News Flash Materialists Caught in Denial

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In summary, the article argues that chemogenesis cannot be based on chemistry alone, and that the organizational complexity of life is not based on chemical or physical potentials, but rather on spontaneous organizing behavior.
  • #141
If everything that is measurable and "can be shown to exists" then becomes physical and material by definition, why would anyone ever reject materialism?
Certainly, that is the view of the materialist. It seems generally absurd to talk about spiritual entities - materialists would be much more comfortable talking of unknown physical objects and such like. If they did not think this way, materialism would be wholly inconsistent with progressive science, and very few people will be materialist. Someone said once that materialist science has in fact found thousands of fairies and gods - they simply choose to call them Gravity, or Energy, or Relativity.

The idea that anyone would reject materialism is that they would reject the idea of the identicalness of:

influence = existence

For example, Iachuss rejects materialism because he sees existence as being something else, perhaps something in the world of ideas, or as a wholing subjective notion, with influence being a subsidiary consequence rather than the precise moment the thing became real.

If something that exists is by definition material then why would anyone believe that something non-material actually exists when if it did exists it would be material by definition? Why would people believe in something that cannot exists?
And thus these people consider that something can exist without doing anything, or that the material should be bounded somehow not to include some things. In short, they do not agree with the definition, or indeed the axiom of what it means to be real, or to be material.
 
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  • #142
Originally posted by Canute
I think your problem with systems of life is the same as that which crops up all over in complexity theory, and it hasn't been solved.

“There’s a price top pay in becoming more complex; the system is more likely to break, for instance. We need a reason why biological systems become more complex through time. It must be very simple and it must be very deep.” Stuart Kauffman quoted in ‘Complexity' – Roger Lewin)

Vitalism isn't quite dead yet, and some recently published papers argue that 'microphenomenalism' or panpsychism is the answer

Yes, that is what I see. I see the scientism devotee adding up all the parts and processes of life without feeling a concern about what brought all those parts and processes together in the incredibly effective form they are in.

Besides, you know who declared vitalism dead don't you? It certainly wasn't the majority of people on this planet. It was, quite conveniently, scientism advocates. Their claim was made with the confidence that they could explain life with physical principles alone.

That's why you hear things like a medical biologist (Lewis Wolpert) claiming in the first chapter of his book on how embryos develop (The Triumph of the Embryo): “I will show that there is no ‘master builder’ in the embryo, no vital force.” Did he? No he simply ignored the issue of what pulled all that chemistry together, and what makes it function such an unusual organizational way. Because he only looked at and described "the parts," he made the stupid claim he'd shown there was no vital force. With that logic, I could take a brilliantly composed painting, break it down to all its component parts, and thereby prove no artist was necessary for such a paining.

So, so far scientism's hope of explaining life has proven to be bravado. And that means declaring vitalism dead was premature.
 
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  • #143
Originally posted by selfAdjoint
Sounds like god of the gaps to me. The closer we study life, the more clearly we see it's nothing but chemistry.

"God of the gaps" is that "empiricentric" thing again, reflected in the typically reductionist statement " The closer we study life, the more clearly we see it's nothing but chemistry." That's right, the more you take it apart, the more all you see is its constituent parts, which is chemistry. But what pulled it together, and keeps it working together as life? If it is just the parts, then why not disassemble every single bit of chemstry of some cell, throw it in a vat, and have it reassemble into life?

Originally posted by selfAdjoint The problems if there are any with complexity will be solved not by speculation but by empirical investigation.

Maybe so, but in terms of complexity being the answer either to life or consciousness, no one has demonstrated it yet have they? Just like chemistry apart from life, all you get complexity to do is continue on for awhile. It never attains that perpetually-evolving, metabolizing, reproducing condition so common to life.

Lewin's statement at least acknowledges the possibility that there might be "something more" which reductionist/empirical investigation may be incapable of revealing. I don't hear a peep about that out of most scientism devotees. Their attitude is that if science can't reveal it, then it must not exist. That's empiricentric if you ask me.
 
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  • #144
Originally posted by LW Sleeth
Maybe so, but in terms of complexity being the answer either to life or consciousness, no one has demonstrated it yet have they?
Very true. Surprisingly nobody knows (scientifically speaking) what in what order complexity, life and consciousness go in, or what gives rise to what. There are supporters for every possible permutation.
 
  • #145
Originally posted by LW Sleeth
"God of the gaps" is that "empiricentric" thing again, reflected in the typically reductionist statement " The closer we study life, the more clearly we see it's nothing but chemistry." That's right, the more you take it apart, the more all you see is its constituent parts, which is chemistry. But what pulled it together, and keeps it working together as life? If it is just the parts, then why not disassemble every single bit of chemstry of some cell, throw it in a vat, and have it reassemble into life?

This is an old criticism based on old lab procedures of in vitro analysis. To use the famous example, if you take a watch apart and spread the parts on a table, they won't tell time. Is that evidence for a mysterious property of "Chronalism" that inhabits the intact watch? No, it just means you have to reassemble the watch carefully in order to make it work.
What's going on in life research now:
1) Artificial viruses have already been created. Years ago a virus was dissolved, the DNA extracted and put into another flask with an amino acid solution in it. The DNA all by itself recreated the virus just like the original.

