Qualia Soup recently posted another good video.I should definitely bring this up next time I come across a dualist trying to argue that something's "non-physical." I'm essentially a neutral monist who just calls that one type of stuff "physical" or "material." If we were to discover something that would now be called "supernatural," it wouldn't uproot too much of my general worldview: About all that could be said is that such things are made of some particularly exotic type of material/physical stuff. It'd be about like the confirmation of dark matter: Some weird stuff with limited interaction with what we're familiar with (baryonic matter).
I don't see any reason these sorts of things would be beyond science in principle. The only pragmatic barriers I can imagine are the sorts of things believers would not readily grant: Extreme rarity, inherent randomness (utter unpredictability), or ridiculously bad luck that prevented scientifically minded people from preparing tests.
I'm not pessimistic enough to think we can be defeated so completely by alleged weird stuff.
3 comments:
You are just angry and sad, trying to prove there is no God so you can sin. What is the chemical formula of love? HA!
What's the chemical formula of Windows 7? There isn't. Does that mean that Windows 7 is supernatural or a demi-soul?
Won't speak for BD, because he's already spoken for himself on that first part many times, but I'm pretty content most of the time, and rarely get angry. Further, I don't try to prove there "is no god so I can sin". I don't hurt people because I don't want them hurt, not because I'm afraid of getting arrested or sent to hell.
This video says (more clearly than I could) exactly what sorts of problems I've always had with duelism. The only point he didn't really bring up is that pushing back "conciousness" as some super-substance just begs the question of how that super-substance explains conciousness. As I've said before, if a process involving atoms and energy can't explain "qualia", then what makes "spirit particles" and their energy suddenly capable of explaining it. Let's assume a universe that DOES have a duelist higher plane that exists in tandem with our minds, with a spirit-brain that takes some bizarre form we've proven to exist where our conciousness "actually" sits, where the brain is just a "sympathetic reciever", where it getting damaged only temporarily paralyses those spirit brains until "death" where it regains full functionality. Now then, would duelists be content with this state of affairs? What's to stop "tri-ists" from emerging, stating that the spirit brains can't explain qualia, that we can't directly scan memories in a spirit brain, and that there's some higher hyper-particles that are the REAL explanation?
This video says (more clearly than I could) exactly what sorts of problems I've always had with duelism.
Yeah, I hear ya. "Duelism" sucks! All that pacing and shooting, and for what?
What's to stop "tri-ists" from emerging, stating that the spirit brains can't explain qualia, that we can't directly scan memories in a spirit brain, and that there's some higher hyper-particles that are the REAL explanation?
Nothing, would be my guess. There is a place for every brand of kook it the world, it seems.
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