Materialism and Logic, mtually exclusive?

Father Parmenides

Materialism is only the logical statement that everything that exists - exists (whether or not we currently know of or understand it). A denial of materialism is really a denial of logic.

If you (religious person of any persuasion) want your god to be real then you have to accept that he/she exists and is therefore bound by materialism.

Sir:

I'll be surprised if many people on this thread whether they style themselves materialists, idealists, closet idealists, or ... will wish to define materialism so.

I personally am unacquainted with any materialist who thinks that a statement of materialism is reducible to "whatever is is". Might you not be, perhaps faintly, recalling father Parmendides?

[[I almost forgot about Democritus et al - however, I'll be happy to assert and also back up the assertion that he isn't support for your statement either - outside this thread. But in any case, do you wish to also assert, "what is not is"? Be my guest.]]

Were our core concepts of "existence" so materially entwined, this thread wouldn't exist - apologies to RandFan, Still thinkin, et al.

Cheers,

FTB
 
True. In some sense ... (I just couldn't resist :) .)
No, that's very good. "Truth" is a perception or a judgment of that which is. That which is exists whether humans exist or they do not. The perception that something is "true" exists only in the human mind.

Is consistency a human construct? I'm not at all so sure about that. My gut-feeling is that any inconsistent universe will cancel itself out.

Doubtless there are philosophers out there who can explain the difference between "truth" and "consistency" better than I can.
I'll leave it to them.
 
stillthinkin said:
I would think that in a materialist view, mistakes would have to be illusory, since everything matter does is actually physically, mechanistically determined. There really can be no such thing as a mistake.
That would be a wrong vision, just because a judgement doesn't impact the mechanisme, doesn't make it any less of a mistake or less materialistic.
As it is that viewpoint of yours has nothing to do with the topic but more about if a self exists.
I was speculating on what a materialist explanation for the phenomenon of mistakes might be, i.e, that they are illusory. Can you provide a different one? I admit the phenomenon of mistakes, as I think we all do. Perhaps I have made a mistake there ;).

So I tried to give my own account, but if I am wrong then what is the materialist account of a mistake? How does a result which is mechanistically determined end up being or looking like a mistake?
 
Sir:

I'll be surprised if many people on this thread whether they style themselves materialists, idealists, closet idealists, or ... will wish to define materialism so.

I personally am unacquainted with any materialist who thinks that a statement of materialism is reducible to "whatever is is". Might you not be, perhaps faintly, recalling father Parmendides?

[[I almost forgot about Democritus et al - however, I'll be happy to assert and also back up the assertion that he isn't support for your statement either - outside this thread. But in any case, do you wish to also assert, "what is not is"? Be my guest.]]

Were our core concepts of "existence" so materially entwined, this thread wouldn't exist - apologies to RandFan, Still thinkin, et al.

Cheers,

FTB
I do so wish to define materialism. That which is. To date that which is, is material, physical.

From that ever so uncontroversial source of wisdom and truth, wikipedia ;)

Materialism

In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. Science uses a working assumption, sometimes known as methodological naturalism, that observable events in nature are explained only by natural causes without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural. As a theory, materialism belongs to the class of monist ontology. As such, it is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. In terms of singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism stands in sharp contrast to idealism.
 
One step backwards, two steps....

I do so wish to define materialism. That which is. To date that which is, is material, physical.

From that ever so uncontroversial source of wisdom and truth, wikipedia ;)

Let's go back a step. The def of materialism proposed was basicially, "what is, is" not "what is".

Now, if the little word "is" bears within its very meaning "matter", or if it is a priori that "is" implies or presupposes matter, I hold by what I said previously, i.e. this thread wouldn't exist. Unless, of course, anyone who would even entertain, much less attempt to address, the question whether whatever is is material is so deeply confused about the meaning/use of the term as to pursue a purported fool's errand.

Cheers,

FTB
 
Let's go back a step. The def of materialism proposed was basicially, "what is, is" not "what is".

Now, if the little word "is" bears within its very meaning "matter", or if it is a priori that "is" implies or presupposes matter, I hold by what I said previously, i.e. this thread wouldn't exist. Unless, of course, anyone who would even entertain, much less attempt to address, the question whether whatever is is material is so deeply confused about the meaning/use of the term as to pursue a purported fool's errand.

