Olivier5

@keshlam B. F. Skinner adopted a more radical view than that. But the argument also targets other forms of reductionism than Skinner's. Broadly speaking, one cannot reduce reason to something else than reason, and still pretend to be reasonable.

nybooks.com/online/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers

plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/#SelRefOb‌​j

@keshlam A few resources you may like to check: plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/#PopuBeha

@ScottRowe My point is simply that language being relational, it makes no sense to try and "atomise" it.

@ScottRowe Note that "as cold as it gets" is still relational.

Not sure I understand the question correctly. In language, qualities are relative, not absolute, like everything else. It's a system of relations and differences. "Hot" is relative to "cold" etc. So there can be no atomic definition of anything. One cannot say: "this thing is cold" and pretend that such is an "atomic definition", because "cold" is relative.

@HrishikeshChoudhary You areceelcome to believe whatever you want but to me, this is not topical here on PSE. It's theology.

@HrishikeshChoudhary This line of thought is about the fear of death, and nothing else. It's a bedtime story for children.

@infatuated This is pure theology. There's no evidence for any of it. Maybe your goal, in gutting the beautiful word "life" of any meaning, was to assuage your fear of death?

@infatuated It depends a great deal on your present situation, as compared to what the passage leads to. If death is for the best, why not go for it?

@infatuated So you wouldn't care if someone threatened to kill you?

@infatuated Just because you can count some stuff, doesn't mean that "numbers apply to everything". The concepts of innumerable or countless or uncountable do exist and are applicable to many things. How many waves are in the sea? How many intuitions in a poem? Can you quantify the amount of beauty in a painting? It's uncountable, hence the concept of number does not apply universally, and the concept of numbering gains meaning from such a contrast. But what would "not living" mean in your system?

@infatuated But it's the same thing. A concept that applies to everything does not apply to anything in particular. It means nothing if it can't discriminate between anything. In language, there are only differences (Saussure).

My point is that if death is just another form of life, "life" means very little.

Seems to me that you are asking if some multiverse theories are falsifiable, and if yes, how to falsify them. I think it is an excellent question.

@Rushi Philosophers invented science, and if they can protect it from abuse, let them do so.

Empiricism is indeed the normal process of true science, but not of fake science, like astrology or intelligent design, or climate change denial. If you love fakers and liars, go right ahead and drop Popper. You might even wish to elect Trump, while you are at it.

The point of the criterion is to ensure empiricism in science. Anyone who wants to do away with empirical facts is welcome to do away with falsifiability.

Schools, universities and research centers need to decide what science to fund and to teach, and for that they need criteria. Or will you like them to teach astrology?

The need for a demarcation emerged historically as a result of the success of science, circa end of 19th century. Soon, everything and its contrary started to pretend to sciencificity. The argument for a clear criterion includes the need for the state and private people and companies to invest is sound science. It has nothing to do with science as a day to day activity. It's about society's protection against fakes.

@Rushi Did not Capt James Lancaster make the empirically testable prediction that drinking lemon juice would prevent scurvy? If he did, he was being scientific, as per Popper.

You misunderstood Popper. He was simply offering a better demarcation criteria than the logical positivists had proposed. His demarcation criterion is still in use, and still excellent. And yes, demarcating fake science from real science involves moral condemnation of fake science. What's wrong with that?

@D.Halsey Nothing invented here. Materialism is commonly defined as the idea that nothing exists but matter. As a direct consequence, it fails to account for ideas, I.e. for itself, other than in the compatibilist version. More here: philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/101135/…

@Anixx How would you propose to give status to ideas in materialism? Because that's what my objection boils down to.

@keshlam I'm trying to help, not to argue.

As a solution to this paradox, I do encourage materialists to work out some kind of status for ideas, including for their own ideas. What are ideas? How come they exist? What can they do? Etc. And in my experience, once they start to work seriously on these questions, or at least ponder them, materialists start by force to work on the transcendental: ie on abstractions and universals. Doing so, they open up to the value of the transcendental, and soon forget their original unduly restrictive and self-defeating materialist ontology.

@keshlam the assertion I am opposing is called materialism, ie that nothing exists but matter. This assertion is self-defeating for obvious reasons: materialism itself is not a piece of charcoal, neither a piece of concrete nor some other material substance. Hence, materialism does not exist under materialism.

@keshlam I'm all for knowledge, which is precisely why I try to keep charlatans at bay.

@keshlam One only needs to see that human reason cannot undermine or deny itself.

@keshlam I thought we were talking of materialism, as making some grand ontological claim. Physics is a science, of course it's open ended.

@keshlam My point is precisely that the model is logically inconsistent, in that it cannot account for itself as a supposedly correct theory of everything. Whence this correct theory, if all there is is matter?

@ScottRowe Seems a bit ad hoc though. 🤔

@keshlam "you don't have to make humans non-physical to make them non-dispensable." No, but you must recognise human agency, personhood. A meat machine is just a machine, with no moral worth.

@D.Halsey Yes, it's my definition and it is meant to be polemical. The goal is to force materialists to give a precise and effective status to ideas in their ontology. Otherwise they have no feet to stand on.

@keshlam the assertion I am opposing is called materialism, ie that nothing exists but matter. This assertion is self-defeating for obvious reasons: materialism itself is not a piece of charcoal, neither a piece of concrete nor some other material substance. Hence, materialism does not exist under materialism.

@keshlam I'm all for knowledge, which is precisely why I try to keep charlatans at bay.

@keshlam One only needs to see that human reason cannot undermine or deny itself.

@keshlam I thought we were talking of materialism, as making some grand ontological claim. Physics is a science, of course it's open ended.

@keshlam My point is precisely that the model is logically inconsistent, in that it cannot account for itself as a supposedly correct theory of everything. Whence this correct theory, if all there is is matter?

@ScottRowe Seems a bit ad hoc though. 🤔

@keshlam "you don't have to make humans non-physical to make them non-dispensable." No, but you must recognise human agency, personhood. A meat machine is just a machine, with no moral worth.

@D.Halsey Yes, it's my definition and it is meant to be polemical. The goal is to force materialists to give a precise and effective status to ideas in their ontology. Otherwise they have no feet to stand on.

Just saying: it may be difficult to conceive under physicalism but the opposite is logically impossible under same physicalism.

@infatuated Correct.

Fair enough. Still it's important to define difficult problems precisely and not to add logical fallacies to the equation, if we can avoid it. The idea of a non-causal object is simply illogical.

@infatuated

Thoughts are demonstably affected by chemistry, and display wave-like behavior such as emission, detection, amplification. The way I see it, the only real explanatory difficulty lays in their symbolic nature, their aboutedness.

Nothing that exists can be non causal, meaning the same thing as "non physical". Hence thoughts are physical and causal in some yet unknown way. To repeat "physicalism does not allow it" presumes a full knowledge of everything physical, which we lack.

I think the distinction you are trying to make is that thinking is symbolic, while walking is geneally not.