Physical idealism

[bennyboy]

Where, in your description of this relationship between chaos and persistent forms, are we to find anything that would be accurately described as a physical idealism..rather than inaccurately -called- physical idealism?  Do you understand why your comment regarding the -various- mechanisms at play was malformed, why it could not support the conclusion?  Do you understand why your attempts to correct the theory of evolution have not been successful?

I'm addressing your comments in this thread, directly and repeatedly, not our previous conversations. So, yeah, let go.

Do you understand that I've never argued against either materialism nor evolution in this thread, and that your strawmen are irrelevant?  Why should I support the words you put in my mouth?

I've discussed everything you've asked about at least three times already, and you've discarded it then parroted on as though I'd never discussed it.

There are clearly formative factors in the universe, which serve as building blocks in ways that the structures they supervene on could not.  A collection of steel cannot, for example, spontaneously fly through the air and put a hole in someone's head.  It is the idea of a bullet which allows actual bullets to come into existence, is it not?

You will now special plead: well of COURSE it's an idea, people made it.  But unless you want to argue that humanity is outside the circle of material cause and effect, it's obvious that a person is killed by the physical expression of an idea which itself isn't limited to any particular medium: it can be passed on by word of mouth, by picture, or by text.

So the exact kind of thing I'm talking about clearly is a reality.  The question is whether this is unique to humans, or whether it's intrinsic to the way the universe functions. And the answer to this is all around us, and in us. The DNA is not a little image of a person, but a collection of ideas about what a person should look like, and how a person should behave. These are the formative factors which allow an assortment of chemicals to be brought together into a coherent, functioning human being-- which could not exist without the ideas encoded in that DNA. They are physical, and they are ideas, because they are representations of something which may be brought into being, but which does not exist yet.