Hmm. What is it you are disagreeing with?
What I did was to suggest that we cold simplify the issue of what "physicalism" is by sticking to physics. — Banno
What I did was to suggest that we cold simplify the issue of what "physicalism" is by sticking to physics. — Banno
?...reifying... — wonderer1
Banno embodies a jester. Once you realize that his posts are easily understood. — Philosophim
Here's a nice description of the physics of billiards, using formulae for conservation of momentum and so on. — Banno
Directly to the personal attack. Nice. — Banno
One of the issues with thinking in terms of local efficient causes is that it ignores global conditions, which produces a false impression of strict linearity or "causal chains" instead of networks of energetic influences. — Janus
The simplest and cleanest way to understand physicalism is as the idea that only the stuff described in physics texts is true. — Banno
But what I've said here does negate the possition you have take over your last few threads, especially the causal necessity stuff. I'm not surprised that you feel the need to resort to this. — Banno
Banno embodies a jester. Once you realize that his posts are easily understood. — Philosophim
I think you're echoing Chalmers, but going beyond asking for a theory of consciousness to asking for a theory of abstractions (like math) as well. He said we should start with just proposing phenomenal consciousness as a thing to be explained by science, similarly to the way gravity was added, with no insistence that science as it is has to be able to answer it. It could be that we have to wait for more quantum theory answers? Or maybe a type of physics that we haven't thought of yet. — frank
Yes, it's a matter of perspective—I see it more as a case of those being better understand as physical, material or natural processes than as being "reduced to explained away" by that understanding. It doesn't seem to me that anything important is being lost or diminished by thinking that way. — Janus
Curious. I'd taken reductionism within the sciences as granted - that physicalism would consider all the sciences variations on physics; after all, the crux of physicalism is that everything is just physics. — Banno
Reductionism is true iff for each mental predicate F there is a neurobiological predicate G such that a sentence of the form ‘x is F iff x is G’ expresses a bridge law.
Curious. I'd taken reductionism within the sciences as granted - that physicalism would consider all the sciences variations on physics; after all, the crux of physicalism is that everything is just physics. — Banno
But you perhaps can't derive society behaviour from atom behaviour. Even though you can argue persuasively that every societal change must be associated to a change in the chemical constituents of entities within that society... And if no constituents changed there could have been no societal change. That's an absence of a "bridge law" reduction, but within the scope of a supervenience physicalism. — fdrake
"Cause" isn't a term used in physics, having been replaced by maths since Galileo. But it lingers in meta-physics and in pop philosophy of science.
More than a century ago, Russell launched a forceful attack on causation, arguing not only that modern physics has no need for causal notions but also that our belief in causation is a relic of a pre-scientific view of the world. He thereby initiated a debate about the relations between physics and causation that remains very much alive today. While virtually everybody nowadays rejects Russell’s causal eliminativism...
I've had an eye out for a few years, using test searches and the like, and while it appears occasionally in more philosophically oriented articles, its appearances in physics texts appear overwhelmingly incidental. It would be wonderful to run my suspicion through Google Ngram Viewer, or through Wolfram, to get something firmer.I read a lot of popular physics and physics articles and cause is mentioned frequently. — Count Timothy von Icarus
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