Search results

  1. Ian Wardell

    Matthew Alper, Have Skeptics Lost Their Edge? |448|

    Matthew Alper said: Dementia is due to an impaired brain. Now, if there is an afterlife, the self/soul would have to be an entirely distinct entity from the brain. Hence, the impaired brain would be an irrelevance to our cognitive abilities. Consider if one has on a pair of eyeglasses. The...
  2. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    This is eating too much of my time up. I should have just posted my essay and leave it at that. Final clarification and I won't be posting again, or at least not for a couple of days. I have work to do. Reductive materialism holds that the mental is reducible to the physical (not the...
  3. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    Reading these comments . . . I really don't know where to start... Mainly the comments by malf. Especially asinine comment such as: It's the familiar "the mental cannot possibly affect the material" which materialists continually trot out time after time after time, even professional...
  4. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    I don't see any problem with my further clarifications. If our thinking is a physical process, then it is constrained along certain channels eg so that the principle of causal closure is satisfied. But our reasoning has to flow from our chain of understanding developed in thinking things...
  5. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    It's not a scientific explanation of course. That would be jumping the gun since we would need science to accommodate consciousness first in its world picture. I talk about this in another blog entry: Neither Modern Materialism nor Science as currently conceived can explain Consciousness
  6. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    Or if you mean Malf, that it's scientifically inexplicable how the mental can affect the physical, then I would say of course it is since science as currently conceived wholly leaves out the existence of consciousness in its description of reality. What we can be sure of though is that...
  7. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    I can make absolutely no sense of anything you say Malf. Why not ask how a billiard ball can impact another billiard ball when they collide? Or why objects don't fall upwards? Or indeed any such metaphysical question pertaining to why? I don't think I should have bothered coming on here...
  8. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    Why doesn't he ask how the physical can impact the physical? Or the mental impact the mental? Or the physical can impact the mental? Is a thought impacting the physical special in some way? How so?
  9. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    No, my blog entry demonstrates a reductio ad absurdum of materialism. Since our consciousness is necessarily causally efficacious, then materialism is false. Supposing that brain processes are identical to reasoning doesn't help. I shouldn't have to keep repeating myself. You need to read my...
  10. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    How could it conceivably be incoherent? Anyway, regardless of whether it is coherent or not, we know it happens. I think and my physical body speaks or types.
  11. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    Causal closure means I can't just do anything, but must follow a prescribed path. Just like the Earth does as it orbits the Sun. But at any moment in time I have the capacity to act in numerous ways. Seemingly unlike the moon as it orbits the Earth. And we have to have such freedom in order...
  12. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    But reasoning can't equal brain processes since brain processes are dictated by impersonal physical laws, and reasons, or any chain of thought, or any voluntary behaviour, is not.
  13. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    Actually, I've just come to a realisation. This whole misunderstanding arises because materialists conflate the inevitability of specific behaviour under physical laws with the inevitability of specific behaviour due to the fact people will invariably behave the same way under specific...
  14. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    To clarify my previous post, people might want to read my blog entry on free will: Free will and the notion of "could have"
  15. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    It doesn't matter if my behaviour is predictable. Even if my behaviour is entirely predictable. You can even draw up laws -- eg on spotting a £10 note on the pavement, Ian will stoop down and pick it up and stuff it in his pocket. But an essential notion of materialism is causal closure. I...
  16. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    I'm not sure why this conversation is going off on a tangent. I'm wondering if there's anything wrong with the argument as I outline it on my blog.
  17. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    Brain processes are like any other physical processes e.g the Earth orbiting the Sun. Physical processes are immutable. But our thoughts have a freedom and can chop and change with our will, as well as our overt behaviour. If our thoughts were like the Earth orbiting the sun, then our...
  18. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    It remains the case that intentions, desires, plans are not required, the physical explanation all by itself suffices. So if consciousness were wholly absent from the physical world and we were all p-zombies, we would apparently think, and behave precisely the same. But, absent any reasoning...
  19. Ian Wardell

    Materialism/Physicalism is incompatible with our ability to reason

    I was talking about Gualtiero Piccinini supposedly refuting the idea that mental events are metaphysically independent of brain events.
Back
Top