It negates your premise that material things dont exist
Your post is just an incredibly lazy straw man. Matter (as a philosophical category) is defined in terms of abstractions made from our observations. They are the most abstract, and thus in some sense, the most “fundamental” entities which, being something derived from observation, are directly identifiable by their observational properties. There is no break between materialism and observability. Kastrup is too lazy to actually criticize materialism, so he just makes up ridiculous straw men arguments that materialists believe in some sort of reality that is fundamentally unobservable. He makes materialist philosophy seem ridiculous so he can knock down the straw man without having to actually address our beliefs, and then his sheep followers who never open a book on materialist philosophy in their lives assume his misrepresentation is accurate.
It actually doesn’t. Idealism doesn’t say things don’t exist.
It’s not actually a strawman, he’s getting at the flaw in materialism, namely the sense of solidity that the concept of matter seems to imply. In a sense your description of matter is part of the argument against materialism, the other is our senses.
There is a reason quantum mechanics poses serious challenges to materialism. I would also recommend looking into mereological nihilism:
Seems to me modern science has added a bit of nuance to that.
Specifically, consider the Krebs cycle, scientists have developed an exquisite understanding of its awesome abilities. It’s where chemistry and geology learned to harness electricity. Bio-electricity that in turn was utilized in countless ways to facilitate ever more complexity.
I would suggest the invention of the Krebs cycle here on Earth, is not only the origin of biology, but arguably it is the origin of the “vital force”. Not philosophical vitalism, the real physical biological force that animates life. Without the Krebs cycle not even pond scum would be possible.
You mentioned organic compounds, but those are simple elemental molecules clustered around a carbon backbone. Not life, simply building blocks. That is very different from the Krebs cycle harnessing electricity for countless subsequent biological functions.
These guys do a much more authoritative job of conveying the details and connections.
Nick Lane
Arthur Reber
My point is that philosophical conjecturing can never get beyond informed opining, based on thoughts and logic and talk and ego. I like facts.
While I’m looking at a world of physical biological evidence, explained through an evolutionary worldview, that demonstrates our connection to all the rest of life, and history.
As for us individual humans, I believe directly connecting our body to our evolution over these past half a billion years of developmental history. That’s worth a little philosophical attention.
Simply dismissing biology as the Easy Problem, as philosophers tend to do, won’t do anymore, evolutionary biology has provided the freak’n road map, its time to start using it.
A final point, Sciences can explain how our consciousness is but the Homo sapiens’ upper level awareness - with your body possessing myriad of “conscious” subsystems that do all the hard work of keeping our body alive & going, so that our mind has all this freedom for doing that fancy thinking, and narrating of our lives, as we live them.
Whats this got to do with in the dark’s claim the existence of material objects cannot be demonstrated and the scientific method cannot be verified scientifically?
Yeah. Good question. CC has been straddling the line between magic and reality for a couple years now, with comments like this
where it is all material forces, but they create something, which he has to put in quotes but, why? It’s not philosophy it’s real, but it’s somehow different or more than biology and if you feel that evolutionary force inside it does something to your thinking that connects you to billions of years of, I don’t know, I’ve tried, still not getting it.
Lately sentence structure is getting harder to follow. He believes in making this connection, but shouldn’t there be another clause? Something that says the connection will… do something… ?
I have no idea what points he is trying to make and why i should care. Is he insinuating that the vital force as he puts it, of the krebs cycle is a conscious force ?
I have a lot of notes, but I’ve never sorted it all out. I’ve read his blogs and they are an inspirational message of sorts, but when I give feedback or ask questions, things go South.
It seems like this forum is a lot of the same 2 people arguing back and forth in a kind of long running debate. What is the back story? Do you all know eachother in real life? Were you former colleagues in the same college department?
Intriguing.
Anyway, I will try to read the authors recommended. Basically I am smart enough to see where my thinking is illogical but I never had basic training in critical thinking at a young age so I tend to fall in the same traps of illogical thinking again and again and I see this in my mom and siblings to some degree as well even though we all love science.
First, I have had some really good conversations here and I hope membership comes back again.
I’m sure we sound like the academic version of an old married couple. If you use the suggested links that come up at the bottom of the page, you can find more lively conversation with more members. Go back before COVID. You’d think we would have increased traffic when everyone was online, but that didn’t happen. CC started his “body/brain mindscape/physical reality” thesis a few years ago. I have been trying to untangle it ever since. He doesn’t like my feedback, as you’ve seen. The user InTheDarkness kept us busy for a year or so, but he limits himself to the threads he starts, which is kind of good really.
Anyway, explaining the ups and downs of the popularity of a forum is not possible, as far as I can tell. CFI does not promote it or attempt to drive traffic to it. I like putting my own thoughts down, even though I know very people are seeing them. I try to let as much diversity of thought in, but the extremes are usually not interested in dialog, so they have to be silenced.
