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>there's nothing "special" happening that can't, in principle, be explained by the same physical laws that govern everything else. How about dark matter and so
by manjushri 9y ago
>there's nothing "special" happening that can't, in principle, be explained by the same physical laws that govern everything else.
How about dark matter and social dynamics?
- roywiggins 9y agoEven if our brains run on dark matter, or spooky quantum shenanigans, such explanations are still fundamentally materialistic, because they're still physical interactions that can be interrogated approximately the same way we interrogate how muscle fiber works or whatever. As to social dynamics, well, that's like trying to explain the behavior of bulk matter or ensembles of things generally. The tools we use are quite different from explaining the behavior of atoms, but we're pretty sure that one way or another, the behavior of a rod of steel is determined more or less entirely by the fundamental particles/fields/stuff that make it up. There's nothing spooky about a bar of steel even though it behaves completely differently than the quarks and electrons it's made of. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it better: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
- manjushri 9y ago>they're still physical interactions that can be interrogated approximately the same way we interrogate how muscle fiber works or whatever Newtonian physics fail to explain quantum phenomenon.
- cygx 9y agoWhich is probably not relevant for the problem at hand: I would be surprised if brains were able to maintain quantum coherence, which means quantum effects will effectively reduce to classical probabilities...
- manjushri 9y ago>I would be surprised if brains were able to maintain quantum coherence Are you hypothesizing the mind is entirely self contained within the brain and independent from the rest of the body and it's environment?
- roywiggins 9y agoWell, sure. But we know an awful lot about quantum mechanics, and we know quantum mechanics is spooky but appears to be contained entirely in the realm of the physical. Particles behave by laws that we can sit down and calculate. That's all materialism is- it doesn't insist that everything is determined by any particular set of physical laws, much less Newton's, which we know is incomplete. Maybe everything's a wave, maybe everything is a tiny vibrating string, maybe we're all holographic projections on a membrane. All of this is compatible with materialism. Materialism is essentially a philosophical stance, that everything in the world is physical. It's not something that is likely to be solved empirically and it's not clear how you would even prove it one way or another. Anything as-yet unexplained might yet yield to a physical explanation, and insofar as physics is well-understood, skeptics can retreat into talking about mental states and so on.
- manjushri 9y ago> a philosophical stance, that everything in the world is physical. It's not something that is likely to be solved empirically and it's not clear how you would even prove it one way or another. Anything as-yet unexplained might yet yield to a physical explanation, and insofar as physics is well-understood, skeptics can retreat into talking about mental states and so on. Interesting. From a philosophical standpoint I see no quarrel. You could replace "physical" with "god" in your definition and it would read true to many religions. It's when dogmatism overrides doubt, questioning, and humility that people are misguided, in scientific theory and religion.
- hackinthebochs 9y ago> You could replace "physical" with "god" in your definition and it would read true to many religions. The difference is that the concept of physical minimally satisfies the required features to fill the conceptual role implied by science. If you replace physical with god, you are either eliminating the necessary properties of god or you're assuming more than is warranted.
- manjushri 9y ago
- adrianN 9y agoDark matter: Just because we don't know the laws yet, that doesn't mean that it's magic. Social dynamics: Give me a sufficiently powerful computer and complete information about the starting state and I can probably give you a pretty good approximation what happens.
- manjushri 9y ago>Just because we don't know the laws yet, that doesn't mean that it's magic. This is a strawman often thrown up when the blind spots of science are pointed out. Magic is a fancy word for something that we have no provable explanation of. Asserting "mind is material" seems like a hubristic explanation of an imaginary thing.
- jonbarker 9y agoIt's also somewhat of a tautology because physicists don't really have a 'solid' understanding of what constitutes material. Pun intended.