2) in about a year or so Craig Venter is going to slip the DNA out of a simple bacteria and replace it with artificially constructed DNA. He hopes by this to obtain tailored bacteria with commercial potential. I have some hope of seeing before I die (I am 70) the analogous thing done with a multicellular organism; perhaps a yeast, or maybe even possibly a worm like some species of Caenorhabditis, that's how fast things are moving. Within your lifetime artificial creatures that live and breathe. And no lightning bolt required.

3) Modern in vivo techniques like tMRI enable scientists to study cellular reactions in the LIVING organism, and they find - more chemistry. It's a lot more complicated than the watch, in even the simplest organsims, but the principle holds. Everything can be explained by interacting chemistries.



Maybe so, but in terms of complexity being the answer either to life or consciousness, no one has demonstrated it yet have they?

Once again with the god of the gaps. Anything not yet completely pinned down is taken as evidence for vitalism. Bad logic.
 
  • #146
Originally posted by selfAdjoint
This is an old criticism based on old lab procedures of in vitro analysis. To use the famous example, if you take a watch apart and spread the parts on a table, they won't tell time. Is that evidence for a mysterious property of "Chronalism" that inhabits the intact watch? No, it just means you have to reassemble the watch carefully in order to make it work.

First of all, I didn't say have a disassmbled watch tell time to prove chronalism, I said get that watch to assemble itself.

Then you go on to make my point for me by saying " you have to reassemble the watch carefully in order to make it work." My criticism all along has been that no one can demostrate enough of an "assembling process" that will lead to life; plus, that in spite of that failure scientism advocates are claiming abiogenesis is "most likely," or in the past that "vitalism is dead." I say, make your case properly first before making such claims.

Originally posted by selfAdjoint
What's going on in life research now:
1) Artificial viruses have already been created. Years ago a virus was dissolved, the DNA extracted and put into another flask with an amino acid solution in it. The DNA all by itself recreated the virus just like the original.

2) in about a year or so Craig Venter is going to slip the DNA out of a simple bacteria and replace it with artificially constructed DNA. He hopes by this to obtain tailored bacteria with commercial potential. I have some hope of seeing before I die (I am 70) the analogous thing done with a multicellular organism; perhaps a yeast, or maybe even possibly a worm like some species of Caenorhabditis, that's how fast things are moving. Within your lifetime artificial creatures that live and breathe. And no lightning bolt required.

3) Modern in vivo techniques like tMRI enable scientists to study cellular reactions in the LIVING organism, and they find - more chemistry. It's a lot more complicated than the watch, in even the simplest organsims, but the principle holds. Everything can be explained by interacting chemistries.

You probably think it must because I don't know about those developments that I doubt abiogenesis. Well, I do know about those developements, and all of it, every bit of it, is just more examples of how you can for some number of steps get chemistry to get organized, get more complex, but you CANNOT get it to come alive.

Viruses are not alive, and when you start out with DNA it isn't exactly proving anyway that even viruses can self organize from raw chemicals. Let's see you get DNA to spontaneously form. All the molecular biologists so proud because they take former life parts and hook them to chemistry are conveniently failing to mention they have no clue about how chemistry can, from raw materials, form into something so elegantly capable of directing chemical programming as DNA.

And then in your second example, you are going to replace a living cell's DNA with artificially manipulated DNA, but just like a virus, that DNA ain't going to do it's thing without a living system to work in.

Is it that hard to see that one is not demonstrating chemistry can shape itself into life just because one can fool around with life process and life's former parts?

Originally posted by selfAdjoint
Once again with the god of the gaps. Anything not yet completely pinned down is taken as evidence for vitalism. Bad logic.

I don't think the gaps are evidence for vitalism. I don't know at this point what the gaps mean. It is the scientism devotees' failure to properly acknowledge the gaps, to so arrogantly declare "vitalism" dead, to exaggerate the meaning of what they can achieve through molecular biology that bothers me.

I am still open to a real answer, and there is nothing wrong with the logic that is telling me I am being propagandized to by those who are overly eagar for life and consciousness to turn out to be materially derived. It may be, but no one is nearly as close to showing it as they are pretending to be.
 
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  • #147
Originally posted by FZ+
In short, they do not agree with the definition, or indeed the axiom of what it means to be real, or to be material.

This is exactly my point. This is what I've been trying to say since that "bias" thread started. The major driver for disagreement in this forum is not a disagreement on what actually "is" i.e. whether materialism is true or not. It is a disagreement on what words like materialism and existence actually mean. No progress in discussion can be made until these semantic issues are resolved. My point goes further then to say that this semantic issue is not the case in the world of philosophy.

There is a distinct line between materialists, idealists etc etc. They disagree on what "is" and not on what the word materialism means. This is where discussions here need to move to.

We shouldn't go into much detail here but your definition sounds like the "scientific" definition and not the philosophical definition.
 
  • #148
There is a distinct line between materialists, idealists etc etc. They disagree on what "is" and not on what the word materialism means. This is where discussions here need to move to.
I do not see this. Clarify?

What I see is LWSleeth repeating that "life may not have come about by a physical process", to which my immediate reactions is... what is the alternative? What is a process, but something that is physical?

Suppose say vitalism was true. Or that God created life. Or whatever What stops the materialist/scientist from pinning on the label and calling it a physical process, as we have done for the gods of time, space and matter? At what point must we say that x is not a physical process, when to the materialist, the extent of physical processes are infinite?

If we toss away this, we just have the question, is the beginning of life solvable by current knowledge, and current, apparently well established principles. To which the answer is... wait and see.

