William Lane Craig denies the number zero.

[Jehanne]

What is missing here is the distinction between zero as the location on a vector and as a set value.

Both are true; what's your point?

[Jehanne]

Who says the number zero has no property? The number zero is a concept and concepts exist in the brain mind.

FTFY. If you were to peek inside someones's skull I doubt you would find anything resembling a "zero" much less cars, grandmothers, or anything else people think about.

Can you demonstrate, empirically, the existence of a mind without a brain?

[Neo-Scholastic]

FTFY. If you were to peek inside someones's skull I doubt you would find anything resembling a "zero" much less cars, grandmothers, or anything else people think about.

Can you demonstrate, empirically, the existence of a mind without a brain?

That is beside the point. If you want to say concepts are literally in the brain then you should be able to pull them out of the brain and show them to others...empirically.

[robvalue]

How much credibility does WLC have?

See. There's no problem here.

[Jehanne]

Can you demonstrate, empirically, the existence of a mind without a brain?

That is beside the point. If you want to say concepts are literally in the brain then you should be able to pull them out of the brain and show them to others...empirically.

All that scientists can do is to show neural correlates.  Can you see an electron?  Or, weigh one on a scale?

[Neo-Scholastic]

That is beside the point. If you want to say concepts are literally in the brain then you should be able to pull them out of the brain and show them to others...empirically.

All that scientists can do is to show neural correlates. Can you see an electron? Or, weigh one on a scale?

Yes, neural correlates are known and like electrons require highly specialized equipment to "see" since they cannot be directly observed. While no one can set a single electron on a scale in the grocery store their mass can be determined by other means. But these are all non-sequiturs.

People often use figurative language to talk about thought, feelings and ideas. We say things like "it's all in their head" and "my brain tells me..." I object to people using those terms literally in philosophical discussions because they are grossly imprecise and misleading. People experience cobalt blue but there is nothing actually cobalt blue inside anyone's brain. I think that information about thoughts and feelings are somehow encoded in various states of material neurons. I think that specific neural activities are demonstrably part of certain conscious experiences. None of this empirical data proves one way or the other that the concepts/ideas/memories are identical with neural states or that neural processes are identical to any sense or feeling. And there are some good reasons to suppose they aren’t, starting with the observation that mental states have intentionality, a quality generally excluded from physicalist theories. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the mind-body problem is notably absent from the Thomistic tradition. This absence is due having a much different of accepted categories of being.

And that takes us back to the ontological status of concepts like number. Numbers are not independent entities in some Platonic realm of mystical Ideas. Following Aquinas I say that numbers exist as objects of intellect in-formed by things that are numerable because they share objective universal natures. Newton’s laws, for example are descriptive in the sense that the equations (objects of intellect) were invented to organize our observations but they are also descriptive in the sense that they are about a discovered universal nature, mass, an external object, that is part of all physical bodies.

Zero is perhaps kind of a special case. After all, no one can say that non-existence is the property of something, because if it was something then it wouldn’t be zero. It seems self-evident that ‘nothing’ does not exist.

[Mister Agenda]

Would something like this count as evidence that concepts exist in our brains?

http://www.livescience.com/53535-compute...ously.html

[Neo-Scholastic]

Would something like this count as evidence that concepts exist in our brains?

http://www.livescience.com/53535-compute...ously.html

That shows that concepts are symbolically represented in the brain something I've never opposed.

[Edwardo Piet]

Who says the number zero has no property? The number zero is a concept and concepts exist in the brain mind.

FTFY. If you were to peek inside someones's skull I doubt you would find anything resembling a "zero" much less cars, grandmothers, or anything else people think about.

The mind is in the brain so in the brain is in the mind. Because when I say in the brain I mean "all the way in, right down to the mind"... or, if you prefer, if you're like me any doesn't believe there is a Cartesian Theater or sense of self and there's just a "centre of narrative gravity" then in a sense the brain is the mind in physical form, or at least parts of the brain working together equates to the mind. There is no "in there", if you believe that like I do.

Of course you won't see something resembling "zero", you dingbat, the concept of the number zero exists in the brain as a concept and conceptualization is a subset of the human imagination which is subset of human subjectivity which resides as brain chemistry within the brain.

[Edwardo Piet]

What is missing here is the distinction between zero as the location on a vector and as a set value.

Both are true; what's your point?

The number zero is an existent concept that represents a quantity that is nonexistent. William Lane Craig's mistake is conflating the existent concept of the number zero with the nonexistent quantity that it represents. Just as there is the concept of nothingness but there is no nothingness: there's the number zero but there is no zeroness.

WLC is too dense to grasp this. He's a cheap apologist Christian hack in posh clothing with an education but who has evidently sub-par abstract thinking skills.