RE: Mind Over Matter?
April 10, 2015 at 9:49 pm
(This post was last modified: April 10, 2015 at 9:50 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
(April 10, 2015 at 9:17 pm)Nestor Wrote: ...If it [math] was about positioning and nothing more, there would be no reason to find absolute consistency in the behavior of matter ... Now you can say that the rules are carved out by the properties of matter...that suggests this something should have any necessary and universal consequences; the suggestion that there are innate properties of material substances basically affirms the coexistence of abstract “ideas” or “principles”, so that “this (matter) will always result in that (behavior)... What are non-physical properties if not abstract entities?
You had me until the last sentence. The distinction between necessary and contingent facts seems increasingly important to me. The extent to which those things that govern physical operations are necessary facts versus contingent ones is a fascinating problem. I do believe that (hate to say it but) the Schoolmen took great care to differentiate between the process of abstraction and form isolated by that process. The E=mc^2 formula is most certainly a propositional description, but it would not qualify as either the formal or dispositional properties at play.
