Physical idealism

[bennyboy]

formal principles clearly precede materialism,

I could only say that I'd stop you right here...again, lol.  My concerns with your previous versions of idealism never had much to do with conscious entitities, and your expressing in this those things I was objecting to in those.  Meh, it would be old ground between us.  It doesn't matter to me whether you sound like you're appealing to deism, or even if you were.  It only matters to me that you follow the word "clearly" - at the very start-  with things that aren't at all clear in an effort to deny things that..if not entirely clear, are at least a hell of alot better evidenced and demonstrated.

I'd say it's clear, because the organization of things cannot be without a framework in which they can be organized. If you believe in the Big Bang, then clearly the rules by which form would eventually come from chaos were already set. So fundamental principles --> fundamental ideas --> classes of things.

Do you have any particular disagreement about limbs and digits..do you disagree that the other things we might turn to for a complete accounting or representation of a human body, particularly in the example -you- brought up.... are just as material as dna?  If the only place that idealism comes into it is to agree with materialism in every explanation and particular and then simply -claim- the credit for all of that upon itself as being "under it"...I don't have the oomph in me to discuss such a non-statement, a phantom position- a long running stolen concept.

Absolutely, I'd agree that ideas about living bodies must require a material medium for their expression. As for our long-running arguments, I've already said I'm not talking about that kind of idealism, and this thread should be taken separate from that.

The point I'm making in this thread is that the forms of things are more foundational to reality than the media by which they are expressed. You could, for example, have many bio-chemical evolutionary paths, possibly not even involving DNA, to things like fins and scales. However, in an environment in which there is chaos with enough coherence to make persistence of patterns statistically possible, a liquid-water world is going to end up with those same features-- that is, the features themselves drive the evolution, not the specific mechanism of DNA.

Let me put this another way, in your estimation....is the explanation for the number of fingers we have accounted for by genetic inheritance, bilateralism, and cellular division..or is all of that shit bunk...and the real reason we have five fingers is that there's an "idea of a hand" -said "idea" not at all being dependent upon or related to consciousness....somehow....and ofc not dependent upon dna, bilateralism, and cellular division?

As I said, I'm not disputing any of the material mechanisms, or that of DNA. My argument is about which is an expression of the other. The genetic code of humans is as much a record of past statistical moments as it is a code for a future organism. However, the statistical moments necessarily preceded the genetic code, and are therefore the real cause of "hand" and everything else, and the DNA should be thought of as the carrier-- much as a Windows disk is not the creator of Windows, though if you put the disk into your computer, Windows will usually come to be.