On a side note, I am doubting whether materialism, idealism, dualism and everything can ever be true or false, but are just ways of thinking, different eyes through which to see an universe of nonsense.
 
  • #149
Originally posted by FZ+
I do not see this. Clarify?

What stops the materialist/scientist from pinning on the label and calling it a physical process, as we have done for the gods of time, space and matter? At what point must we say that x is not a physical process, when to the materialist, the extent of physical processes are infinite?

Exactly! Do you not see that this is the very same question I am asking? I think you see the same situation I do but it doesn't appear that you understand what point I'm making with the observation. You are simply saying that anything that we discover to be true would then become materialism. You are asking for an example of something that can be found to be true and yet not be physical because you can't see how such a thing exists. And this is exactly what I'm saying. With the definition of materialism that you are using, non material things cannot exists. By definition!

Yet, there are philosophers who consider themselves dualist which means they believe that something non-material does exists. How can this be when we know by definition that it cannot? It is because they are using a different definition of materialism. The definition of materialism that you, Zero, and others here use is not the philsophical definition that is being used when we talk about Materialism/Idealism. It was pointed out in the "bias" thread that confusion is common among scientists and non-scientist because they assume the science definition of materialism applies to the philosophical debate that has been going on for years. When it does not.


On a side note, I am doubting whether materialism, idealism, dualism and everything can ever be true or false, but are just ways of thinking, different eyes through which to see an universe of nonsense. [/B]

I agree with you, if you're using your definition of these things. But the philosophical definition is a much better one that makes it easy to distinguish between material and non-material. When the semantics are clear, the views are either true or they aren't.
 
  • #150
Originally posted by FZ+
I do not see this. Clarify?

What I see is LWSleeth repeating that "life may not have come about by a physical process", to which my immediate reactions is... what is the alternative? What is a process, but something that is physical? . . .

I am doubting whether materialism, idealism, dualism and everything can ever be true or false, but are just ways of thinking, different eyes through which to see an universe of nonsense.

What I see so much is everyone in a hurry to have a philosophy, concept, belief, etc. that gives one an answer for the deep questions.

But why not leave all the issues open? You could say, "with the evidence we have today, reality looks like . . . " (i.e., whatever the evidence indicates). If you get new evidence tomorrow, then let whatever it is reshape your concept. Why do you have to settle on the truth of anything ever? I don't. At any given time I only have that which is most supported by my experience, that which is most supported by evidence, and those interesting areas which are supported by my experience and by evidence but yet somehow seem at odds with each other. I usually pay special attention to that.

Of course, with that approach, it requires me to be open to all types of evidence, not that which only supports my favorite theory. It is to trust the truth to reveal itself without any controls, or promotion, or censorship by me.
 
  • #151
Re: Definitions

As Sleeth says, the terms materialism, phenomenalism, physicalism, idealism, dualism etc have so many different meanings that confusion is inevitable. I suspect it's because however you define them objections arise, so people keep wriggling aroung trying to find subtle variations on them that are plausible. Even the term 'exist' is in dispute. I'm beginning to think it's better to discuss the issues without using these words.
 
  • #152
It is because they are using a different definition of materialism. The definition of materialism that you, Zero, and others here use is not the philsophical definition that is being used when we talk about Materialism/Idealism.
Pop quiz, then. What do you think is material? What I think is at materialism's core is the insistence there is no division between "spiritual" and "material" - spiritual either does not exist, or is just a subset of the other.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=materialism
"Philosophy. The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena."

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=materialism
"Of or pertaining to nature (as including all created existences); in accordance with the laws of nature; also, of or relating to natural or material things, or to the bodily structure, as opposed to things mental, moral, spiritual, or imaginary; material; natural; as, armies and navies are the physical force of a nation; the body is the physical part of man."

You could say, "with the evidence we have today, reality looks like . . . "
I agree completely - that is what science, or anything, can only ever say. If we accept the people involved are not breathlessly arrogant, and that they are still working in the field of science, that is probably what they meant. Hell, constantly rewriting your thoughts as evidence tears them down is what science, or "scientism" is about.


It is to trust the truth to reveal itself without any controls, or promotion, or censorship by me.
But the truth bearly ever reveals itself. You need to look. Sometimes people look too hard.
 
  • #153
Originally posted by FZ+
Pop quiz, then. What do you think is material? What I think is at materialism's core is the insistence there is no division between "spiritual" and "material" - spiritual either does not exist, or is just a subset of the other.
Spirits do exist by the way, and I base everything I say about materialism versus spiritualism upon this. I know that they exist, and hence a spiritual world as well, because it's something I experience all the time. So you can call it what you will, but that's not going to change whether they exist or they don't exist (except in people's minds).

So the hardest part it would seem, is finding a way to explain it in such a way that other people can understand which, ain't all that easy. :wink:
 
  • #154
And then in your second example, you are going to replace a living cell's DNA with artificially manipulated DNA, but just like a virus, that DNA ain't going to do it's thing without a living system to work in.

You take the chromosome out of a bacteriaum, and what do you have? A dead bacterium. Mortal remains. You put your own handmade chromosome in, and BING! it comes to life. This is not creation from scratch, but it is a much stronger result than you try to make it seem. Dead matter is made to live, not again, but anew, with new chemical reactions happening instead of old.

I am sure you will boast that science can't make life until they manufacture an artificially generated living human from a pile of chemicals on the floor, and even then you won't admit it's really so. You talk of science being locked in a pattern and it's you who won't wake up and smell the coffee.
 
