The notion that facts having to do with people are somehow exempt from being 'real' in the sense in which realism of any sort is interested seems to me mistaken. Features of an act itself obviously have to do with people and their actions as well. Surely we don't want to say that morality and its grounding has nothing to do with people and their actions: that's precisely what morality is (at least in large part) about. — The Great Whatever

Yeah but the same can be applied to aesthetics, and the case for realism qua aesthetics is even less well supported than morality. It seems quite clear that a lot of what human beings find tasteful, interesting or beautiful is particular to human idiosyncrasies, and is not some objective feature of the world.

As an example, say we end up using Mars to dump all our trash on until it becomes an ugly, smelly planet by human standards. Is it ugly to the universe? Is it ugly to some alien creature that feasts off trash?

Back to morality. Would aliens find torturing human children to be immoral? Maybe, but maybe it would depend on their culture and what it means for aliens to conceive. Would the universe care about us torturing kids? It doesn't seem like the universe cares at all what kind of bad things go down. It's not even a proper question to ask.

So then, morality, like aesthetics, is dependent on human values, which are not objective. They're particular to us. They don't exist independent of us, unless you want to argue God or Platonism.

So is the idea "if there is an objective X, we can't disagree about X?"

But that's nonsense, right? — The Great Whatever

Sure, but that we can so profoundly disagree about what's right and wrong in many cases, particularly across cultures is what makes it questionable. It's different than some ordinary fact that we can have consensus on. Let's take slavery as an example. It's just as bad as torturing children, yet it has been defended vigorously by various cultures and individuals over time. It's even been claimed that slavery was objectively moral, in that God ordained slaves to be in that position in life.

If evolution is the case, then it's really hard to see how there can be objective morality, in the realist sense. We're moral creatures because that's the best strategy for us to pass our genes on, but the exact morality can vary depending on what works in any given time or culture.

However, if one isn't a realist about the world, then one could ignore evolutionary reasons for why we behave the way we do in favor of grounding morality in something else, like God or the platonic realm, I suppose. But then one needs to account for the various disagreements over ethics. Why is it that we can fundamentally disagree about how to behave if there is an objective moral code we're all supposedly aware of?

Going back to natural fiber (wool, linen, cotton, leathers and feathers) is possible, but doing so would require a tremendous agricultural and manufacturing shift. — Bitter Crank

There's always hemp ;)

As long as we have enough oil to last until the world transitions to cleaner energies, then we should be fine on that front. Battery, solar, wind, etc are all improving. I don't know how long it will realistically take to transition. Say it's 30 years. Do we have enough oil for three decades?

Oil can be replaced. If nothing else, we have a giant ball of energy in the sky that won't run out for billions of years. And you never know with cold fusion. The breakthrough might still happen.

I think adapting to the resulting climate change from burning so much oil will be more problematic than running out of it. We'll have a different energy economy in a few decades, but we'll have to adapt to the results of a warmer climate. Let's hope it's not severe enough to dry out the Amazon, or melt Antarctica.

It's nonsense to say that a tree doesn't falls in the forest if nobody is there to witness it, it just does. — Question

Sure, and a computer moves electricity (or light) around when nobody is around to witness it.

This is clearly not true. A computer is a logical space, which behavior is dictated by logical facts. Ask Turing. And as per the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle, the world is the totality of facts, not things. — Question

But a computer is actually a physical device that we invented to do logical things with. You have to have electromagnetism and atoms to make an electronic computer. The whole logical space, boolean algebra, and programming are all abstractions on top of the actual physicality of the machine.

The world is the totality of things. — quine

The world is a totality of fields?

I don't know that this works when it comes to physics, though, with it's universal laws, constants and particles and forces. You can't point to one electron as an example that defines the rule. They all have the same charge, mass, etc (that is what it is to be an electron).

The world just is. Facts are something we create from our intersection with the world as part of forming knowledge. Facts are a knowledge construct, even though they are about the world. But they are not the world, as if facts could exist independent of any minds.

The principles we (robots, fish, iPhones, humans) work on e.g. the laws of physics and chemistry are same. The difference I believe is that of degree not of kind. — TheMadFool

Are planets robots? How about black holes? Plants? Fire?

Physics and chemistry apply to everything physical. You've basically equated robotics with those two fields. There needs to be a bit more discrimination before you can compare life forms to robots.

Is a squid like a robot?

That is, ethics is shown, not said. — Banno

Except that it is, like since you were a little school boy. Do this, don't do that. It's better to share. 10 commandments. A good person does this and not that. Our language is full of ethical entreaties. We have ethical schools of philosophy dating back to pre-Socrates. We discuss ethical dilemmas presented to characters on various shows. It's hard to see how ethics isn't intimately related to language.

