Process and metric (e.g. walking and distance-duration). Or apples and fruit ... — 180 Proof

This suggests analogies but doesn't clearly describe.

Or apples and fruit — 180 Proof

So the thought of an apple can cause a physical effect but the abstraction, fruit, can never cause a physical effect?

How can this be known?

Is it important to continue thinking and saying this?

Your question analogizes a "relationship" so ... what's good for the goose.

Try to eat abstract "fruit" instead of a concrete apple. :roll:

Exactly, that's the tricky part. If forced, I'd say that I am a non-reductive physicalist, leaning towards being ontologically agnostic. Whereas I'm happy to go further out on a limb in promoting a physicalist philosophy of mind.

Even in principle there aren't any such "entities".

Righto, it was a rhetorical question.

It's a "problem" of your own making, Count, because non-reductive physicalism is not "an ontological position" but a methodological paradigm (i.e. an epistemological criterion / paradigm) employed in the cognitive / neurosciences. Otherwise, if "non-physicalism", then account for

That's a fine position, but it's an idiosyncratic definition. Physicalism is generally understood to refer to a group of ontological models. The SEP article on physicalism is largely about issues in metaphysics (identity, supervenience, modality, etc.). The opening of the Wikipedia article (and isn't Wikipedia the world's book of democratic record?) starts off with:

" physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism..."

The peerless Google algorithms appear to be returning an entire page about physicalism as an ontology as the top results.

I'm not sure what is particularly physicalist about "physicalist epistemological methods." The same methods are employed effectively by non-physicalists (Roger Sperry, Wilder Penfield, etc.). There are plenty of these folks, enough that articles about the problem of an excess of crypto-dualism in neuroscience are regularly published. Personally, I'm more surprised by how not dominant physicalism is in philosophy of mind. Only 52% of people specializing in the field opted for "accept or lean towards: physicalism," in the latest PhilPapers survey, a large decline from 70% back in 2009.

The issue I tend to come across in my reading and discussions is that physicalism gets conflated with the methods of science. Which to be fair, is understandable given science generally gives us physicalist answers. A problem arises when this leads to critiques of physicalist ontologies being taken as necessarily critiques or rejections of scientific methods. This is at least easy enough to clear up, but a more pernicious problem is ontological cheating, where scientific findings are used to imply metaphysical claims without being explicit about what those claims are, and what would falsify them.

For an obvious, and over the top example, some Quora post I saw today resolved the entire issue of universals once and for all because "red is a light wave with a 620nm wavelength." This one is easy to dismiss, but there are plenty of less obvious, but similar lines out there that essentially assume "fundamental properties and facts are physical and everything else obtains in virtue of them,” without stating so.

Edit: Should note that I notice this sort of ontological cheating far more in articles that are attempting to critique non-physicalist metaphysics. It's generally not quite as bad when there is debate about different types of essentially physicalist metaphysics, provided that one side doesn't mistake the presence of any metaphysics at all as somehow being anti-physicalist magicspeak, which you do see happen.

I prefer to think for myself and consult google wiki & SEP only for clarifications too lengthy for this space. Is it too much to ask that you (& others) do likewise and take issue / disagree with my premises, assumptions and validity of my arguments only then consulting with google, etc in order to clarify your objections?

Well, I could have just told you that isn't what anyone normally means by "physicalism," I just figured it would be helpful to show that's the case.

Try to eat the absraction "fruit". — 180 Proof

It would be almost the same as eating the thought of an apple.

Your question analogizes a "relationship" so ... what's good for the goose –,,Astro. — 180 Proof

Why no clear description and instead an obvious evasion or shrug?

Try to eat absract "fruit" instead of a concrete apple — 180 Proof

Your lines are misdrawn.

I can eat fruit and I can eat an apple. I can't eat the abstraction, fruit, or the thought of an apple.

non-physical causation(?)..... Name a non-physical, or merely abstract, Y which causes such changes. — 180 Proof

1+1 is 2. This causes 2-1 is 1. However, 1+1+1 is 1 has caused a great amount of bloodshed in history against and by those who thought otherwise: the Ottoman Turks, the Arabian invasion forces, the armies of Genghis Khan; as well as against Barbarian tribes in the northern parts of the entirety of Europe, and in all the parts of the remaining world outside of Europe.

In Goethe's "The Hardships of the Young Werther" Werther loses his love. Werther then commits suicide. At the time period of a year or two after publication, twenty-five thousand young people committed suicide right after reading this fictional novel.

Sinful lives will earn you eternal suffering. Virtuous life and accepting the Holy Spirit in your heart will lead to eternal life in bliss. This causes people to swallow a piece of carbohydrate and drink some red wine in a cold building built by the community for the main and exclusive purpose to eat a piece of bread and drink a mouthful of wine.

1+1 is 2. This causes 2-1 is 1 — god must be atheist

:cry:

You're right. That was totally stupid of me.

Do the other two examples stand on their right? I can't tell from here. I can't fathom the depth of my own thoughts.

:zip:

Is thinking reducible to neural matter, or is it not? — Wayfarer

Yes. The brain is made of matter, not pixie dust. Highly functional, highly systemmatized, genetically coded, matter of unrivaled sophistication. Thinking does not come from any other place in the known universe. That said, are you under the impression that thinking comes from non-matter? Because that would be some seriously mystical thought.

Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are by-products or epiphenomena of material processes (such as the biochemistry of the human brain and nervous system), without which they cannot exist — Alkis Piskas

This is clearly what is going on in the universe. Anybody that says otherwise is thinking in terms of magic.