  • #155
Report of speech given by neurosphysiologist Karl Pribram.

‘One can no more hope to find consciousness by digging into the brain than one can find gravity by digging into the earth’s centre’. His solution to the mind/brain problem is, much like Thompson, to reject the assumption of an inherent division and instead to regard the brain as but part of a larger web of causations impinging upon each instantiation of consciousness, including social systems and culture. He concluded by invoking a spiritual dimension to the quest for human understanding; not the kind of spiritualism one suspects Honderich had in mind, but rather a kind of ‘pervading consciousness’ which partakes of patterns that seem to be an intrinsic part of nature and human experience, including ‘quantum mechanics, organic chemistry, history, interpersonal interactions, or religious beliefs’ – all touched on to some extent in this wide-ranging presentation.”
Robert Peperell ‘Between phenomenology and neuroscience’ A report of the ‘Towards a Science of Consciousness’ Conference, Prague, July 2003) - Journal of Consciousness Studies Vol 10 No 11 2004 p 87
.
 
  • #156
And this proves nothing except that spirituality is important to Pribram. Marxism is important to Lewontin and he has written a long book asserting that genome research will go nowhere, because it is contrary to dialectic (he doensn't put it that way, of course). Any individual scientist can well be "mad nor' nor' west", it is the work of scientists as a community that makes progress.
 
  • #157
Quite agree, except that you're confusing spirituality with an rational ontological hypothesis. I don't think much of what scientists generally have to say on this matter either. I was just illustrating that on this matter any scientific 'orthodoxy' is an illusion.
 
  • #158
Originally posted by selfAdjoint
You take the chromosome out of a bacteriaum, and what do you have? A dead bacterium. Mortal remains. You put your own handmade chromosome in, and BING! it comes to life. This is not creation from scratch, but it is a much stronger result than you try to make it seem. Dead matter is made to live, not again, but anew, with new chemical reactions happening instead of old.

As I've said, I freely grant top cleverness honors to scientists achieving such things. I am in awe, I think it is wonderful (even if I am not convinced the bacterium will be entirely dead when the new chromosomes are put in).

Originally posted by selfAdjoint
I am sure you will boast that science can't make life until they manufacture an artificially generated living human from a pile of chemicals on the floor, and even then you won't admit it's really so.

Why the sarcasm? I am arguing you straightforwardly, and not playing games (even if I do get a little hot under the collar).

Possibly you joined this thread late and haven't read the original post along with the various debates that ensued. In case that is so, then I will remind you my point is that I say scientists cannot demonstrate the potential of chemistry to become "living" when left all on its own. To prove chemistry alone organized itself into the first life form, you have to show chemistry has that self organizing capability.

I don't think it does. I think the abiogenesis theory still needs a specific kind of organizing principle which chemistry hasn't yet been shown to have.

You think it does. Prove it. Afterall, the burden is on you to prove, and not me to disprove. Every example you and others give are not proofs, but rather evidence. Fine, I accept it as evidence. But, again, when you speak to the public about what is "most likely," you shouldn't act as though it is an objective statement of science when really it is a statement of materialist belief.

Originally posted by selfAdjoint
You talk of science being locked in a pattern and it's you who won't wake up and smell the coffee.

What coffee is that exactly? YOUR coffee? Or am I allowed to search for THE "coffee" that satisfies my objections to the abiogenesis theory?

Do you think I am religious, or believe in creationism? Supernaturalism maybe? Do you think I am conducting a vendetta against legitimate science? (You'd be wrong on all counts.) What assumptions are you making about my reasons for objecting to abiogenesis?

My reasons are a lot more objective than yours appear to be. I see an important missing capability of chemistry to do what abiogenesis enthusiasts claim chemistry did to form life. I want the truth, and I am open to that truth from any source it might come. How about you?

You know, just because you and every other scientism devotee believe chemistry did it doesn't mean that qualifies as a proper proof. It's not democracy, the will of the majority, might makes right . . . proof has a standard separate from all that. I'm sorry, but I genuinely see a huge gap in the abiogenesis theory right where I have been pointing. And no one is going to bully me into accepting materialist hopes and dreams as good science or a proper proof!
 
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  • #159
You say that chemistry must have a "something else" to be able to organize itself into a living organism. I say the best evidence to date, though incomplete, strongly suggests that it can do that by itself. I am the one backing the more parsimonoius model: there is nothing there beyond chemistry.

You are the one with less parsimony: some unknown factor beyond chemistry will be required. As I see it the burden is upon you to characterize your unknown factor and show its necessity. I have nothing to do but to watch the march of chemical knowledge and verify or reject my inference based on that. Of course if you can construct a rigorous and empirically testable version of your required force I will be glad to attend to that.
 
  • #160
Originally posted by selfAdjoint
You say that chemistry must have a "something else" to be able to organize itself into a living organism. I say the best evidence to date, though incomplete, strongly suggests that it can do that by itself. I am the one backing the more parsimonoius model: there is nothing there beyond chemistry.

You are the one with less parsimony: some unknown factor beyond chemistry will be required. As I see it the burden is upon you to characterize your unknown factor and show its necessity. I have nothing to do but to watch the march of chemical knowledge and verify or reject my inference based on that. Of course if you can construct a rigorous and empirically testable version of your required force I will be glad to attend to that.

Parsimony? Does this even apply in our universe anymore? No cosmologist I know of would put much stock in it after all that's been learned in recent years.

