Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Arkilogue]

I like what Arthur C. Clarke had to say...

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[Jesster]

Yeah. "You can't prove there isn't magic." Adults. Adults are saying this to me, once you remove the layers of nonsense.

No, I can't. I don't need to. I don't want to. I don't even know what fucking magic is anyway, outside of peoples' imaginations.

We had someone say it was things in other realities. That's a fair definition, although it doesn't seem to match any common usage of the word.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Apparently so, given your many objections just in this thread.  What else can I say?

Maybe you could mention what the definition that lacks, something you believe is indispensable. Or you could just offer your own definition. Then again that would expose your apparent lack of thought.

[The Grand Nudger]

Who said it lacks anything?  It isn't the definition that's lacking, in our interactions..... I think it;s rather an issue of you telling -me- whats wrong with it, right?

Can you think of some immaterial thing? Care to show us that immaterial thing, and how you know it;s immaterial...and how we might even detect the immaterial thing? Like I said to rob...you want something included in a statement of what is, make it so.

[Neo-Scholastic]

The function of a thermostat is immaterial. The meaning of a sentence is immaterial. The value of pi is immaterial.

[The Grand Nudger]

Strange, because I can describe to you the function of a thermostat by material interactions.  That is, in fact, how we build them..and why they work -as- thermostats.   The meaning of what sentence is immaterial? I think that the various meanings of any given sentence are very material..existing in the brains of those who take them to mean..whatever they take them to mean.  That sensible bodies are numerically distinct is an artifact of how we have defined sensible bodies..itself an artifact of how we observe sensible bodies.  Is this any more immaterial than the meaning of a sentence referenced a moment before? The value of pi is an unknown, and a numerical value, itself defined as an artifact of what we define as a circle....again, another example that is another form of the -same- example. I'm starting to think that you're intentionally bloating your numbers....lol....

Are thoughts (about this, that, or the other thing) the only immaterial thing, that you can think of?

So, now that we have all of those examples.  How did you detect them.  How did you detect them -as- immaterial things?  How do you know that they are immaterial things? What is your instrumentation? What is your margin of error?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Except perhaps for the example of pi, the issue is not as you suppose whether something is alienable; but rather, if it is distinct.

[The Grand Nudger]

Oh chad, the one thing I enjoy about our conversations is the fast flowing river of objection.  I probably don;t have the patience to argue with you over the term distinct, do I?  I thought you objected to materialism....?

[Sal]

Actually, I think there is something special about the materialist conception of what we, as beings are – it’s what makes it is so devilishly difficult for people to understand the intrinsic problems with that worldview - and it has nothing to do with abstract philosophical jargon, sense theories, or anything else one can argue logically about.  It has to do, rather, with the fact that the materialist conception of us as “living things” in a three dimensional world is the worldview implicit in the way every child learns to think and talk, and the way in which he will continue to think and talk for the rest of his life – even if he becomes a brain scientist.  It isn’t something we are “taught,” but rather is the very context in which our thinking develops.  You think it takes work to show a person the flaws in a religious view they’ve been raised in?  Try showing a person whose very thinking embodies the materialist worldview the flaws in that worldview! 

Aren't you a special snowflake. Maybe it's so difficult to find flaws in the materialist worldview because it's one unhinged from all philosophical babble that the entire scope of philosophy itself, in its own worldview of immaterial things, find itself lacking and flawed.

The materialist worldview is, IMO, the most parsimonious view of reality because exactly it doesn't add any extraneous "things", like the idea that something exists only as an "idea" of the any thing.

The problem, however, is the leap of reason from brains with a exceedingly complex neural network writing text on a keyboard, using a computer viewing a LCD screen, communicating that a ratio between a circles circumference with its diameter is "special" somehow. The material is all there is. It's us giving them special meaning, just to make sense of all the complexity of reality. It (concepts, ideas, numbers, language, etc.) has its uses, but don't forget where it's rooted.

[bennyboy]

The materialist worldview is, IMO, the most parsimonious view of reality because exactly it doesn't add any extraneous "things", like the idea that something exists only as an "idea" of the any thing.

Eh? Are you joking, or serious?