
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>:
On Tuesday, May 29, 2018 at 1:25:19 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
You miss my point that no one, no physicists, no philosopher,
starts out by defining "primary matter". It is your invention
as a straw man to be defeated by computationalism. Some
physicists and some philosophers may suppose that the stuff
described by physics is enough to explain the world we
observe; but most also suppose that it is not "primary". They
look for a deeper more unified ur-stuff and many physicists
have followed Wheeler and Tegmark in thinking of the equations
of mathematical physics as simply defining the ur-stuff.
Brent
This and other old philosophical ideas are of no utility in
physics. There is no physical meaning to terms such as primary
matter.
Primary matter is a metaphysical idea about the reality... so of
course it is of no utility in physics... but physics don't tell us
anything about what is reality.
Yet it tells us about how the world works and what we can and can't do.
So what exactly would it add know "what is reality". This is exactly
like my point about consciousness. When we can predict, construct,
manipulate, consciousness the way we do the physical world, then the
"hard problem" of consciousness will be as irrelevant as elan vitale is
to biology and "primary matter" is to physics.
Everythingism are metaphysical idea about what is reality... so if
your concern is only in utility, philosophy doesn't concern you...
Materialism, physicalim, computationalism, deism etc are metaphysical,
philosophical and about what reality is... physics is about prediction
on the reality, not about what ultimately reality is... it answers
how, not what and why...
The problem is with people equating physics whith physicalism...
they're not the same, one is a metaphysical idea about the nature of
reality.
But I'm suggesting to you that this metaphysical idea is empty if it has
no consequences, but if it does have consequences then it's physics and
not metaphysics.
Brent
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