What's interesting about all this is that physicists and biologists generally don't agree on this matter. Physicists argue that chemistry behaves a certain way and life in some form is inevitable while biologists see it more as an amazing statistical oddity that would probably never happen again. So which is it? Both branches of science use parsimony I would think. Which of these does parsimony suggest? I'm just curious.

I think this will be my new signature: Don't worship a rule of thumb. Don't forget to think for yourself.
 
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  • #161
Originally posted by selfAdjoint You say that chemistry must have a "something else" to be able to organize itself into a living organism. I say the best evidence to date, though incomplete, strongly suggests that it can do that by itself. I am the one backing the more parsimonoius model: there is nothing there beyond chemistry.

I have to agree with Fliption on this one. The Nova special I watched a couple of weeks ago on string theory shows thinking that is anything but parsimonious, and yet which seems to explain more stuff because of it. I agree that if the theory you have is explaining things just fine, then why stick on superfluous elements. Outside of that, I can’t see how parsimony should be given precedence over simply investigating, accepting and, if necessary, hypothesizing how complex reality might turn out to be.

Originally posted by selfAdjoint You are the one with less parsimony: some unknown factor beyond chemistry will be required. As I see it the burden is upon you to characterize your unknown factor and show its necessity. I have nothing to do but to watch the march of chemical knowledge and verify or reject my inference based on that. Of course if you can construct a rigorous and empirically testable version of your required force I will be glad to attend to that.

An example I cited earlier in this thread was how perturbations in the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter had astronomers believing another planet was orbiting the sun out there. They could not actually see Pluto, and yet the behavior of what they could see convinced them they needed to add a new component, unparsimoniously, to the model.

My anti-parsimoniousness is due to the same sort of observation. Since I have no philosophy to stick up for, no concerns for whether or not creation turns out to be purely material, or if consciousness might somehow be involved, or if something I haven’t even imagined yet is part of things . . . because of that I am free to notice and acknowledge any anomaly there might be.

What I notice is chemistry behaving anomalously in one specific way. I do NOT claim the individual interactions between life’s chemical processes violate the norm. So far, you and others arguing against my assertions keep responding like you think that is what I am saying. That’s why I get list after list of all the “normal” chemistry that goes on behind/in various organic processes.

So what is the anomaly I notice? It is the organizational quality of life’s chemistry. Earlier you gave an example of how taking a watch apart doesn’t reveal any “chronalism,” and then you went on to say that all one has to do is assemble those parts and one has a time-keeping watch. But if you had all those parts laying around on a table, and they were to assemble themselves into a watch, wouldn’t you consider that an anomaly? And what if the watch developed it’s own solar-powered battery, reproduced another of itself, and came to adapt to the environment?

Even if you could bounce around the table enough to get the parts to fall into place, that still isn’t analogous to what abiogenesis theorists say happened with life. To really recreate analogous conditions you’d have to put the raw materials of the watch on the table, like bits of metal, and they would have to first shape themselves into springs, wheels, hands, etc., and then all would have to fit together rather perfectly to actually function as an effective timekeeping device.

Well, the first metabolizing, reproducing, adaptive cell, no matter how primitive, was a major organizational event. And to this day, we have never, ever – not once – observed another an organizational event of that quality from chemistry. In order to get chemistry to perform more steps than it would if left strictly to its own devices, you have to consciously manipulate it. Hmmmmmmm. In fact, the only time we see anything close to the sort of organization found in life is when consciousness has been involved. Yet you say that in an ocean full of the right chemicals and conditions, and given enough time, life could come about spontaneously.

So, like that disturbance in Jupiter’s orbit, I look at the chemistry of life and see something in its organizational quality that is atypical. You wonder why I am open to other explanations besides chemistry itself to account for that anomaly. I wonder why all the abiogenesis advocates can’t bring themselves to even acknowledge the anomaly, much less admit there might be an unrecognized influence at work in life. That is why I attached the term “denial” to this thread . . . because I suspect the lack of acknowledgment is due to the fear that might open the door to metaphysical propositions for that influence. It’s what materialists dread most.
 
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  • #162
Well said.

I'm unclear on one relevant question. How many times is life considered to have started on this planet?
 
  • #163
Yes, Les, well said. One other thing not yet brought up in this thread is that life, at least locally, violates the laws of thermodynamics both in organization and in energy use. I read somewhere long ago that pound for pound the human body radiates more energy than the sun.
While they deny it all, there is something special about life that is unknown and unexplained, as you say.
We have, as I have said before, found no evidence of proto-life or simpler life forms. Virus do not count as they must have de-evolved from a higher state with the ability to reproduce themselves and later as hosts became available to do that for them they lost the ability to reproduce themselves. Either that or they evolved later after life had already established itself in abundance here on earth.
There is no way that virus can be an evolutionary step as they would never be reproduced.
Again as I have said in other threads, all known life on Earth in of the same form. From the simplest fungi to human beings we share the same DNA and it is interchangable. This may be evidence that life only happened once on Earth or it may be that it was designed this way. By whom or what or why I can't say other than my personal beliefs.
 
  • #164
life, at least locally, violates the laws of thermodynamics both in organization and in energy use.

Oh no, are we going to get off on that phony thermodymaics argument again?

This is the fact. Neither life nor evolution violates thermodynamics is any way shape or form. This is the opinion, not of the biologists alone, but of the thermodynamicists. There is an excellent discusion of this over on the Talk Origins Archive .
 