Do the other two examples stand on their right? I can't tell from here. I can't fathom the depth of my own thoughts. — god must be atheist

Every single thing you said is the result of matter. I eat bread, all matter. I kill myself, all matter. Such beliefs leading to those material actions are formed in a brain made of matter. Anti-materialism is anti-philosophy, anti-life, and anti-science. No other way to put it.

Irrelevancy of an appeal to popularity. 'Meaning is use' – deconstruct my (eccentric? heterodox? idiosyncratic?) usage of the term / concept in the context of our discussion when you find fault with it. Dictionaries are for scrabble, Count, not for philosophical discussions.

That said, are you under the impression that thinking comes from non-matter? Because that would be some seriously mystical thought. — Garrett Travers

Numbers, grammatical rules, the principles of logic, scientific principles - none of these have a scientific explanation and cannot be meaningfully reduced to physical laws. They also can’t be meaningfully accounted for as products of evolution either without reducing them to biology,

(When I say scientific principles don’t have a scientific explanation - such principles are discovered by science, but science provides no account of why, for example, f=ma.)

Numbers, grammatical rules, the principles of logic, scientific principles - none of these have a scientific explanation and cannot be meaningfully reduced to physical laws. They also can’t be meaningfully accounted for as products of evolution either without reducing them to mere biology. — Wayfarer

These abstracts are, in fact, generated – via autopoiesis – in ecologies of (human) brains. You don't really believe, Wayf, abstractions can be "reduced" to mere woo, do you?

Numbers, grammatical rules, the principles of logic, scientific principles - none of these have a scientific explanation and cannot be meaningfully reduced to physical laws. They also can’t be meaningfully accounted for as products of evolution either without reducing them to biology, — Wayfarer

All of these things have scientific explanation. Also, an argument from ignorance is a fallacy. It wouldn't actually matter to your position if there were no evidence of mine. As it happens, each of those metrics are human generated concepts used to map perceived patterns of reality, with symbolic representation that is useful to the human being. The human does this through processes seen to by the brain which allows for the human consciousness to generate concepts to do just this, making Man the pinnacle predator of known history. There is no reduction, the processes being described to you are the result of 3.5 billion years of species evolution, the production of an apex species through the greatest, most destructive, terrifying, and majesterial crucible of competition imaginable. You are an alpha species among the starts. To reduce, or relegate the human consciousness to something beyond that majesty is beyond anything I know how to apprehend. What exactly is your position? Again, you didn't tell me where you think thoughts come from if not matter. You do realize that materialism is THE premier metaphysical school of thought right? The one all science is predicated upon and which proves its validity as a daily occurences in the sciences?

why, for example, f=ma — Wayfarer

F doesn't = ma. F=ma is a concept that humans generated to understand how to properly categorize it as a pattern. The why of things is functional, not intentional, as humans would understand things. The universe is of itself so, it doesn't require a why that is comprehensible to us at this stage in human development. You are anthropomorphizing the universe. Whenever you realize that such givings are a miscalculation between your nature and the universe, you will understand completely. Besides, the only way for us to master reality and learn its secrets, is to first obey its inviolable laws. Functions and meaning in the human sense will be revealed in time, as so much already has. A lack of explanation means only an absence of knowledge, that does not mean something extraordinary. Especially when one considers that the entire body of data of all fields of science indicate a material universe, an objective reality. To prove me wrong, all you have to do is present a single shred of evidence to the contrary. Not a thought exercise, not a blind spot of science, but actual evidence of something non-material. Any evidence will do.

All of these things have scientific explanation. — Garrett Travers

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena. — Wittgenstein

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena. — Wittgenstein

"The whole modern conception of Wittgenstein is founded on the illusion that the opinions he posits are explanations of natural phenomena."

- Garrett

See how that works? Wittgenstein was wrong. Got an argument somewhere in there?

It's not worth the effort mate.

You're not worth the effort mate. — Wayfarer

Another anti-realityist down the tubes. And here I thought this was a philosophy forum...

It's weird to see so many people on here, just like you on the mystic bandwagon, who never can give an argument about their beliefs in extra mundane phenomena that doesn't included insult, obfuscation, conflation, appeal to ignorance, or some other negation technique that, I guess normally works on the untrained minds with whom you regularly make contact with and present this trash to.

Luckily, there's still one rationalist on planet Earth on whom that shit doesn't work on.

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena. — Wittgenstein

They may be only an illusion, but they may be the illusions that correctly describe the world.

Wittgenstein did not prove the illusions wrong. He merely stated they are what humans do to figure out the world.

He used the word "illusion" but he failed to show that these illusions were invalid.

I hate: Wittgenstein, Socrates, Plato. I love Hume, Descartes, Marx.

There. I said it.

I also hate Rand and Arendt. Although one wonders how that can be, when one's name is the negation of the name of the other. (Something to do with the vague similarity of the spelling of their names that perhaps can be traced back by etymology to "Rand" and "Aren't Rand.")

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena. — Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein was saying that the laws of nature are not logically necessary - that they are contingent. Look at the context.

they are contingent. — Banno

What isn’t?

Necessities.

and where in the grand scheme do they come from?

TLP 6.371...

:wink:

Materialism is a form of philosophical monism ...
— Alkis Piskas
This is clearly what is going on in the universe. Anybody that says otherwise is thinking in terms of magic. — Garrett Travers

OK, only that it looks like these are my own words; it's a quote from Wikipedia ...