On Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 12:11:11 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> On 16 May 2019, at 12:25, Philip Thrift <[email protected] <javascript:>>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 4:44:48 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 14 May 2019, at 20:45, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> 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]> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> Materialism is a very natural option, then it leads to Mechanism, often
>> used to hide the mind-body problem, if not to eliminativism, or some non
>> sensical dualism. Then, after the Church-Post-Kleene-Turing discovery of
>> the universal digital machine/number, “matter” begins to show its
>> contradiction, and eventually we are back to Pythagorus, enhanced by the
>> Turing-Church thesis. Thales was a great guy, Aristotle too, and they would
>> be there, they would feel honoured to be refuted, because that is *the*
>> only real honour we can give to a scientific researcher: to refute its
>> theories.
>>
>> Bruno
>>
>>
>>
> Materialism leads to Mechanism *only* - I claim, consistent with Galen
> Strawson, and also William Seager [
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Seager_(philosopher) ] (who I came
> across recently - if it's what might be called modern materialism,
> equivalent with what is commonly called physicalism today in 2019 (or
> *physics*-alism, as some writers write to make the point).
>
> (This is not to say that physics as subject will be the same in 2119 as it
> is in 2019. Who knows?)
>
> But I say the old guys - Thales, Democritus, Epicurus - had more of the
> right idea of *what matter is.*
>
> And most *physicists* today - at least all the ones I've read in the past
> 50 years - *do not*.
>
>
>
> Mechanism (the Digital mechanism we discussed here, I am not sure if there
> is a non-digital mechanist theory today, despite the claim of some people)
> leads to non-materialism. Adding some primitive matter in the ontology
> makes it mysterious, as it would need non computational “magic” to
> influence the consciousness flux that provably exist in arithmetic if we
> assume mechanism.
> Plotinus explains already well why Democritus atoms cannot work, and his
> argument can be refined to show that a continuous field can’t work either
> (although Plotinus would have been more happy with it than with atoms, but
> he lacked the Church-Turing thesis, which is really what changes
> everything).
>
> Bruno
>
>
The atomistic materialism of Epicurus had major revisions of that of
Democritus:
https://www.iep.utm.edu/epicur/#SH3c
like the swerve (random atomic motion) and sensible qualities (qualia).
Epicurus was the father of *experiential materialism*.
@philipthrift
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