• T Clark
    13.6k
    there are good arguments for the involvement of us humans in the establishment of reality,
    — T Clark

    Such as?
    Wayfarer

    I first came to this realization through the Tao Te Ching. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." It has become a central part of my understanding of how the world works - reality is not objective, it is a mixture of an external non-human existence interacting with our human nature. Kant described something similar when he talked about aspects of reality, i.e. space and time, that we know a priori. Recently I've been reading Konrad Lorenz who connects Kant's a priori with evolution. He says that we have evolved to survive through an interaction between objective reality and our biological nature. In his understanding, human nature is a reflection of objective reality. I don't see it that way, but I think his understanding of the mechanism is correct. Here's a link to an article of his.

    https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz

    I have some other ideas about this too, but I haven't got them put together enough to go into them here.
  • Leontiskos
    2.7k
    Chomsky's criticismBaden

    But can't the same be said about talk of "the natural"? Is naturalism any less shifty than physicalism?Leontiskos

    To give a pertinent example, can Chomsky's mysterianism really be said to conform with naturalism?

    -

    Edit: This is perhaps a pithy way to phrase my objection: If the physicalist pivots to methodological physicalism, has he then solved the problem? Or is there something suspicious about trying to solve the problem in this way?
  • T Clark
    13.6k
    I have a number of friends who would, if pressed, probably deny that there's anything out there except the physical world. But nor would they claim that you can use the fundamental entities of physics to explain macro-phenomena like economic behavior.J

    I think there are a lot of people out there, probably mostly physical scientists, who do think psychology, sociology, and economics are nothing but physics.

    Not necessarily. We can construct a sort of "best we can do right now" position that would go: "Sure, we have loads of unanswered questions about how physical realities interact, and how they can be causally effective. But at the end of the (scientific) day, I'm betting that the answers will still fail to reveal anything beyond the physical. We have to wait and see, but my money is on physicalism."J

    As I see it, this is not a "best we can do right now" issue. It's not a question of inadequate theory and technology, it's that it is not possible. Here's a link to one of my favorite papers - Anderson's "More is Different." Written in 1972, but it always gets brought up when this subject is discussed.

    https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf
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