News today isn't actually news, so much as blogging.That is the danger of understanding science from newspapers.
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News today isn't actually news, so much as blogging.That is the danger of understanding science from newspapers.
Materialism has only one problem, and that's idealism. They both paint a picture of the world, but from contrasting perspectives. They are a problem for each other, but for no one else (like science).What is the issue with joey's finding the nipple? How is that a problem for materialism?.
How so? How is idealism in any way a 'problem' for materialism?Materialism has only one problem, and that's idealism. They both paint a picture of the world, but from contrasting perspectives. They are a problem for each other, but for no one else (like science).
Perhaps materialism is only a problem for idealism. Have you thought of that? ...I thought not.How so? How is idealism in any way a 'problem' for materialism?
No, that was how I saw it exactly. A problem for idealism, but not materialism.Perhaps materialism is only a problem for idealism. Have you thought of that? ...I thought not.
They don't. Many theories in the social sciences, for example, aren't concerned with "material" phenomena and thus can be (and indeed must be) formulated independently of any assumptions about whether they are reducible to material explanations (i.e., whether or not economic booms or recessions can in principle be explained in terms of the dynamics of sub-atomic constituents). In fact, one of the most successful theories in physics (statistical mechanics) is explicitly immaterialistic in that it deals with systems that are mathematical idealizations of physical systems. Quantum mechanics, at least canonically, is even worse: a quantum system is a purely mathematical entity and quantum mechanics irreducibly statistical (the "systems" it describes aren't real but are vectors in an infinite-dimensional complex space that are "observed" by mathematical functions called Hermitian operators in order to relate particular experimental designs to measurements).
Of course, materialism is mostly a philosophical view, and we don't generally even use the term or consider the issues, as (unfortunately) too many of us have neither familiarity with nor training in philosophy or metaphysics, leaving such issues mostly to those with a scientific background but who are philosophers of science (or worse, philosophers without scientific backgrounds). For example:
"materialism is waning in a number of significant respects—one of which is the ever-growing number of major philosophers who reject materialism or at least have strong sympathies with anti-materialist views. It is of course commonly thought that over the course of the last sixty or so years materialism achieved hegemony in academic philosophy, and this is no doubt right by certain measures—for example, in absolute number of self-identified materialist philosophers of mind or in absolute number of books and journal articles defending materialism. It is therefore surprising that an examination of the major philosophers active in this period reveals that a majority, or something approaching a majority, either rejected materialism or had serious and specific doubts about its ultimate viability. The following is just a partial sampling of these philosophers, more or less in order of birth.
Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Alonzo Church, Kurt Gödel, Nelson Goodman, Paul Grice, Stuart Hampshire, Roderick Chisholm, Benson Mates, Peter Strawson, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, Jerrold Katz, Alvin Plantinga, Charles Parsons, Jaegwon Kim, George Myro, Thomas Nagel, Robert Adams, Hugh Mellor, Saul Kripke, Eli Hirsch, Ernest Sosa, Stephen Schiffer, Bas van Fraassen, John McDowell, Peter Unger, Derek Parfit, Crispin Wright, Laurence BonJour, Michael Jubien, Nancy Cartwright, Bob Hale, Kit Fine, Tyler Burge, Terence Horgan, Colin McGinn, Robert Brandom, Nathan Salmon, Joseph Levine, Timothy Williamson, Mark Johnston, Paul Boghossian, Stephen Yablo, Joseph Almog, Keith DeRose, Tim Crane, John Hawthorne, Richard Heck, David Chalmers."
from the editors' introduction to Coons, R. C., & Bealer, G. (Eds.) (2010). The Waning of Materialism. Oxford University Press.
True. For example, about the closest we can get in the sciences to “proof” is found in Bell’s inequality, which “proves” that if we find particular correlations between space-like separated measurements of systems than the only explanation is nonlocality. This, of course, isn’t true: one can abandon realism instead, but as that would be an abandonment of an assumption to all scientific theories very few opt for this (none that I know of are physicists). The problem is that nonlocality entails some "cause" behind the dynamics of systems that isn't "materialistic". Newtonian gravitation was nonlocal, but at least it was "something" (i.e., it was an effect which was so constant in its influence on mechanics that all motion could be explained in terms of this force as a singular effect). Nonlocality isn't a force, but a surprising and seemingly paradoxical feature of the universe that has no singular generalization the way Newtonian gravitation did. It can't be used to explain the dynamics of systems (Bell's inequality, for example, was derived from the mathematics of quantum mechanics, and first violated some 20 years later by Aspect et al.). It isn't even clear how to approach describing it (nonlocality is sometimes considered to be superluminal effects/processes, instead of effects/processes that occur in "no-time"). But there is no "material" explanation for it, and indeed it violates classical causation.
