On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 11:24:06 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 13 May 2019, at 20:24, Philip Thrift <[email protected] <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > > On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 12:25:38 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> >> On 10 May 2019, at 09:12, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> >> When someone says "consciousness is not a material thing" I think of Wile >> E. Coyote. >> >> Consciousnesses need something (matter) to hang on to. Consciousnesses >> just don't go floating around willy-nilly. The Coyote finds that out when >> he finds out he is hanging on to nothing, and looks down. >> >> >> >> That is nice Aristotelian poetry. But you just repeat you ontological >> commitment in a material world, where no physicist has a consistent theory >> of it, nor even have tried to test its existence. What the Aspect >> experience has only shown, is that IF there is a physicaly reality then it >> can’t be a boolean reality (which would have already annoyed Aristotle). >> >> Then with Mechanism, “Matter” invocation needs to add some magic >> incompatible with YD+CT. >> It is like invoking a God to impeach testing simpler theories which do >> not commit a so strong ontological commitment. >> >> Bruno >> > > > I was shooting for Epicurean poetry (or Lucretian; Lucretius's *De rerum > natur*a [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura ] was a poem > about the philosophy of Epicurus). > > Aristotle's philosophy is *confused nonsense*, especially when compared > to Epicurus’s. > > > This is weird. I appreciate Aristotle, because it is rather clear, and > enough precise to be refuted, with in the natural science and the theology. > I tend to consider him as the inventor of the notion of primitive matter, > that is the first which postulate the existence of a physical universe (in > metaphysics), but that is also the only place where he get confused (his > metaphysics). > > As a materialist (a “believer in matter”) it is astonishing you don’t > appreciate Aristotle. He is really the one who got the idea that “God” is a > physical universe, even if he add the chiquenaude divine to create the > first move. > > Bruno > > The atomistic materialist Democritus came before Aristote, and Epicurus, the most advanced of the atomists (as written about by Lucretius) was about the same time as Aristotle.
But way before them was Thales, who inspired Aristotle's thoughts on matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Water_as_a_first_principle Thales' most famous philosophical position was his cosmological <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology> thesis, which comes down to us through a passage from Aristotle <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle> 's *Metaphysics <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics_(Aristotle)>*. In the work Aristotle unequivocally reported Thales’ hypothesis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis> about *the nature of all matter <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter#Historical_development> – that the originating principle of nature <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arche> was a single material substance <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_monism>*: *water*. Aristotle then proceeded to proffer a number of conjectures based on his own observations to lend some credence to why Thales may have advanced this idea (though Aristotle didn’t hold it himself). Aristotle laid out his own thinking about matter and form <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism> which may shed some light on the ideas of Thales, in *Metaphysics <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics>* 983 b6 8–11, 17–21. (The passage contains words that were later adopted by science with quite different meanings.) That from which is everything that exists and from which it first becomes and into which it is rendered at last, its substance remaining under it, but transforming in qualities, that they say is the element and principle of things that are. …For it is necessary that there be some nature (φύσις), either one or more than one, from which become the other things of the object being saved... Thales the founder of this type of philosophy says that it is water. In this quote we see Aristotle's depiction of the problem of change and the definition of substance <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_theory>. He asked if an object changes, is it the same or different? In either case how can there be a change from one to the other? The answer is that the substance "is saved", but acquires or loses different qualities (πάθη, the things you "experience"). Aristotle conjectured that Thales reached his conclusion by contemplating that the "nourishment of all things is moist and that even the hot is created from the wet and lives by it." While Aristotle's conjecture on why Thales held water as the originating principle of matter is his own thinking, his statement that Thales held it as water is generally accepted as genuinely originating with Thales and he is seen as an incipient matter-and-formist. Now Thales may have been wrong about matter=water per se (unless you are a wave-function monist), but that is water under the bridge. @philipthrift -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/7e479e4e-df81-4175-9106-b92bfa63e1a4%40googlegroups.com.
