On 2 June 2018 at 17:10, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 3:15 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> > wrote: > >>> >> I'd like to see Bruno actually quote some well known philosophers or >>> >> scientist using the term. >> >> >> >> > Materialism vs. Idealism is one of the oldest philosophical debates, > > Yes, and like all old philosophical debates philosophers have not moved one > inch closer to a resolution of the problem in the last 2000 years, they just > keep going around and around in circles. That's not to say gigantic progress > in philosophy hasn't been made, its just that philosophy is no longer done > by philosophers, its done by scientists and mathematicians.
What you are alluding to is more or less how the idiot Greeks operated. They also tended to be all of those things at the same time. I have no particular sympathy for modern academic "philosophers", but this is a bit like expecting an academic literary critic to write a novel that one wold care to read. Is there a lot of bullshit in academia? Sure. Also true in the sciences. > Newton, Gauss, > Darwin, Maxwell, Cantor, Einstein, Hubble, Godel,Turing, Everett, and Watson > and Crick advanced the field of philosophy enormously; Karl Popper did not. There have been tremendous philosophical advances in modern history outside of the natural sciences. The entire world was a laboratory for many of these ideas. Some of the American founding fathers were philosophers, and so was Karl Marx. I could also mention ethics -- and again many such ideas made their way into how our civilization is organized. We could also discuss issues of meaning, and the many viewpoints surrounding one of the original philosophical questions: "how to live a good life?". I would say that you simply have a bias for the natural sciences, and don't really care for other fields of inquiry. >> >> > The uber-mainstream wikipedia defines materialism as a belief in that >> matter is primary. >> >> >> >> From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism#Overview : >> >> >> >> "To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are primary, >> and matter secondary. " > > > It would seem to me that statement is about as un-controversial and > non-profound as a statement can be. The profoundity of ideas is a personal and subjective assessment. I don't think it really has any bearing on validity or relevance. Depending on my state of mind, the ideas that I find the most profound at a given moment vary a great deal. Also certain life events turn cliches into deep wisdom, and vice-versa. > In this context "secondary" doesn't mean > second rate, it just means there is a difference between nouns and verbs. > “Stuff" is not the same as "doing stuff" and doing stuff is secondary > because stuff obviously can't do anything if stuff doesn't exist. I'm not > saying this is deep I'm just saying its true. You are imposing your own metaphysics on the article. It's not a question of something being "second rate". In the materialist view, mind is secondary to matter, but nobody uses this to claim that mind is some second rate thing. It's a question of weather there exists some reality independent from the perception of conscious entities where what we call "matter" can be said to exist, even when we are not looking. I am not trying to convince you that idealism is correct (I am not convinced myself), I am just arguing that it is a perfectly coherent hypothesis, that has not been proved nor disproved. > And by the way, the number of > times the phrase "primary matter" is mentioned in that article is exactly > the same number you will find it mentioned in any modern physics journal. > Zero. I assumed I was not arguing with a string matching algorithm. In this case it does take a bit of semantic parsing: "To materialists, matter is primary[...]" Now, I am not a native English speaker, but I am fairly convinced that if you find the pattern: N is A, where N is a noun and A is an adjective, you can equally allude to AN. For example you could write the equivalent sentence: "Materialists believe in primary matter." But if you insist on string-matching arguments: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=primary%20matter Modern physics journal: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1014465327475 > The reason the “primary matter" debate is never going to get anywhere is > that philosophers write impassioned posts and even scholarly tomes about the > existence or non-existence of "primary matter" but never once ask themselves > what the hell the term is supposed to mean, and many don't even wonder what > "matter" means. You illustrate the belief in primary matter frequently, when you argue with Bruno that a physical computer is necessary for computations to exist, or that physics is more fundamental than math. This is a position of belief in primary matter. > Leibniz invented the silly catch phrase but, as is > customary whenever scientists put on their philosopher's hat, he was rather > vague (and Bruno even more vague) about what "primary matter” means; and > that's why specialists in the study of matter, physicists, have never found > the idea useful. It is normal that they don't find it useful, since they are interested in physics and not in metaphysics -- although, of course, it is possible to be interested in both. > And “free will” is a idea that’s even worse, but of course > that hasn’t stopped philosophers from generating a vast quantity of verbiage > about that too. With that I agree. Telmo. > John K Clark > > > > > > -- > 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