  • #165
Originally posted by FZ+
Pop quiz, then. What do you think is material? What I think is at materialism's core is the insistence there is no division between "spiritual" and "material" - spiritual either does not exist, or is just a subset of the other.

How do you know whether there is a division between material and spiritual if you cannot define what material means? I do not know what the definition of material is as it is being used here. This is the very question I was asking in the other thread. How can I decide whether I agree with materialists or not if I don't know what it means to be material? This is why I was asking the question in that other thread.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=materialism
"Philosophy. The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena."

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=materialism
"Of or pertaining to nature (as including all created existences); in accordance with the laws of nature; also, of or relating to natural or material things, or to the bodily structure, as opposed to things mental, moral, spiritual, or imaginary; material; natural; as, armies and navies are the physical force of a nation; the body is the physical part of man."

These definitions are poor. Material means to be physical? What does physical mean? I wouldn't use a dictionary to define philosophies. It's better to get these from acedemic texts. The philosophical disinction between material and non-material is based on whether something is of the mind or not. Whether it is "mental stuff" or not.

The following website discusses these two construals of the term "material".

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/materialism.html
 
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  • #166
Yeah, materialism has been around so long it's gathered all sorts of sub-meanings. Would 'physicalism' be a better term as shorthand for 'only phsyical things exist'.
 
  • #167
Originally posted by selfAdjoint
Oh no, are we going to get off on that phony thermodymaics argument again?

This is the fact. Neither life nor evolution violates thermodynamics is any way shape or form. This is the opinion, not of the biologists alone, but of the thermodynamicists. There is an excellent discusion of this over on the Talk Origins Archive .

Technically you are correct, and probably the word "violate" isn't the best term to apply. I think anomaly might be better. In any case, I hope Royce doesn’t mind if I argue what I believe his overall point is a little more. The way life “violates” the rule of entropy is similar to this analogy:

A boulder rolls downhill . . . gravity is obeyed. The rolling boulder hits a smaller boulder, is sent flying through the air, comes down . . . gravity is obeyed. The boulder rolling down the hill encounters a deep, dried up, meandering creek bed; the boulder slides into the creek bed and is seen traveling in a meandering way down the mountain . . . gravity is obeyed.

All over the universe just such rolling boulders can be found. Sometimes the creek beds are incredibly twisted and complicated, and therefore so too is the path the boulder takes. Nonetheless, all of the behavior of the boulder can be explained as obeying the law of gravity in relatively straightforward ways.

Then you stumble upon a planet where boulders roll down the mountain unlike any other way observed in the universe. Each time before they roll down the mountain, they roll up the mountain a bit first. With each downward roll, they do overall descend down the mountain a little more, but what explains that upward roll first?

And they don’t just roll up, they roll up in such a way that they seek out smaller rocks and crevasses which help slow down their backward roll. And they don’t just seek out ways to slow down their backward slide, they actually create rocks and crevasses for slowing down. And then, before they roll all the way down the mountain, they spit in half and leave behind another boulder to continue where they left off.

Overall, the boulder was always rolling a little more downhill, so overall the rule of gravity was not violated. But if a group of observers had objectively looked at all the other rolling boulders in the universe, and then after seeing this new behavior you tried to suggest nothing unusual had happened because, after all, the rule of gravity hadn’t been violated . . . don’t you think the rest of the group might suspect you had some personal motive for refusing to acknowledge what was genuinely different about that rolling boulder?
 
  • #168
Ah sorry, that wasn't clear.

The second quote is the definition of "physical".

f there is indeed a coherently conceivable distinction between minds and material bodies, we must reject the view that materialism, understood as entailing mind-body identity, is conceptually, or analytically, true
The link you gave seem to back up my view - that the core assertion of materialist is not that effects seen as spiritual do not exist, but that there is no distinction between them in terms of types of reality.
 
  • #169
Originally posted by FZ+
The link you gave seem to back up my view - that the core assertion of materialist is not that effects seen as spiritual do not exist, but that there is no distinction between them in terms of types of reality.

That is but one sentence in a long discussion. There are other comments disagreeing with your view for the same reasons that I have pointed out. This link was an honest discussion about how these terms should be defined. Don't lose sight of the fact that it does eventually choose a definition and then proceed to define all of the different types of materialism. All being derivations of the mind/matter distinction.
 
  • #170
Maybe I'm blind or something, but I still don't see. LWSleeth and most other attacks still seem to be concentrated on what the article calls eliminative materialism, what's more, an extreme form of that. I do not consider any value for a large scale blanket "Materialists in Denial" statement.

There are other comments disagreeing with your view for the same reasons that I have pointed out.
Er... which ones?

As I said before, the question seems to be what it means to "is".
 
  • #171
Originally posted by FZ+
Maybe I'm blind or something, but I still don't see. LWSleeth and most other attacks still seem to be concentrated on what the article calls eliminative materialism, what's more, an extreme form of that. I do not consider any value for a large scale blanket "Materialists in Denial" statement.

I suppose I should explain what I mean by materialism.

I have used the term in the way described in the opening paragraph of the link Fliption gave. It says, “Materialism is a general view about what actually exists. Put bluntly, the view is just this: Everything that actually exists is material, or physical.” After that, there might be some dispute among thinkers about what material processes achieve.

