Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[The Grand Nudger]

Away from keyboard, lol.

[bennyboy]

Show you the science.....that demonstrates that a table is made out of matter?  What -else- could science demonstrate?   It's necessarily materialistic.............how can this not be getting through?   

You are conflating two contexts-- the context of that which is observed, and that of the hypothetical framework upon which all that rests.

[Angrboda]

When I put the probes of a voltmeter across a certain part of an electrical circuit, the readout displays a number which represents an electrical quantity.  We know it does so accurately because we've designed it to provide an accurate representation of the electrical quantity.  When it's voltage, we say that we have measured the voltage across the probes.  With current, current.  We only have correlates for the things we measure…. Is it a valid objection to the practice of measurement to say that I haven't measured the presence or absence of the experience red in this hypothetical brain?  

This raises an interesting question. Are all aspects of reality quantifiable?

That's the gambit. It could be wrong, but the evidence points in that direction.

It seems to me that identifying that a thing is present, like a memory, by observation of a brain state is not the same as identifying the quality of a thing, such as what that memory is about.  Applying rules about extended bodies to things that have no extension seems like a category error. It is like saying that ‘nova’ means the same thing in English (a brightening star) and Spanish (doesn’t go) just because it has the same spelling.

You're suggesting that there will be a level of detail that eludes inspection. The hypothetical is asking what would be the case if that were not true; nothing more.

All we have are correlates; once you dispense with them, you've dispensed with the notion that anything is real.

If efficient cause is defined by temporal succession, then your position makes perfect sense. At the same time that Humean causality comes at great cost, i.e. it creates an infinite regress of intermediate causes. That is exactly the same objection reductionists consider a damning flaw of substance dualism.

You're too cryptic for me to make out here. What reductionist objection are you referring to?

[The Grand Nudger]

Show you the science.....that demonstrates that a table is made out of matter?  What -else- could science demonstrate?   It's necessarily materialistic.............how can this not be getting through?   

You are conflating two contexts-- the context of that which is observed, and that of the hypothetical framework upon which all that rests.

...how can this fail to get through?   It's pointless to request specific scientific demonstration of materialism.  That's all it -can- provide.  That's all it talks about.  The minute you've assigned any credibility to any particular piece of science, you have assigned credibility to a materialists position.  It self limits and self describes -as such-. I'm not interested, again, in proving to you that science works and can be trusted, proving to you that what science says..is true. You get to make that determination for yourself.

[bennyboy]

You are conflating two contexts-- the context of that which is observed, and that of the hypothetical framework upon which all that rests.

...how can this fail to get through?   It's pointless to request specific scientific demonstration of materialism.  That's all it -can- provide.  That's all it talks about.  The minute you've assigned any credibility to any particular piece of science, you have assigned credibility to a materialists position.  It self limits and self describes -as such-.  I'm not interested, again, in proving to you that science works and can be trusted, proving to you that what science says..is true.  You get to make that determination for yourself.

So your defense against my assertion that materialism is an arbitrary philosophical assumption is to go to science, and you say science is defined by a belief in the material world view?  Circles are bad, man.   Circles. . . are bad.

[Silver]

I am uncertain that science makes any assertion in relation to materialism so much as the soft, pseudo science of sociology.

[The Grand Nudger]

...how can this fail to get through?   It's pointless to request specific scientific demonstration of materialism.  That's all it -can- provide.  That's all it talks about.  The minute you've assigned any credibility to any particular piece of science, you have assigned credibility to a materialists position.  It self limits and self describes -as such-.  I'm not interested, again, in proving to you that science works and can be trusted, proving to you that what science says..is true.  You get to make that determination for yourself.

So your defense against my assertion that materialism is an arbitrary philosophical assumption is to go to science, and you say science is defined by a belief in the material world view?  Circles are bad, man.   Circles. . . are bad.

WTF are you talking about? Why even quote me? Theres no reason for me to repeat myself a third time. You're not going to get anything you didn't get the other two. If you think that science is somehow in the business of providing circular reasoning...I don't have the patience to prove to you..as I keep saying, that science works and can be trusted. But why, then, even ask to be shown any science, about anything, whatsoever?

@Maelstrom, LOL, yeah, there are hard sciences and there are sciences. I jest, I jest. Sociology does have hard sci in it, too, lol.

[bennyboy]

So your defense against my assertion that materialism is an arbitrary philosophical assumption is to go to science, and you say science is defined by a belief in the material world view?  Circles are bad, man.   Circles. . . are bad.

WTF are you talking about?  Why even quote me?  Theres no reason for me to repeat myself a third time.  You're not going to get anything you didn't get the other two.  If you think that science is somehow in the business of providing circular reasoning...I don't have the patience to prove to you..as I keep saying, that science works and can be trusted.  But why, then, even ask to be shown any science, about anything, whatsoever?  

I've not said that science using circular reasoning.  I'm saying that YOU do.  I've not said science is invalid, I've said that your abuse of science as an explanation, despite your complete unwillingness to attempt to use it to support your philosophical position, is invalid.

Science is just the process of observation, categorization, experimentation, and so on.  It is the art of learning things in a particularly useful way.  But you are conflating the PROCESS of science, which is very useful, with the philosophical predilections of some (hypothetical and as-yet unquoted) scientists, which are not really any better guesses than anyone else's.  Science does not "arrive at" a material world view, nor is a particular belief about reality required-- though certainly some scientists, including many of the greats of the 20th century, held views that they were not capable of letting go when evidence showed their particular views about materiality to be incorrect.

If reality consists of nothing more than ideas, or fairies dancing in space, or the Mind of God, it may be that science will arrive eventually at that understanding. So no, I disagree that science and a materialist world view are necessarily connected at the hip-- though for some scientists they are.

[robvalue]

+1 rhythm and bennyboy daily philosophy podcast

[Neo-Scholastic]

This raises an interesting question. Are all aspects of reality quantifiable?

That's the gambit. It could be wrong, but the evidence points in that direction.

I see it more as your interpretation of what counts for evidence. You seem to shoo away observations about things that cannot be locally quantified, like utterances. For example, installation art is based entirely on the non-local nature of aesthetic experience. Understanding it as a phenomena requires a type of inquiry that goes well beyond observations of stimuli/responses. What it is about cannot be explained by describing in terms of bottom-up processes. Instead people must look at top-down processes, as well.

If efficient cause is defined by temporal succession, then your position makes perfect sense. At the same time that Humean causality comes at great cost, i.e. it creates an infinite regress of intermediate causes. That is exactly the same objection reductionists consider a damning flaw of substance dualism.

You're too cryptic for me to make out here. What reductionist objection are you referring to?

The interaction problem, i.e. that if material substances and mental substances have entirely different natures then they cannot interact without appealing to a third substance that in turn requires a fourth and fifth intermediating substance, and so on and so forth. Similarly, if A is considered the cause of B because B habitually follows A and if only events qualify as causes, then either B follows A for no reason at all or there is an intermediate cause C...and so on and so forth.