Or Babylon 5: mind wipe the criminal and replace it with a new mind. I don't recall where they got the "new" minds from.

Well what hasn't been done cannot be done and must be a bad idea. I concede — unenlightened

It would be like promising to get rid of money if you got elected. Now maybe one day in the future we'll be post scarcity and there won't be money or prisons (maybe a neural adjustment will fix criminal impulses). But that possibility says nothing about the reality of a politician abolishing punitive forms of justice today.

I'm not expecting to get elected any time soon. — unenlightened

Even if you were elected, you wouldn't get very far with abolishing punishment. Literally every society engages in some form of retributive justice.

Punishment is never sensible. If someone is unpleasant, they are not made more pleasant by being unpleasant to them. — unenlightened

Punishment is also for the victims and society's sense of justice. This even applies to studies where participants play a game that gives them a chance to cheat, and others will go out of their way to punish the cheaters, even at cost to the themselves.

Humans have an innate need for some form of justice. It's not all about the perpetrator.

A primary function of a mind is to create knowledge - each mind has to do that for itself. Animals don't create knowledge. — tom

Nah. The primary function of mind is to figure out how to survive and have (and rear in some animals) offspring. The accumulation of knowledge is a spandrel. Evolution could care less about philosophical, mathematical, or sports knowledge, for example.

Plants don't count but horseshoe crabs do because ...?

Wouldn't the statistics be heavily in favor of being some bacterium or virus overy any other life form?

How about we change mind to sonar. It's incredibly unlikely to be a whale or a bat. Therefore, only whales and bats exist. Or perhaps, it's incredibly unlikely to be able to use your mind to change the color of every single skin cell, therefore, only cephalopod minds exist.

Afterall, what makes the human mind more unique than that of an octopus or a bat? Just because we value abstract reasoning more than being able to see with sonar or camouflage into the background? (Would be quite useful in certain social situations come to think of it.)

There's a very wide range of abilities that we're not so great at or lack altogether. A mantis shrimp's eyes puts ours to shame, and are probably unique in their combined abilities. Maybe only mantis shrimp eyes exist?

The argument is trading on pure anthropomorphism. I doubt very much nature agrees with our exaggerated sense of self-worth, or philosophical obsessions over language and abstract thinking. The lowly horseshoe crab has been around in basically the same form for four hundred million years or so. We've been around for what? A couple hundred thousand in close to modern form? The horseshoe crab has survived all manner of cataclysms. We worry about making it out of this century.

Maybe only horseshoe crab minds exist.

It's not just "my form." It's ridiculous to think that every (other) physicalist is merely deferring to the science of physics, and that that's all there is to the position. — Terrapin Station

Of course it's not just deferring, since it's a philosophical position. But the term is physicalism for a reason, and that's because modern physics has shown that matter isn't the only game in town. Or to put it a better way, matter is only part of the physical picture.

That would matter if physicalism were adherence to whatever the received view is in the scientific discipline of physics, but it isn't. — Terrapin Station

I think you have your own version of physicalism as evidenced by:

TThe idea that energy can obtain apart from matter is part of the "crap" I was referring to earlier. It's incoherent. — Terrapin Station

As such, whenever I mention physicalism going forward, just ignore it, because it obviously has nothing to do with your form of materialism.

A clue should be in the term "materialism"--materialists/physicalists generally think that everything is material or matter as well as perhaps "forces" of matter and so on. — Terrapin Station

Really? You fall back on matter after rejecting physics? BTW, there is a reason it's called physicalism. And that reason is because physics has shown that the world is made up of more than matter, and that matter itself isn't even truly fundamental. It's a form of energy.

You're getting confused here regarding the exact content of their views with the sort of thing they were talking about. What do all materialists pre-science have in common that makes them materialists? — Terrapin Station

Mind independent, natural stuff? It's kind of hard to specify a material ontology without being specific. Thus atoms and voids, or five elements.

nd if you are, you know that materialists go back hundreds and hundreds of years, right?--long before there even was anything like a science of physics per se. So how do you make sense of there being materialists prior to the formal development of science? — Terrapin Station

Because of the Greek atomists positing that atoms and the void were all that ontologically existed. Everything else was made up of that. I suppose that Thales and Aristotle posited alternative materialistic views with water or the five elements.

But those have been outdated by the findings of science. You can't seriously maintain an old-fashioned version of materialism. We know they were inadequate. There's more than atoms and the void, or water, or the five elements.

