(August 10, 2021 at 9:44 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: @vulcanlogic said something that intrugued me. Talking about @Belaqua. It was suggested that atheism and mysticism were two-sides of the same coin rather than opposite sides of a spectrum. Perhaps.
I am not dismissing the worlds of meaning we've created, just that any modern atheistism that is both reductive and physicalist has a very big problem reaching those world of meaning. That is not a defeater. I cannot prove warrant for meaning is impossible within an atheistic framework but all the proposals I see do not work.
reductionism is an excellent tool for understanding things, but emergence must also be studied.
Reductionism tells us the basic building blocks of the universe. How those blocks operate can be surprising, and requires looking into chaos theory and attractors. Behavior and patterns emerge that are not inherent in the blocks themselves, but only show up in how things interact.
I've already mentioned in threads that re-entrant processes are the heart of complicated behavior - including the human mind. A mathematics that is re-entrant cannot both be complete and correct. Many processes that are re-entrant cannot have their outcome predicted.
If a theist wants to say "you can't get consciousness from matter", I say this is a bad question. Complex processes MUST be built on top of some logical framework (as opposed to chaos). We understand how complexity can arise in the natural world. Matter can produce pretty much any process imaginable, and what you think of as consciousness is just a particular type of process. It isn't an "object", and it doesn't require a "soul".