No, but it’s the first step. It is the point where chemistry learned to harness electricity to create biology. Fractals up from there to cells that are aware and intentional, to single cells that communicate and coordinate into neighborhoods, to simple creatures that changed the face of the world, to complex creatures and ever more awareness leading to consciousness.
It can’t be stated more clearly than that. If one finds that irrelevant, I can’t help but thing that someone, hasn’t spent much time, or interest, in keeping up with scientific biological developments these past decades.
“cutslikeaknife” if you are satisfied to simply dismissing what I’m trying to express.
Stay smug and satisfied.
But if you actually want to learn about what I’m talking about, then consider putting in some homework.
Start with Nick Lane’s epilogue to Transform, title “Self”
From the read the entire book, perhaps even his previous books that help set up the stage. If as another has told me, Nick Lane was too-long, irrelevant, ain’t got the time, besides there’s this awesome theological thesis I want to read instead.
I can’t help either of you.
“It’s not philosophy it’s real, but it’s somehow different or more than biology”
What a profound misunderstanding. Please go back and review my words -
It’s the Krebs cycle that created biology!
Of course, I sound like an idiot when it’s filtered through a mind that misrepresents what I’m actually writing down more often than not.
(PS. For what it’s worth I wrote Professor Lane, and have received his thumbs up, that I am, indeed, not misrepresenting the science, with that claim.)
“if you feel that evolutionary force inside it does something to your thinking that connects you to billions of years of, I don’t know …”
No it’s not about getting others to “feel that evolutionary force” (where … do you think I wrote that?)
It’s about appreciating the biological physical reality.
Namely that your body is an “incarnation” of your parents.
Or would someone like to correct me on that?
Your parents are in turn the “incarnation” * of their parents, and you twice removed, and so on.
Does this make sense so far?
This regression can be traced back a half billion years worth of one generation passing it’s legacy to the next generation, which was then tasked with turning that legacy into a heritage, one day at a time, and to pass along to the next generation.
Are you with me there, does that make sense?
If not why not?
NO woo there, simply intellectual appreciation for what was, and what we are made of.
it does something to your thinking that connects you to billions of years of, I don’t know ,
No buddy, that part about ‘connecting’ to deep time and billions of years of evolution requires years worth of proactive personal effort and learning.
My background includes a fun highlight, in the early nineties and after multiple viewings of the BBC series masterpiece, **David Attenborough’s Life on Earth I was in a situation where an empty room and 8’ long banquet tables were made available to me for a couple month, to draw out an Evolutionary Timeline, using that old fashioned matrix printer endless paper, like nearly 15’ worth.
Marking out a timeline, one millimeter for each million years. In my spare time over a couple months I filled it in with evolutionary highlights, as we knew them at the time. Nearing the last few hundred million years, I had to create a second line because the pace of events is a like hockey stick curve, and the post it notes were piling up and crowding each other. So I fancy I’ve spent a good deal more time digesting the information and absorbing its reality and implications, than most non-experts. Which tricks me into assuming others understand certain concepts, when they don’t. Another reason I keep pushing for feedback.
I don’t expect people to have developed my crowded mindscape of understanding around evolution. It was my passion, like others have their hobbies, mine was learning about myself and this Earth.
To be clear Lausten, I’ve never offering a magical path to feeling deep time, or the past billions of years unfolding upon this planet.
I’m simply trying to introduce the utter importance of the topic to understanding oneself. I’m trying to awaken awareness, while understanding requires one to do the homework for themselves.
How much time do you spend thinking about your body, its insides, how you move through life, how others interact with it, etc.?
Or struggling with who you are, compared to who you want to be, etc.?
Those are tough issues for people. I see a world of lost people out there trying to cling to stuff for comfort and to justify themselves - when there’s a universe of stuff inside being ignored, and an emptiness that’s eating them up.
Coming face to face with the reality that your body was built up, generation by generation, each new generation starting with a legacy, living their lives of trials and tribulations one day at a time. Taking that legacy and adding the heritage of their own accomplishments and handing it on to the next generation. For me the thought of being the product of specific lineage of 100% survivors is cool as heck, and has spiritual layers, beyond anything our melodramatic religions has offer me.
Plus it provides a much more sober foundation for understanding the complexity of my body, which is actually a spectrum of consciousness, that starts in your mitochondria and works up to cells, and systems, and organs, and senses, and brain, right up the complexity scale, getting more intricate as the organism gets more complex.
It’s this stuff that I can’t relate to. I’m sure the Krebs cycle created biology, I don’t argue those facts, but then you say I have to spend years of learning to make some sort of connection. You’re literally admitting that you can’t describe it.
One underlying question to this issue is: what is matter.
In the field of science that studies matter (physics) enormous progress has been made, getting rid of the mechanical materialist conception, and developed a much more richer description of how nature works on the lowest levels, esp. in the field of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory.
