On Saturday, January 5, 2019 at 4:26:11 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 4 Jan 2019, at 17:25, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Physicists today (as I've observed) are not (for the most part) real > materialists. > > > > That is true, and physicists have rarely problem with the consequence of > Mechanism. Now, some physicist can be immaterialist, but still physicalist > (like Tegmark was at some moment at least). The physical reality would be a > mathematical reality among others, but with computationalism, the physical > reality comes from a more global mathematical phenomenon based on the > behaviour/semantics of the material mode of self-rereyence (involving > probabilities, i.e., for those who have studied the self-referential modes > available, the []p & X modes, with X being either p, or <>t, or p & <>t). > > This makes mechanism testable, and if quantum mechanics did not exist, I > would have thought that Mechanism is already refuted. > > Bruno > >
"Physicalism"/"Physical" are words that needs deprecating, as they can mean (to some philosophers of science) "can be reduced to physics", and physics is what is currently-accepted in the physics scientific community. (When I use "physical", I mean it in the sense of being "explainable" by physics.) It gets worse: "In this entry, I will adopt the policy of using both terms ['materialism' and 'physicalism'] interchangeably, though I will typically refer to the thesis we will discuss as ‘physicalism’." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/ Better to just use "materialism" and reject the use of "physicalism" (unless it refers to a the particular meaning of "can be reduced to physics"), though materialism has a "weak" and "strong" definition. Galen Strawson defines what "hard-nosed materialism" is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvHVo6TslV4 But what exactly would be a "test for Mechanism"? - 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.