Possibly something non-material can emerge from the material, for instance, as P.W. Atkins seems to suggest in his book The Creation, “Atoms are only loosely structured into molecules, and explorations of rearrangements resulting in reactions are commonplace. That is one reason why consciousness has already emerged from the inanimate matter of the original creation. If atoms had been as strongly bound as nuclei, the initial primitive form of matter would have been locked into permanence, and the universe would have died before it awoke.” In this case, the process of emergence from the physical might have caused consciousness to take on non-material qualities.

Or one might say every single trait that exists can be explained as physical processes, including consciousness. That is, nothing new has happened with the appearance of consciousness, we can reduce it all to known physical principles.

There are other distinctions materialists make among themselves, but they all share the belief (or suspicion) that all existence is wholly material, and whatever exists now which looks “different” has somehow been derived from materiality. I am not referring to those who say all we can observe is materiality, and so as a practical matter that’s all we have to work with; it is to go further and assume the ontological position that there is only materiality/physical processes (although often defended with the argument “because that’s all we have observed”).

And what is material, or “matter”?

Matter is anything with mass, and ordinarily exists in one of three physical states: solid, liquid, or gas. The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology provides an interesting way to think about matter: “[matter is] The substance composing bodies perceptible to the senses. The distinguishing properties of matter are gravitation and inertia. Any entity exhibiting these properties when at rest is matter. . . . All material bodies have mass, which is a measure of inertia; every material body near the Earth’s surface has weight, which is a measure of the Earth’s gravitational attraction for the body.”

Fundamentally, matter is atomic and atomic derived.

One problem for many non-materialists is that because matter is clearly temporal, it looks like something preceded matter which is more basic. In other words, atoms are not fundamental enough. We know atoms deteriorate and we know they had a beginning. Where did the “stuff” which composes atoms originate, where does it go to when atoms decay? Is consciousness really a product of matter, or does consciousness merely co-mingle with matter?

Materialists, already committed to an ontology, must find ways to explain everything as material. That, I say, can lead to bias, nonobjectivity, putting “spin” on all facts so that they can explain things with material principles. So when scientists who are materialists put a spin on science, such as what I accuse them of doing with the “most likely” claim, I object to it. Yes, empirical research only exposes materiality, but all that points to for certain is what the limitations of empiricism is. Yes, all one can observe with the senses is materiality, but all that tells us is what the sense can do.

Is there other experience besides sense experience? If so, does the experience reveal something non-material? The answer of the committed materialist seems to be, we are only going to trust our senses, we are only going to examine things empirically, and when we conclude from that sort of investigation we’ve found nothing immaterial, we are going to proclaim to the world that matter is “most likely” the origin and basis of all existence.
 
  • #172
Nice post. On 'emergence' you might like this. It comes at the issue through the 'spatiality' of consciousness. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html
 
  • #173
Originally posted by FZ+
Er... which ones?

The last sentence of the first paragraph says

"This portrayal of materialism is attractively simple, but may be unilluminating."

It then starts a new paragraph with the words

"The problem is..."

and ends this paragraph with

"but further explanation, without conceptual circularity, will then be needed."

It then changes the discussion to the definition dealing with the distinction between mind/matter as an alternate without the conceptual circularity.

In my mind conceptual circularity means building your conclusions into your assumptions which is what I've been saying all along about your definition of materialism.
 
  • #174
Originally posted by Canute
Nice post. On 'emergence' you might like this. It comes at the issue through the 'spatiality' of consciousness. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html

Thank you for the link, I loved that article. Coincidentally, I have come to the same conclusion that we need a new understanding of space in order to make sense of both physics and consciousness. Because of the continuing talk about materialism his this thread, I thought I would post this excerpt from McGinn's paper:

". . . There are, historically, two main lines of response to the problem, commonly supposed to be exclusive and exhaustive. One response denies a key premise of the problem, namely that mind sprang from matter. Instead, mind has an autonomous existence, as independent of matter as matter is of mind. Perhaps mind has always existed, or maybe came about in some analogue of the origin of matter, or owes its existence to a direct act of God. In any event, mind is no kind of out-growth of matter but an independent ontological category. Thus we have classical dualism, Descartes' own position. In effect, dualism takes the space problem to be a reductio of the emergence hypothesis. Mind and matter may causally interact (let us not inquire how!) but it is absurd, for dualism, to suppose that mind could owe its very being to matter. That is simply metaphysically impossible, according to dualism. You can no more derive the unextended from the extended than you can derive an ought from an is.(9)

A second response questions what we have been assuming so far, namely that consciousness is inherently non-spatial. We may grant that we ordinarily conceive of it in this way, but we should insist that that mode of conception be abandoned. Here we encounter, it may be said, yet another area in which common sense misconceives the true nature of reality. In fact, conscious states are just as spatially constituted as brain states, since they are brain states - neural configurations in all their spatial glory. Thus we have classical materialism, the thesis that consciousness is nothing over and above the cellular structures and processes we observe in the brain.(10) Since these admit of straightforward spatial characterisation, so, by identity, do conscious states. The case is analogous to the following: to common sense physical objects appear solid, but science tells us that this is an illusion, since they are really made up of widely spaced particles in a lattice that is anything but solid. Somewhat so, the materialist insists that the appearance of non-spatiality that consciousness presents is a kind of illusion, and that in reality it is as spatial (even solid!) as the cell clusters that constitute the brain.(11) It is Descartes' assumption of unextendedness that is mistaken, according to materialism, not the emergence hypothesis.

