(October 2, 2016 at 4:14 am)robvalue Wrote: I expect sound waves are an abstract idea, no? That they actually represent movements/vibration in a physical medium? There's no such thing as "a sound wave", right? I mean, as a separate entity.
If I'm right, we have the existent, moving under rules, and then a pattern/property which can be described abstractly as a sound wave.
Here's an example to illustrate the idea I'm trying to get at. Since science doesn't provide us with an explicit distinction between properties of light (of which color is not one - there's no such thing as a red photon), and experiences supposedly happening in a material brain, we talk about "sound waves" like we talk about "red light." Imagine someone sticks a knife in your leg. If we take the scientific sense story at face value, the experience of pain doesn't happen in your leg, but rather happens in "the brain." Neither does the brain somehow send or project the experience of pain to the site of there injury. There is no physical basis for such a idea. Now, would we say the knife had a quality of "pain"? Would we say the knife was a "painy knife"? No. But we do exactly that when we talk about "red light" and "sound waves." Are there, in materialist terms, wavelengths of air vibration which, upon entering the ear set in motion a sensory process when results in an the experience we call "sound" that happens, somehow, in the brain? Yes. But the two - the air vibrations and the experience of sound happening in the brain have nothing to do with one another - except that they are at two ends of a process. By calling the air vibrations "sound waves" we make this important difference hard to see, and makes it easy for people to confuse the two. Am I saying we should stop saying "sound waves" and "red light"? Absolutely. Is it going to happen? Absolutely not. But that doesn't mean that I - or any one else who really wants to have an accurate understanding of the materialist sense story (whether or not one believes it) - have to talk and think in ambiguous terms. They should have signs posted near all buildings where physical science is being done saying, "Phrases such as "red light" or "sound wave" are not allowed within 100 feet of this building."
