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I challenge you: your best argument for materialism

This was a long time ago, don't think I have anything to add. As I recall the more interesting part of this was a debate about computational ism.

Also, as I recall Bernardo was pushing Materialism, except he was changing the labels to disguise it.

Maybe time for a repeat of my all purpose ontology primer;

Materialism: There is stuff
Idealism: There is other stuff
Dualism: There is stuff and other stuff
Neutral Monism: There is stuff and other stuff that both reduce to other other stuff
All other ontologies: Basically some variation on the above.
 
My own metaphysics is Robinism.

I challenge everyone here to defend ... oh, say um ... Molinism.

If you can't defend Molinism then I win and Robinism is true

Because that's how philosophy works, apparently.
 
Is the gist of the argument "materialism can't possibly account for how special I feel?" Because we've heard that one before.
 
Robin said:
This was a long time ago, don't think I have anything to add. As I recall the more interesting part of this was a debate about computational ism.

Also, as I recall Bernardo was pushing Materialism, except he was changing the labels to disguise it.

Maybe time for a repeat of my all purpose ontology primer;

Materialism: There is stuff
Idealism: There is other stuff
Dualism: There is stuff and other stuff
Neutral Monism: There is stuff and other stuff that both reduce to other other stuff
All other ontologies: Basically some variation on the above.
Click to expand...

Nihilism: There is no stuff
Solipsism: There's just my stuff
 
Functionalism: Stuff does stuff.
Computationalism: The stuff stuff does is other stuff.
 
Myriad said:
Is the gist of the argument "materialism can't possibly account for how special I feel?" Because we've heard that one before.
Click to expand...

As far as I can see he is just pushing plain old Materialism, but he has rebadged matter as 'non-reflective consciousness'. It is a common enough move.

Still, if he can make money out of arguing in favour of Materialism in the guise of arguing against Materialism then I don't grudge him that.
 
Robin said:
As far as I can see he is just pushing plain old Materialism, but he has rebadged matter as 'non-reflective consciousness'. It is a common enough move.

Still, if he can make money out of arguing in favour of Materialism in the guise of arguing against Materialism then I don't grudge him that.
Click to expand...


Indeed, that is impressive!
 
LarryS said:
I did check out this book from local library and read it quite a few years ago. His reasoning favoring Ideaism seemed solid enough...
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If you have time would you mind summarising that reasoning?
 
I'm not serious here because I (luckily) don't know much about Philosophy but I would define Nihilism as "There's a lot of stuff but none of it is actually important" :D
 
Functionalism: Stuff happens
Stoicism: **** happens
 
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Logical Positivism: Any sentence that refers to stuff is meaningless ... er, except this one.
 
LarryS said:
It’s a waste of time and bandwidth to go against the group think here . . . fatalism
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Okay. Reality doesn't exist. Use your mental magic powers to think up a universe where everyone agrees with you and gushes over how deep you are.

Why are you copping an attitude with figments of your imagination?
 
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