Classical physics, including the "law of gravity", is wrong. It is true that our incomplete knowledge of physics hasn't provided us with an adequate replacement, as gravitation per se doesn't exist in general relativity but we have haven't been able to incorporate GR into quantum physics. However, regardless of this lack of an adequate replacement, the "law of gravity" is still just plain wrong. It is not consistent with any theory of modern physics, as it predicts that every electron in the universe would plummet into the nuclei each orbits in an instant. Thus every second atoms continue to exist provide as many counter-examples to the "law of gravity" as there are atoms in the universe.
...that I linked to a free version of a peer-reviewed paper. Would you like more? A pure assertion is making so inane and ill-informed statement about complex systems reducing to algorithms as you did (which contradicts the foundations of relational biology) without evidence (and then thinking that producing a bunch of popular science garbage or other popular, non-technical literature is somehow indicative of anything other than an ability to use internet search engines). Even those scientists in relevant fields who believe that life and evolutionary processes can be reduced to computable models (algorithms are by definition computable) are well-aware that nothing like this is remotely closer to being shown.
No, they haven't. Not in the technical sense, as we remain unable to create complete models of single cells (which, as Robert Rosen and followers argued, is impossible; they are [M,R]-systems and closed to efficient causation).
No, they aren't. Computational neuroscience (part of what I do) involves models of neurons and neuronal networks, and in fact entire software environments like NEURON exist solely for creating neural models and whole fields in HCI involve the creation of Neuromorphic systems, BCIs, etc. But all these are MODELS or involve interfaces that are neither models, nor simulations, and tell us relatively little about the brain.
“We have demonstrated, for the first time to our knowledge, that computations performed and shaped by the dynamics of charges are radically different than computations in digital computers.”
Aur, D., & Jog, M. S. (2010). Neuroelectrodynamics: Understanding the Brain Language (Biomedical and Health Research Vol. 74). IOS Press.
Louie, A. H. (2005). Any material realization of the (M, R)-systems must have noncomputable models. Journal of integrative neuroscience, 4(04), 423-436.
"while leading computationalists have shown considerable ingenuity in elaborating and defending the conception of minds as computers, they have not always been attentive to the study of thought processes themselves. Their underlying attitude has been that no theoretical alternative is possible...The essays collected here are intended to demonstrate that this attitude is no longer justified."
Fetzer, J. H. (2001). Computers and cognition: Why minds are not machines (Studies in Cognitive Systems Vol. 25). Springer.
“The brain is not a computer, nor is the world an unambiguous piece of tape defining an effective procedure and constituting “symbolic information.” Such a selectional brain system is endlessly more responsive and plastic than a coded system.”
Edelman, G. M. (1999). Building a Picture of the Brain. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 882(1), 68-89.
“no formal system is able to generate anything even remotely mind-like. The asymmetry between the brain and the computer is complete, all comparisons are flawed, and the idea of a computer-generated consciousness is nonsense.”
Torey, Z. (2009). The crucible of consciousness: An integrated theory of mind and brain. Cambridge: MIT press.
“To understand why neurons and computers are fundamentally different, we must bear in mind that modern computers are algorithmic, whereas the brain and neurons are not.”
Tse, P. (2013). The neural basis of free will: Criterial causation. Mit Press.
“The free will theorem supports a powerful challenge to the scientific credentials of determinism, by showing, on certain well-supported assumptions, that two cornerstones of contemporary science, namely (1) acceptance of the scientific method as a reliable way of finding out about the world, and (2) relativity theory’s exclusion of faster-than-light transmission of information, taken together, conflict with determinism in both its versions. Belief in determinism may thus come to be seen as notably unscientific.”
Hodgson, D. (2012). Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will (Philosophy of Mind). Oxford University Press.
“The view that the brain does not compute Turing-computable-functions is still a form of wide mechanism in Copeland’s sense, but it is more encompassing than Copeland’s, because it includes both Copeland’s hypercomputationalism and the view that mental capacities are not explained by neural computations but by neural processes that are not computational. Perhaps brains are simply not computing mechanisms but some other kinds of mechanisms. This view fits well with contemporary theoretical neuroscience, where much of the most rigorous and sophisticated work assigns no explanatory role to computation”
Piccinini, G. (2007). Computationalism, the Church–Turing thesis, and the Church–Turing fallacy. Synthese, 154(1), 97-120.