Cheers,

FTB
Ok, I think the light is breaking through (emphasis on "think"). I can be a bit slow at times. Though I do usually come around eventually. So have patience and excuse my ignorance. Is to state "what is, is" a tautology?
 
'Mistake' is another human term, like 'good', 'bad', 'right', 'wrong', etc.

It's an invention, not a fact.
 
Brain Warping Stuff

[nitpick]
That is only true in Euclidean geometry. Take away the parallel postulate, and the interior angles of a triangle can assume any value from just above zero to just below 180 degrees.
[/nitpick]

I looked up parallel postulate in wikipedia. And I was keeping up until it started talking about elliptic geometry where two straight lines can meet at more than one point. That's just weird.

It sort of kills me that math gets so crazy at the university level. I imagine that uni profs just tell there students, "Remember all those rules you thought you had mastered in High School? Well that was just the sensical stuff. Here is the real deal. It is much weirder."
 
I was speculating on what a materialist explanation for the phenomenon of mistakes might be, i.e, that they are illusory. Can you provide a different one? I admit the phenomenon of mistakes, as I think we all do. Perhaps I have made a mistake there ;).

So I tried to give my own account, but if I am wrong then what is the materialist account of a mistake? How does a result which is mechanistically determined end up being or looking like a mistake?
Simply it can happen because of limited input (we aren't allknowing), or experiences that don't fit the situation, or even damaged brians may cause mistakes.

Just because something is 'mechanistically determined' (noting immaterial involved) doesn't mean that one always gets the best possible action.
 
'Mistake' is another human term, like 'good', 'bad', 'right', 'wrong', etc.

It's an invention, not a fact.
Can you clarify what you mean by "invention".

The light bulb was an invention. When people make "honest" mistakes they are not necessarily inventing anything, though we sometimes call lies and false theories "inventions". But we can also call true theories "inventions". I proposed the term "illusion", do you see a problem with that term? Or is there some other term?
 
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stillthinkin said:
I was speculating on what a materialist explanation for the phenomenon of mistakes might be, i.e, that they are illusory. Can you provide a different one? I admit the phenomenon of mistakes, as I think we all do. Perhaps I have made a mistake there :wink:.

So I tried to give my own account, but if I am wrong then what is the materialist account of a mistake? How does a result which is mechanistically determined end up being or looking like a mistake?
Simply it can happen because of limited input (we aren't allknowing), or experiences that don't fit the situation, or even damaged brians may cause mistakes.
Indeed, we arent all knowing - but matter always behaves exactly as it should. Matter doesnt make mistakes. If everything we do is part of this material chain of determined mechanism, then we cant really make mistakes. When it appears to us that we have made a mistake, we are suffering under an illusion.
You mention brain damage; RandFan suggested earlier the example of a corrupt database returning "illogical data". These would suggest the possibility of mistakes being the result of some kind of "malfunction". But we know that material things dont really malfunction -- matter always does what it is supposed to. When a brain is damaged by, say, a stroke - then matter has done exactly what it is supposed to. When a hard drive fails, it has not done so in violation of mechanistically determined material reality, but precisely because of it. Things break down because matter under stress breaks down, all according to the laws of physics.

Just because something is 'mechanistically determined' (noting immaterial involved) doesn't mean that one always gets the best possible action.
Well, in a deterministic system one always gets the only possible result, which therefore is the best possible result, and also the worst possible result... the adjectives "best" and "worst" are illusory. I suspect this is why zaayrdragon included the words "good" and "bad" in his list of invention examples... but we will let him speak to that.
 
What I mean by 'invention': Well, I'm not the most gifted wordsmith, to be sure. When I speak of such concepts as love, good, evil, mistake, logic, reason, etc., I'm speaking of linguistic terms humans have invented to cover things that are not themselves clearly understood by common folk. Love, for example, is an invention; it is a term used to describe a very complex set of biochemical reactions and the brain's subsequent processing thereof, in relation to an individual's interactions with another individual (or, of course, with itself). 'Love', then, becomes a term of convenience. If you want to say love is an 'illusion', I could certainly agree.

The same goes with most of these non-concrete ideas we're discussing - and a 'mistake' is one of those ideas. Physical processes happen; it takes a sufficiently complex computational system to assign one of those processes or set of processes the label of 'mistake'.

