Physical idealism

[bennyboy]

It doesn't matter what any of it means to me.  When you've described what you call "physical ideas".... they have been...in each example,  interchangeable with material interactions and objects.  Nothing has been added, nothing has been removed, no additional insight or explanation has been produced.

I'm saying specific things about what a physical idea is, and you are saying, "You're just talking about stuff 'n' sich."  Yes, I am talking about stuff 'n' sich, but I'm talking about particular collections of stuff 'n' sich that arise in particular ways, and about the philosophical consequences.  You seem to think I'm against materialism when I use the word "idealism" but I'm not-- because to me, they are not mutually exclusive.

I'm saying that a physical idea is a formative principle, and that specifically in the case of the body, individual body parts don't evolve-- the idea of individual body parts evolves, and what changes are not the whole parts themselves, but ideas about how those parts are expressed. So a "hand" isn't an expression of a genetic code specifically for a hand: it's the expression of a lot of non-hand ideas, evidenced by the possibility that relatively minor changes in DNA can end up in things like a baby with 31 fingers and toes.