“Referring to the ‘widespread belief ... in many scientific circles ... that the brain is a computer,’ neurobiologist Gerald Edelman (2006) insists that ‘this belief is mistaken,’ for a number of reasons, principal among which are that ‘the brain does not operate by logical rules’ (p. 21). Jerome Bruner (1996), a founder of cognitive science itself, yet, coincidentally, a key figure in the emergence of narrative psychology, challenges the ability of ‘informationprocessing’ to account for ‘the messy, ambiguous, and context-sensitive processes of meaning-making’ (p. 5). Psychologist Daniel Goleman (1995), author of the popular book Emotional Intelligence, asserts that cognitive scientists have been so ‘seduced by the computer as the operative model of mind’ (pp. 40f.) that they have forgotten that, ‘in reality, the brain’s wetware is awash in a messy, pulsating puddle of neurochemicals’ (p. 40f.) which is ‘nothing like the sanitized, orderly silicon that has spawned the guiding metaphor for mind’ (pp. 40–41).”
Randall, W. L. (2007). From Computer to Compost: Rethinking Our Metaphors for Memory. Theory & psychology, 17(5), 611-633.
“Semantic ambiguity exists in real-world processes of life and mind...Thus, it is feasible to rationally investigate a real-world semantic process, such as the interaction between synaptic communication and NDN, by placing the process into a modeling relation with an impredicative model, such as a hyperset process, and learn novel (albeit qualitative rather than quantitative) things about the real-world process by asking questions about the model.
What is not feasible is serious investigation of such processes by algorithmic computation. Algorithms disallow internal semantics, and specifically prohibit ambiguity. In other words, in a fundamental manner, the entailment structures of algorithms differ from the entailment structures of processes of life and mind. Thus, algorithmic descriptions of such processes are superficial, capturing the incidental syntax but not the essential semantics...
No computer program, no matter how cleverly designed, has an entailment structure like a mind, or even a prion.”
Kercel, S. W. (2003, June). Softer than soft computing. In Soft Computing in Industrial Applications, 2003. SMCia/03. Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE International Workshop on (pp. 27-32). IEEE.
“Today’s programs—at best—solve specific problems. Where humans have broad and flexible capabilities, computers do not.
Perhaps we’ve been going about it in the wrong way. For 50 years, computer scientists have been trying to make computers intelligent while mostly ignoring the one thing that is intelligent: the human brain. Even so-called neural network programming techniques take as their starting point a highly simplistic view of how the brain operates.”
Hawkins, J. (2007). Why Can't a Computer be more Like a Brain?. Spectrum, IEEE, 44(4), 21-26.
“there is no evidence for a computer program consisting of effective procedures that would control a brain’s input, output, and behavior. Artificial intelligence doesn’t work in real brains. There is no logic and no precise clock governing the outputs of our brains no matter how regular they may appear.”
Edelman, G. M. (2006). Second nature: Brain science and human knowledge. Yale University Press.
"the brain is not a computer, yet it manipulates information...while von Neumann and others invented computers with mimicking the brain in mind (von Neumann 1958), the brain does not appear to behave as a Turing Machine "
Danchin, A. (2009). Information of the chassis and information of the program in synthetic cells. Systems and synthetic biology, 3(1-4), 125-134.
“Determinism would be the crucial issue if the early modern atomist–reductionist picture were true. That is, if the causal capacities of complex entities were nothing but the combined causal effects if the entities’ constituents, and if the most basic constituents operated according to deterministic laws, then it would indeed seem to be the case that humans could do nothing other than what their atoms, in aggregate, do…
We have argued that this picture is wrong on three counts. First, it is widely accepted that the ‘‘atoms’’ (in the philosophical sense) do not behave deterministically. Second, it is becoming more and more widely recognized that complex dynamical systems can exhibit new sorts of causal capacities not found at the level of their constituents. We have emphasized, among these, sentience, goal seeking, consciousness, acting for a reason, and self-evaluation. Third, we have argued that higher-level systems exert downward effects on their constituents via selection among possibilities generated randomly, probabilistically, or according to deterministic lower-level laws.”
Murphy, N., Brown, W.S (2007). Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. Oxford University Press.