The picture described by quantum mechanics is however rather bizarre md counter intuitive, and involves concepts like the uncertainty principle (we can’t know exactly the position and momentum of a particle at the same time, the more preciese we measure one value, the less preciese comes the other value) and the famous particle-wave duality.
Contemorary logic would claim that something is either a wave or a particle, but not both, while quantum mechanics shows that both features of matter are present , and it depends on the experiment which feature we actually observe like in the double sllit experiment.
In the double slit experiment we can show that electrons can behave like waves (showing wave like features like interference), but as soon as we try to measure which path the electron took, the interference pattern disappears, and we get the particle like behaviour of the electron.
In the field of gravity, the development of general relativity does away wth the concept of gravity as a force, and instead insists that gravitation is explained by the curvature of spacetime itself, and that measurements of space and time are dependent on both the intertial reference frame and curvature of space-time, getting rid of the newtonian view of absolute space and time. And apart from cuvature of space, modern cosmology insists on the idea that space can also stretch causing light waves to redshift due the spacetime expansion over long cosmological distances.
As to this modern understanding, some idealist have argued that matter as such does no longer exist, and quantum mechanics has definately proven that physical reality is observer dependent. For example as exemplified in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. However that position is not uphold by many physicists, and instead of arguing that quantum mechanics shows that physical reality is observer dependent (dependent on consciousness) they argue that the measurement itself is a physical process which determines the outcome of a measurement, and does not depend on consciousness, and as such poses no opposition to the materialst point of view.
In current day physics however, the term matter has a different meaning then the philosophical term matter. Physics defines matter as composed of elementary particles (the ingredients of the Standard Model of physics) ie. leptons (the constituents of ordinary matter, like electrons, protons, neutrons) and bosons (force carying particles like photons resp. for the electro-magnetic phenomena, W and Z particles resp. for the electroweak force (nuclear decay), and gluons assoiated with the strong nuclear force (holding the nucleus together), and the Higgs boson (responsible for part of the masses of the other particles).
The Standard model might not be the complete picture, as some physical/cosmological theories require other particles to exist, for example the dark matter hypotheses (the anomalous rotatiion curves of galaxies, gravitational lensing of large objects like galaxy clusters) which tries to explain these phenomena at the basis of massive particles that do not interact with the electromagnetic force, but which do act gravitationally. Some other unknown ingredient of the universe is dark energy, which is the current explenation for the accelerated expansion of the universe.
But current physics has no understanding of what this dark energy in fact is, but its existence was postulated based on Einsteins equation of general relativity of a constant, called lambda, initially thought of by Einstein to keep the universe stable (not collapsing or expanding), but in current cosmological models used to explain the opposite - why the universe expansion accelerates. Roughly speaking, dark energy is a contant energy density with a negative pressure, causing gravity to act repulsively. Neither dark matter nor dark energy are understood very well, and might also indicate that the current understanding of gravity is somehow wrong, although it has proven very difficult to alter general relativity.
It is often argued that the current model of the universe proves that the materialist conception of nature is wrong, because it would somehow prove that matter itself is not eternal, and that matter, time and space have had some definate origin. But there is no reason to suppose that, and what we see on the scale of the observable universe is in fact analogous to what we see every where else, namely that every material structure is always in a state of change and development, nothing stays the same, and that also includes plamnets, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters etc.
Neither of them impose the need for some kind of absolute begin to space time and matter, and the observable universe we inhabit, which itself is assumed to be part of a much larger structuire, and since we see that it develops on large time scales (expansion of space time and the chemical compositon - the relative abundances of the elements in the universe change over time due to nucleosynthsis in stars) - which requires that the material structure (of which the observale universe is a part) has some begin in time and probably also an end, but that understandingb does not imply that the universe itself must have had a beginning in time and/or that reality itself is not material.
You’re right it’s too complicated for me, I can barely grasp of it myself, and I been learning about it my whole life! But from the outside looking in, from street level. An enthusiast, not one of the experts that you don’t seem interested in . . . .
The understanding is what matters to me, but apparently we got some ego v. ego thing going or something, and it all about you & me. That’s your game, not mine.
Okay and what was all that about? We’ve read all that stuff plenty of times before, nothing new. All that stuff is the product of our physical senses, body and brain creating thoughts and stories.
All of it unfolding within the bubble of our minds.
On the other side of that bubble is the actually physical matter world and the laws of nature, that created our planet billions of years before us and that will last billions of years after we are gone, even after we totally destroy the biosphere we were all born into and dependent on.
Our thoughts don’t affect that - no matter what any mathematical conjectures print out. Of course, with the help of our hands and tools we can turn thoughts into incredible material constructions, but once our thoughts become physical actions, then they join the physical world.
The current hubris blows me away - that I even have to argue about the important of the Appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide feels nuts.
The point is material conditions shape our consciousness . The material world which entails our environmental, social and economic realities influence how we perceive and interpret the world.