Now it is not my intention here to rehearse any of the usual criticisms of these two venerable positions, beyond noting that both have deeply unattractive features, which I think we would be reluctant to countenance if it were not for the urgency of the problem. These are positions we feel driven to, rather than ones that save the phenomena in a theoretically satisfying way. My purpose is to identify a third option, and to explore some of its ramifications. The point of this third option is to preserve material emergence while not denying the ordinary non- spatial conception of consciousness. The heart of the view, put simply, is this: the brain cannot have merely the spatial properties recognised in current physical science, since these are insufficient to explain what it can achieve, namely the generation of consciousness. The brain must have aspects that are not represented in our current physical world-view, aspects we deeply do not understand, in addition to all those neurons and electro-chemical processes. There is, on this view, a radical incompleteness in our view of reality, including physical reality. In order to provide an explanation of the emergence of consciousness we would need a conceptual revolution, in which fundamentally new properties and principles are identified. This may involve merely supplementing our current theories with new elements, so that we need not abandon what we now believe; or it may be - as I think more likely - that some profound revisions are required, some repudiation of current theory. Consciousness is an anomaly in our present world- view, and like all anomalies it calls for some rectification in that relative to which it is anomalous, more or less drastic. Some ideal theory T contains the solution to the space problem, but arriving at T would require some major upheavals in our basic conception of reality.

I am now in a position to state the main thesis of this paper: in order to solve the mind-body problem we need, at a minimum, a new conception of space. We need a conceptual breakthrough in the way we think about the medium in which material objects exist, and hence in our conception of material objects themselves. That is the region in which our ignorance is focused: not in the details of neurophysiological activity but, more fundamentally, in how space is structured or constituted. That which we refer to when we use the word 'space' has a nature that is quite different from how we standardly conceive it to be; so different, indeed, that it is capable of 'containing' the non-spatial (as we now conceive it) phenomenon of consciousness. Things in space can generate consciousness only because those things are not, at some level, just how we conceive them to be; they harbour some hidden aspect or principle.

Before I try to motivate this hypothesis further, let me explain why I think the needed conceptual shift goes deeper than mere brain physiology, down to physics itself. For, if I am right, then it is not just the science of matter in the head that is deficient but the science of matter spread more widely.(12) A bad reason for insisting that the incompleteness reaches down as far as physics is the assumption that physiology reduces to physics, so that any incompleteness in the reduced theory must be reflected in the reducing theory. This is a bad reason because it is a mistake to think that the so-called special sciences - geology, biology, information science, psychology, etc - reduce to physics. I will not rehearse the usual arguments for this, since they have been well marshalled elsewhere.(13) If that were the right way to look at the matter, then physics would be highly incomplete and defective on many fronts, since all the special sciences have outstanding unsolved problems. But it is surely grotesque to claim that the problem of how (say) the dinosaurs became extinct shows any inadequacy in the basic laws of physics! Rather, the intransitivity of problems down the heirarchy of the sciences is itself a reason to reject any reductionist view of their interrelations. So it is certainly an open question whether the problem of consciousness requires revisions in neurophysiology alone, or whether those revisions will upset broader reaches of physical theory. It depends entirely on what is the correct diagnosis of the essential core of the problem. And what I am suggesting is that the correct diagnosis involves a challenge to our general conception of space. Given the fact of emergence, matter in space has to have features that go beyond the usual conception, in order that something as spatially anomalous as consciousness could have thereby come into existence. Somehow the unextended can issue from matter in space, and this must depend upon properties of the basis that permit such a derivation. It therefore seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the requisite properties are instantiated by matter prior to its organisation into brain structure. The brain must draw upon aspects of nature that were already there. According to our earlier speculation, these aspects may be connected to features of the universe that played a part in the early creation of matter and space itself - those features, themselves pre-spatial, that characterised the universe before the big bang. Consciousness is so singular, ontologically, and such an affront to our standard spatial notions, that some pretty remarkable properties of matter are going to be needed in order to sustain the assumption that consciousness can come from matter. It is not likely that we need merely a local conceptual revolution"
 
  • #175
LWS:
The substance composing bodies perceptible to the senses.
This is, IMHO, the most important part of it.

Fundamentally, matter is atomic and atomic derived.
I'm sorry, but I cannot accept that philosophically speaking. All of science has gone beyond the atom - even matter itself in modern physics is being considered in terms of waves, fields and further, unconventional entities. I find deeply impractical any idea of materialism that denies the existence of, say, light.

Possibly something non-material can emerge from the material, for instance, as P.W. Atkins seems to suggest in his book The Creation, “Atoms are only loosely structured into molecules, and explorations of rearrangements resulting in reactions are commonplace. That is one reason why consciousness has already emerged from the inanimate matter of the original creation. If atoms had been as strongly bound as nuclei, the initial primitive form of matter would have been locked into permanence, and the universe would have died before it awoke.” In this case, the process of emergence from the physical might have caused consciousness to take on non-material qualities.
The idea of emergent behaviour seems to be a prevalent idea amongst materialists. I do not consider it to be a case of non-material arising from material, but that at large scale levels materials interactions being interpreted in terms of non-material values.

Flipton:
In my mind conceptual circularity means building your conclusions into your assumptions which is what I've been saying all along about your definition of materialism.
Yes, I accept that. But I do not see it as a flaw, but as part of the essence of the matter. IMHO, materialism is not justifiable logically - it is, in effect, simply a single coherent system by which to view the universe. Ultimately it's core assumptions, or axioms, or definitions or whatever cannot be shown by any evidence and you cannot say whether it is true or false.
 

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