I challenge you: your best alternate to materialism

LarryS said:
No one that can make a comprehensible statement re it - could you be that someone?
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How about: we call what we experience "matter" when we measure and analyze it, we call it "consciousness" (or "experience") when we take it as a sheer occurrence.
 
gurugeorge said:
How about: we call what we experience "matter" when we measure and analyze it, we call it "consciousness" (or "experience") when we take it as a sheer occurrence.
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Where's the *mon*ism in that? The 'we call it'?

You would need to show the mono in this ism first, or at least make a good case for it. Then we can talk about what we call the events and/or objects or whathaveyou...
 
realpaladin said:
Where's the *mon*ism in that? The 'we call it'?

You would need to show the mono in this ism first, or at least make a good case for it. Then we can talk about what we call the events and/or objects or whathaveyou...
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The "mono" bit is in these being two ways of looking at the same thing/event/process - one way, in terms of measurement and analysis, the other way in terms of acceptance of sheer presence, without regard to naming it anything or being interested in the particularities of its funny little ways.

But one can go deeper: the materialistic analysis attempts to explain how presence comes to be.

Imagine the Own-Brain-O-Scope (tm) - you think about something, and at the same time you are observing the chunglings-about of your brain that are occurring while you are thinking. Are the chunglings-about more real than the thought itself? They are themselves perceptions, a way of looking at the thought, rather than being that thought.
 
gurugeorge said:
The "mono" bit is in these being two ways of looking at the same thing/event/process - one way, in terms of measurement and analysis, the other way in terms of acceptance of sheer presence, without regard to naming it anything or being interested in the particularities of its funny little ways.
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The whole 'presence' is 'measuring' and 'analysis'; the fact that it is there means you have analysed the situation and determined it's presence.

The fact that you know what it is means you have measured it; you are able to discern a model car from a real car.

To me, what you are describing is an arbitrary dichotomy where none existed...
 
gurugeorge said:
How about: we call what we experience "matter" when we measure and analyze it, we call it "consciousness" (or "experience") when we take it as a sheer occurrence.
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Aside from these definitions just being wrong and having no bearing on the way the terms are actually used, this makes your proposed form of neutral monism completely useless.

It isn't an ontological position. It's just vocabulary. The "matter" and "consciousness" are both matter; the latter simply hasn't been looked at and scrutinized yet.

gurugeorge said:
Imagine the Own-Brain-O-Scope (tm) - you think about something, and at the same time you are observing the chunglings-about of your brain that are occurring while you are thinking. Are the chunglings-about more real than the thought itself? They are themselves perceptions, a way of looking at the thought, rather than being that thought.
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Word games. Those "chunglings-about" - assuming by that you mean the processes observably taking place within your brain - are the thought.
 
Belz... said:
Light can be slower, but not the photons.
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I beg to differ.

ETA: Not that it matters, exept for academical purposes.
(Note that ALL EM waves are photons, not just light).

Hans
 
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Belz... said:
The particle itself IS ALWAYS AT C.
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You are right, but c has different values in different mediums (exactly as MRC_Hans already wrote in http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10425651&postcount=1184).

c simply can't be greater than 299,792,458 meters per second, which is the speed of light in vacuum (which is a type of medium) w.r.t all observers and their measurement tools.

More precisely , the group velocity can't be greater than 299,792,458 meters per second in vacuum, but phase velocity can exceed it, although it is not considered as an information or energy transfer by physicists, so no physical thing can exceed the speed of light in vacuum.

For more details, please look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_velocity.
 
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Aside: The symbol c is used, nigh-on completely universally, to refer to the speed of light in vacuo, not in a particular material. I'm sure there is the odd exception out there. As for how fast "photons" are moving in materials, you might enjoy a recent discussion in another thread here:

Ziggurat's first post on the topic: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=10419879#post10419879
ben m's perspective: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=10420352#post10420352
Darwin123's perspective: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=10422395#post10422395

Anyway, if you add the qualifier "in vacuo" to Belz...'s original statement, you avoid worrying about these distractions, fascinating though they are.

Or if you want something else which is "invariant" (whatever that actually means), why not go for charge conservation? The total electric charge in the universe is the same constant value for all observers at all times.
 
ctamblyn said:
The total electric charge in the universe is the same constant value for all observers at all times.
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By total do you mean that there is an accurate finite value for electric charge that can't be grater than that value?

If this is the case, then it is equivalent to the value of c in vacuum, where both c and electric charge can be less than their maximal values.
 
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doronshadmi said:
Is the result is some accurate finite or infinite value?
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The result will be some particular well-defined number, provided that the universe is spatially finite (I neglected to mention that before). If you're going to ask me exactly what it is, I don't know. Even if the universe is not finite, electric charge is still conserved locally: in any finite volume of space, with no charged particles escaping or entering it, the amount of electric charge contained in it remains fixed.

Or if you want some other "invariant" statement, consider the magnitude of an electron's intrinsic angular momentum (i.e. its spin). For any observer, at any time, the magnitude is always the same.

There are many examples of quantities (or other objects) in physics which are "invariant" in one sense or another.
 
doronshadmi said:
The point is that c has different values in different mediums, or in other words, c is variant and so is the speed of pothons.
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The locally-measured speed in vacuo, which is what is usually meant by the symbol c, is invariant. That was my point. Also, if you read the three links I provided above, you'll see that the speed of a photon in a medium is not as straightforward a matter as you appear to think.
 
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