That's got to be about the stupidest comment I've ever heard. "Just in case your physicalism isn't a deferral to the science of physics, then we have no way to tell what in the world you might be referring to by 'physical.'" — Terrapin Station

Well, what do you mean by "physical"? The world? What we sense? Reality?

Because that's not saying much. Any metaphysical doctrine can do the same.

The only thing that's required is that you think that everything is physical. You can believe that the science of physics has just about everything completely wrong and still think that everything is physical. — Terrapin Station

That is literally saying nothing whatsoever, since you're free to state whatever you want and call it physical. What would it even mean for physics to be completely wrong and yet physicalism to be true?

The science of physics is not the same thing as what the science of physics studies. — Terrapin Station

Okay, sure. But you can't argue for physicalism by positing something not part of the science of physics, and use that to defend physicalism.

So panpsychism is not physicalism, because they are positing an extra ontological property onto the world.

So you can't be a physicalist and an instrumentalist? — Michael

No, no way. An instrumentalist is not making any ontological commitments.

And one need not be a realist on logic, either. — Terrapin Station

So what? You need logic to make meaningful statements.

So how is it the case that physicalism is necessarily about "what's logically necessitated by physics"? — Terrapin Station

If it's not, then there's more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of by physicalists.

Physicalism need not have anything to do with the science of physics. — Terrapin Station

Yes it does. Physicalism is predicated on the stuff of physics being what's ontologically fundamental.

ut you don't have to be a realist on physical law to be a physicalist either. — Terrapin Station

Sure, I was just making a list. Causality is it's own deal. Arguably, laws of nature, if they're real, transcend physics.

But that is a totally different discussion, attacking physicalism from a very different angle.

What I was hoping to discuss with you in this tangent was "What does 'entailed by physics" mean exactly?" We never got very far with that. — Terrapin Station

That the physics of the world necessitates the existence of everything. Which means that particles, fields of force, spacetime, constants, and laws of nature determine absolutely what can and what cannot exist.

Which means that something like math owes its existence entirely to physics. There is no platonic realm. So does consciousness. There can be no physical identical world lacking it. And so on.

Again, it seems like you're wanting to simply rehash the old physicalism vs dualism (or whatever) argument. I'm not interested in that. We've done that a bunch already. — Terrapin Station

What is the goal, then? The OP is asking how intentional content can be incorporated into a physicalist framework. That is traditionally part of the mind/body problem.

Do you have a different approach?

Nothing can be said about nothing. And yet, we say something.

Language creating something from nothing. Is that how God performed ex nihilo?

ton of things after all, couldn't it? And that could be the case no matter how we progress with our social practices that count as that science. — Terrapin Station

Jesus man, this isn't that difficult of a concept. Is everything made up of the stuff of physics, or not?

That's saying something about the science of physics per se, isn't it? — Terrapin Station

It's saying something about the nature of the physical world, since physicists aren't God.

ou're trying to skip to the "point" or "meat" of the argument. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in what "logically possible" or "logically accounting for" is supposed to refer to, because I'm challenging that it refers to anything significant in the argument. — Terrapin Station

The rules of the game of life plus it's initial starting position logically entail any patterns that emerge during that game. If you had a super complex game of life such that there was something akin to characters and societies, with different levels of abstraction from which one could make sense of that game, they would all be logically entailed by the rules and starting conditions.

You could make a probabilistic game of life, and then the resulting complexity could be understood in terms of probabilities.

The question is whether physics is like that for all phenomena.

So an answer would have to fit "x is entailed by physics just in case _______" and the blank would be whatever the explanation is of what the phrase means. — Terrapin Station

No, it means that if you knew everything about physics, you would know everything that could be made up of physics, whether it's realized in our universe, or not (maybe because some early quantum fluctuation didn't lead to the right conditions).

In the sense where we're talking about the "furniture of the world" so to speak a la things that can be known via experience, whether directly or not, and whether extrapolatively/interpolatively or not. — Terrapin Station

So in all possible worlds where the furniture of the world is exactly the same, do you always have consciousness, intentionality, abstract categories, etc?

How about referring to it, then, rather than referring to referring to it? In other words, how about saying what it means exactly? — Terrapin Station

It means exactly the same thing as saying that everything is made of XYZ. It's a statement of what ontologically exists, and by contrast, what does not. It's a statement about the fundamental building blocks of reality.

"Everything is math" would mean that math is the foundation of reality from which everything else is somehow formed. There can't be any exceptions to that for it to be true.

I'm not talking about "empirical" in the sense of epistemological empiricism obviously. — Terrapin Station

What sense are you talking about it in? A peculiar one where you get to say that everything is physical, but don't have to back it up with ontological considerations?