On 12/11/2018 12:04 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 1:53:50 PM UTC-6, [email protected] 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 <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 <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. AGWhen Vic refutes that materialism ("all there is is matter") has been refuted (as Vic did in his essay), he is asserting all there is is matter. There is no matter + some ghosts behind matter. He wanted to banish the ghosts (the immaterial).
Ghosts are agents. The proposal that there is nothing more to matter than mathematical relations, an idea advocated by Max Tegmark, Bruno Marchal, Wheeler and others, is quite different from "ghosts".
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