A synonym for 'mistake' is 'error'. Computers certainly are capable of making quite a few errors. Strangely, the more complex we make our machines, the more prone to error they become. No machine is more complex than the human brain, and the greater complexity also results in a greater propensity for error. Our brains have developed to allow for much greater flexibility and wider array of possible actions, resulting in brains that are 'jack of all trades, master of none'. They are vast organic computers with complex multi-parallel processors that take shape as we learn, creating networks of connections that often result in strangely related information processing (as the joke goes, 'what do windshield wipers have to do with breasts?').

Anyway, the point you kept harping on, 'can machines make mistakes'? The answer is, absolutely - in the same way machines can be beautiful or fearsome or useless. In other words, a mistake is a human label to apply to any set of unexpected and/or undesired behaviors of a system. If I have a color-by-number book and I rely on my admittedly poor memory to color it, I might 'make a mistake' and color the 3s red, when they should be blue. Mechanistically, there was no particular 'mistake' involved, but due to the inventions of 'instruction', 'language', and 'mistake', I made a mistake. On the other hand, if my intention was to color it red - for example, I felt that a red race car was more interesting to me - then I made 'no mistake'; yet others might still feel I made a mistake. It is, as you suggest, all illusion. It is also human invention.

Humans invent all sorts of convenient illusions, such as politics, religion, morality, superiority, subservience, beauty, and so on and so forth. All illusions; all inventions.

A light bulb is an invention, yes. It is also an illusion. It is a mass of atoms and molecules that, when electrically charged to the proper degree and along the proper pathways, stimulates emissions of photons. We have invented terms like 'light' and 'bulb' to simplify communication about this object; these terms are illusions as well, if we want to look at it that way.

So, to sum up: a mistake and a light bulb are both inventions and illusions. Logic, likewise, is an invention and an illusion, as you use the term. Machines are capable of doing logic, unless you can prove either a) that no machine anywhere ever can do logic (proving a negative - not possible), or b) that those machines that are known to do logic are not simply machines (prove that humans possess immaterial (= in no way related to matter or energy) qualities - due to definition of 'immaterial', not possible either).

I think this discussion really can't be completed satisfactorily, until such time as the brain and its processes are fully understood; such time as a manufactured entity demonstrates full philosophical reasoning ability; or until such time as a means is determined for detecting and analysing things which violate the principles of materialism. Until such time, we're deeply in the realm of conjecture.
 
Indeed, we arent all knowing - but matter always behaves exactly as it should. Matter doesnt make mistakes. If everything we do is part of this material chain of determined mechanism, then we cant really make mistakes. When it appears to us that we have made a mistake, we are suffering under an illusion.
You mention brain damage; RandFan suggested earlier the example of a corrupt database returning "illogical data". These would suggest the possibility of mistakes being the result of some kind of "malfunction". But we know that material things dont really malfunction -- matter always does what it is supposed to. When a brain is damaged by, say, a stroke - then matter has done exactly what it is supposed to. When a hard drive fails, it has not done so in violation of mechanistically determined material reality, but precisely because of it. Things break down because matter under stress breaks down, all according to the laws of physics.

Exactly right, from the perspective of matter. However, human invention/illusion has labeled a set of matter as 'hard drive', and a set of conditions which constitutes 'operates normally'. Matter doesn't really malfunction. But material systems fail to operate within limits applied by human invention and, thus, 'malfunction'.

Well, in a deterministic system one always gets the only possible result, which therefore is the best possible result, and also the worst possible result... the adjectives "best" and "worst" are illusory. I suspect this is why zaayrdragon included the words "good" and "bad" in his list of invention examples... but we will let him speak to that.

Exactly right. Every human choice is the only choice the person could have made. The 'common sense' problem has a simple solution: that this particular deterministic system is so vastly complex, we have no hope, presently, of knowing the deterministic outcome of most choices. This ignorance allows us the illusion of free will.

Before this devolves into a discussion about crime and punishment, I should note that treating a decision as a deterministic outcome is a mistake (heh), because these systems are so complex and replete with feedback loops and multiple-redundancies, that data about punishment and reward play a part of the deterministic process as well. Even processing data about processing data becomes a variable being processed. Thinking about thought adds another variable to the thoughts involved. This is why we can debate internally about whether or not to take an action, and come up with [apparently] contrary results - the data from considering a course of action becomes another datum in the decision-making process.

