On 4 June 2018 at 17:11, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 3 Jun 2018, at 20:40, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On 2 June 2018 at 17:10, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 3:15 AM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> >>> 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. > > I agree. But I also think that materialism is refuted in all frame assuming > digital mechanism.
I agree -- under that assumption. > I also believe that digital mechanism solves (perhaps incorrectly in case it > happens to be refuted) the "hard problem” of consciousness versus matter. At > least for all conscious people who are OK with the ideas that consciousness > is, for them, true, non doubtable, immediate, non definable, and non > provable. That can be used as a semi-axiomatic theory of consciousness, and > it can be shown that all (Löbian) universal machine are confronted with, and > can described, such predicate. > More: Consciousness got an important role here: it speed a machine relatively > to other machine. Consciousness select the computation (without magic, but > like in the WM duplication), but it accelerates the self developing autonomy. > It provides … free-will, which is not much the ability to say “no” to the > authorities, be them parents, teacher, bishops, ayatollah, etc. I have had an idea for some time, and I will describe it to see if it goes in the direction of what you are saying. You could say it proposes a solution to the Fermi Paradox. My idea is to combine Darwinism, Many-Worlds and Anthropic reasoning: what if evolution works exactly as modern Biology describes it, but with a probability of success that is incredibly low? Then the multiverse could be a barren wasteland, with incredibly sporadic regions where entities like us evolved. This then becomes a complex version of your duplication machine, where I can only see Moscow if Moscow exists, which is to say, if I am in a computation that supports human existence. This would also explain my disappointments with genetic programming :) >> >>> 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. > > See my reply to Clark on this. Free-will is often defined by an ability to do > something randomly, but that is impossible and that is just, imho, a very bad > definition. If you read the neoplatonist, or study the behaviour of the > neoplatonist, like I just described, or like in the video on Islam that I > just gave, and still in my buffer: > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60JboffOhaw > > You will see that free-will was exactly what the literalist were opposed (who > defend literal interpretation of sacred texts as dogmatic truth). > > Free-will is the ability to determine oneself, with respect to Nature, or the > Pope. Free-will is almost more a right than a metaphysical truth. Today, this > is taught to pilots of airliners.the encouragement to the copilots to say to > the commandant or the captain of the plane that they are wrong. That is not > obvious, especially when they come from the army. More than a hundred > passenger planes have crashed despite the cockpit recorder show that the > copilot were aware that the commandant were wrong, but they were felling not > free to tell him. Thanks for the video, I will watch when I have a bit of time. If I understand correctly, you define free-will as the ability to act independently from other people, biological instincts and so on. My problem is that free-will must be free from something. I can accept it as a relative concept -- my free-will in relation to what other people want me to do, as you say. But isn't it the case that, if you zoom out enough, there is nothing for the will to be free from? Just a bunch of stuff happening? If your Universal Dovetailer is the source-code of reality, doesn't it contain all computations? Then whatever I choice I make "here" is replaced by another choice somewhere else. I have the impression that free-will in this context amounts to an inability to perceive everything. Best, Telmo. > John Clark like to say that free-will is nonsense, but he used an old > definition which indeed makes the concept non sensical. But that video of > Islam showed how science has declined very quickly when they passed from a > theology defending the notion of free-will to a theology against it, which of > course suited more the authoritarians. > > Best, > > Bruno > > > >> >> 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 [email protected]. >>> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >>> 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 [email protected]. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> 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 [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > 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. 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