On Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 10:07:13 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 11 Dec 2018, at 20:53, [email protected] <javascript:> wrote: > > > > On Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 7:30:32 PM UTC, Philip Thrift wrote: >> >> >> >> On Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 1:02:52 PM UTC-6, [email protected] >> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> On Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 6:44:34 PM UTC, Philip Thrift wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> On Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 12:32:51 PM UTC-6, [email protected] >>>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> * As for physicists being materialists in the sense of believing there >>>>> is nothing underlying matter as its cause, I have never heard that >>>>> position >>>>> articulated by any physicist, in person or on the Internet. AG * >>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>> >>>> Victor Stenger >>>> *Materialism Deconstructed?* >>>> >>>> https://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/materialism-deconstructed_b_2228362.html >>>> >>>> >>> >>> *I was once a member of Vic's discussion group. Vic believed in the >>> reality of matter, in the sense that if you kick it, it kicks back. But he >>> didn't deny the possibility that there could be something more fundamental >>> underlying matter. This denial is what Bruno claims is the materialist >>> position, but it surely wasn't Vic's position. You know this, of course, >>> being a member of that group. Right? AG* >>> >>>> >>>> - pt >>>> >>> >> >> I hosted Vic in Dallas in 2014 for a talk. I got to know him fairly >> personally . >> >> Homages to philosophical materialism ("matter is the fundamental >> substance in nature") is in his books. *Timeless Reality* in particular. >> >> One can be open-minded, or *ironist *in Rorty's definition [ >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironism ], and he was that. >> >> But despite all the "models" talk, I would confidently say he was always >> a hardcore materialist. >> >> - pt >> > > Show me one instance, just one, where Vic denied something causal and > unknown underlying the existence of matter? This is Bruno's model of > materialism among physicists but it clearly doesn't apply to Vic. AG > > > > You might read my favorite book by Vic, which is “The comprehensible > cosmos”. There, it shows something very platonist-like: he shows that > physics can be derived from few principles. Unfortunately, he seems to > ignore the mind-body problem, and so he does not explain how that physical > reality can select our consciousness in way corresponding to what we > observe. So there is still a bit of magic in his explanation, or of lack of > rigour (by not seeing that he uses some non-mechanist theory to allow a > physical reality to do that selection, instead of deducing his first > physical principle from arithmetic and machine’s psychology, as we have to > do with mechanism. That is even more apparent in his less interesting books > like “God the paling hypothesis, (where I agree with the content, but find > it bad because he identifies theology with the current theology which > assumes a creator but also a creation). > > So Vic approach is still materialist or at least physicalist. But he was > on the right track, and would have understood that his attempt to > comprehend the cosmos was only a beginning: to work well, he would need to > derive the cosmos from machine statistical experience in arithmetic. > > Bruno > > > >
It is interesting that you raise the part of Stenger's writings that have to do with things like symmetry, point-of-view invariance (POVI) in the foundations of physics. That is the part I didn't get at all at the time (now some years ago) and I don't get it (I reject it) even more now. It was like *So you are a Platonist now?* :) - pt -- 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.
