Bertvan@aol.com writes
in message <a5.384a573.260a2b79@aol.com>:
>
> Ted:
> >Periodically, I'm mystified why you make this strange distinction
> >between materialists and non-materialists. God, free will,
> >consciousness, information, purpose can all be studied by
> >materialists, their conclusions so far are that these phenomena
> >can be explained with natural laws.
>
> Bertvan:
> Surely you aren't suggesting God can be explained with natural
> laws.
Ted:
And why not? Every single manifestation or affect of God seems to
have a corresponding natural explanation. (That doesn't disprove
God, however.)
> I should have included "design" on the list. Can that be
> explained by natural laws? And Purpose? Free will, consciousness
> and information might be defined materialistically, but I'm not
> sure how completely they can be explained by natural laws. (At
> the moment, anyway.)
Ted:
Has anyone proved that Purpose, free will and consciousness
*can't* be explained by natural laws? Only then would
search for a natural explanation be irrational.
> (Materialists tend to know things with absolute certainty.)
Ted:
Not true of any materialists I know. A logical conclusion of
materialistic assumptions is that human knowledge can only
approach actual reality but never quite attain it. Absolute
truth exists only in religion (or at least, many, there, think
they have it).
> Bertvan:
> Defining materialism would be a good project, Ted, but I doubt
> any two people would agree completely. Most people don't have
> any trouble deciding which they are, but I suppose some could
> feel ambiguous
Ted:
Well, that's the problem. If you label people "materialists"
and they don't agree with your definition, you might as
well label them "pzarqlists" for all the good it does.
> A materialist believes the "real world" consists of matter and
> energy, and forces which can be measured and manipulated.
This is not a belief, it's an observation. It is also an
observation that forces that are traditional thought to be
aobve matter and energy are increasingly shown to be
rooted in them.
> Many materialists don't even believe in the existence of free
> will; they believe choices are really the inevitable result of
> molecules and neural connections in our brain. Most materialists
> believe consciousness can be completely explained by those
> molecules and neural connections in the brain.
But is there good evidence that consciousness can *not* be
completely explained by matter and energy?
<snip>
Well, in any case, I see what you're getting at. You define
materialists as those people that are unreasonably biased
towards materialistic explanations.
Here's an observation for you: there are very few materialists
out there, by your definition. The vast majority of your
materialists are actually empiricists -- they simply make tentantive
conclusions from what they observe. As an empiricist myself,
I've never seen materialism disproved, so I must assume that
the possibility exists that all of observable reality can be
explained with known or unknown natural laws. As an empiricist,
I haven't yet seen good evidence that some forces *require*
non-materialistic assumptions at all. (If some forces *require*
non-materialistic assumptions, well then by golly, materialism
has just been disproved, QED.). An an empiricist, I observe
that there has never been utterly convincing evidence in all
of history that non-natural forces are or were at work. I do,
however, observe that people *thought* non-natural forces were
at work all the time and were consistently wrong, and so I conclude
that human thoughts, dreams and hopes appears to be a significant
source of empirical error that must be carefully accounted for.
How reasonable is this view, in your opinion?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 22 2000 - 16:25:56 EST