Yeah, it gets really convoluted, really quickly - that's what we get for having such messy brain design.
 
Indeed, we arent all knowing - but matter always behaves exactly as it should. Matter doesnt make mistakes. If everything we do is part of this material chain of determined mechanism, then we cant really make mistakes. When it appears to us that we have made a mistake, we are suffering under an illusion.
How can you be sure of that, you are an illusion after all?

Also I don't see how any of your arguments show contradictions between logic and materialism?
 
How can you be sure of that, you are an illusion after all?

Also I don't see how any of your arguments show contradictions between logic and materialism?


The only contradiction he has demonstrated occurs by chucking out materialism before he gets into the argument properly.

'Logic is a process of the human mind; human minds are immaterial; hence, logic and materialism are incompatible.'

Forget that making the second statement assumes materialism is false anyway... :D
 
Sir:

I'll be surprised if many people on this thread whether they style themselves materialists, idealists, closet idealists, or ... will wish to define materialism so.

I personally am unacquainted with any materialist who thinks that a statement of materialism is reducible to "whatever is is". Might you not be, perhaps faintly, recalling father Parmendides?

[[I almost forgot about Democritus et al - however, I'll be happy to assert and also back up the assertion that he isn't support for your statement either - outside this thread. But in any case, do you wish to also assert, "what is not is"? Be my guest.]]

Were our core concepts of "existence" so materially entwined, this thread wouldn't exist - apologies to RandFan, Still thinkin, et al.

Cheers,

FTB

I think you may be missing my point. Materialism does not require that a person understands the nature of material, or that material conforms to a single law or specification. Materialism does not have a prerequisite for gravity, quarks or black holes.

Fundementally, Materialism is the proposition that everything that exists is given the label 'material' (but its just a word, not a concept in itself). Since things that don't exist - don't exist - then they are immaterial. This is the logical problem for anti-materialists and is also why Randfan correctly asked the question about 'what is, is' being a tautology.

Yes - its logical, bloody obvious, staring everyone in the face and really very simple. But still people like to invent and believe fairy stories. If you feel that my description of Materialism is wrong then fine - let's call it HodgyMaterialism and let anyone who so desires make logical arguments against it.
 
stillthinkin said:
Indeed, we arent all knowing - but matter always behaves exactly as it should. Matter doesnt make mistakes. If everything we do is part of this material chain of determined mechanism, then we cant really make mistakes. When it appears to us that we have made a mistake, we are suffering under an illusion.
How can you be sure of that, you are an illusion after all?
No, I am not an illusion, I dont think. I am not sure where you get the idea that I thought I was.

Also I don't see how any of your arguments show contradictions between logic and materialism?
We were fleshing out a materialist account of the phenomenon of "mistakes". I believe we have reached the conclusion that if materialism is true, then "mistakes" are actually an illusion of the conscious mind. The argument is that matter doesnt make mistakes, but always behaves deterministically - it does exactly and only what it has to according to the laws of physics. At this point I am only trying to clarify whether that result - mistakes are illusory - is a valid conclusion from materialist theory.
 
The only contradiction he has demonstrated occurs by chucking out materialism before he gets into the argument properly.

'Logic is a process of the human mind; human minds are immaterial; hence, logic and materialism are incompatible.'

Forget that making the second statement assumes materialism is false anyway... :D
I afforded you the courtesy of speaking for yourself. Please extend me the same courtesy.
 
'Mistake' is another human term, like 'good', 'bad', 'right', 'wrong', etc.

It's an invention, not a fact.
I would take a slightly different tack, that "mistake" names a class of observations. Mistakes can occur when decisions or plans are made. (And they do, trust me on that, I've made some myself.) No goal or intention, no mistake.

Material reality has no goals or intentions, it has states and physical laws that determine what new states can follow. Mistakes are not possible in that realm. Moving electrons cannot absently-mindedly not notice a magnetic field.
 
No, I am not an illusion, I dont think. I am not sure where you get the idea that I thought I was.
That seems to be what you are argumenting.

We were fleshing out a materialist account of the phenomenon of "mistakes".
No, not really.

I believe we have reached the conclusion that if materialism is true, then "mistakes" are actually an illusion of the conscious mind.
No, they are the products of the concious mind and therefore not illusionary. If you do want to claim this you can also say that you as a concious person don't exist.
 

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