How does material defeat objective thought, what does that even mean? You seem to have some assertions about consciousness too, that it exists as this static object of maximum choice and free will. But most of the stuff we do is hardly our decision. You dont get to choose which thoughts you think, so at best you select between random thoughts our brains produce. And your thoughts determine your existence pretty much. and then consider the fact that most of what you do is involuntary. So any choice we actually have is extremely limited. And theres no reason why consciousness couldnt be just an advanced illusion resulting from self awareness and the automated systems of neural circuits in our head. We may also be composed of a timeline of different conscioisnesses too. For instance if you were created 5 seconds ago with all the memories of your previous life, then you would think you had been conscious when you actually Hadnt. So you could be a different consciousness each second. The point is that youre making claims assuming you know what cinsciousness is when no one doesMy understanding is simple. If our consciousness is a product of material interactions then how can we claim to be equipped for objective thought? The same is true for science itself.
If our awareness arose from some material interactions, then we are not masters of our own mind (which of course is true of most of us who actually think and act unconsciously).
On the other hand, if we have any hope of breaking free of our unconscious actions and their effects it is because our source of awareness is unborn.
Whether the source of our awareness is material or non material is actually a bad question, since these categories themselves are known in awareness only.
The consciousness is a given category. It gets validated even while we deny it. Ultimately, if some day a machine passes the Turing test, a conscious person will have to know and certify that. There is no way that we can ever deny our own awareness.
Creationism has a conceptual scheme integrating fact and opinion in distinct categories. Creationism actually has argumentation going for it.
You only write arbitrary nonsense.
"Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist."
Eliminative Materialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Idealism has no problem with these common sense ideas not existing--nothing truly exists in that sense, and so everything exists (existentialism).
Eliminative materialism, on the other hand, would have us claim mental states to be something other than what they might otherwise be.
I should have explained, or used an explanation from a scientific/scholarly source, on the problems posed to materialism by certain theories in, and indeed approaches to, biology, particularly as I mentioned relational biology and referred to a paper by one of Rosen's students in my first response. Hopefully this is concise and comprehensive enough to do. Consider a model, simulation, or similar "realization" of a cell and the process of metabolic-repair, and let f: A→B be a function
"where f is the process that takes input A and output B...The system Rosen uses for an example is the Metabolism-Repair or [M,R] system. The process, f, in this case stands for the entire metabolism goin on in an organism...The transition, f, which is being called metabolism, is a mapping taking some set of metabolites, A, into some set of products, B. What are the members of A? Really everything in the organism has to be included in A, and there has to be an implicit agreement that at least some of the members of A can enter the organism from its environment. What are the members of B? Many, if not all, of the memebers of A since the transitions in the reduced system are all strung together in the many intricate patterns or networks that make up the organism's metabolism. It also must be true that some members of B leave the organism as products of metabolism...In the context developed so far, the mapping, f, has a very special nature. It is a functional component of the system we are developing. A functional component has many interesting attributes. First of all, it exists independent of the material parts that make it possible. Reductionism has taught us that every thing in a real system can be expressed as a collection of material parts. This is not so in the case of functional components...Fragmentability is the aspect of systems that can be reduced to their material parts leaving recognizable material entities as the result. A system is not fragmentable is reducing it to its parts destroys something essential about that system. Since the crux of understanding a complex system had to do with identifying the context dependent functional components, they are by definition, not fragmentable". (pp.103-108; emphasis added; italics in original)
Mikulecky, D. C. (2005). The Circle That Never Ends: Can Complexity be Made Simple? In D. Bonchev & D. H. Rouvray (Eds.). Complexity in Chemistry, Biology, and Ecology (Mathematical and Computational Chemistry). Springer.
The topic is on materialism. I addressed that topic both directly and indirectly (the latter via addressing would-be evidence for the view that, whether they are or not, turn out to be wrong). I have found, though, that for you sometimes it seems "the topic at hand" tends to be "the topic as I conceptualize it and thus anything which deviates from my addressing those aspects of it that are part of my perspective are 'off-topic'". Earlier you mentioned in a response to another that nonlocality (phrased specifically in terms of paired-photons, which is a particular and the oldest demonstrations of violations to Bell's inequality) are irrelevant because you (correctly) asserted that photons can't "know' anything. But the problem posed by nonlocality to materialism is not based upon conscious agents. It is based on a violation of causality that has no material explanation, incarnation, manifestation, or realization, yet exists. In fact, problems such as this are considered by some to be so problematic as to challenge realism, which is (unlike determinism) required for materialism. See e.g.,
Busch, P., & Jaeger, G. (2010). Unsharp quantum reality. Foundations of Physics, 40(9-10), 1341-1367.
Leggett, A. J. (2008). Realism and the physical world. Reports on Progress in Physics, 71(2), 022001.
Pusey, M. F., Barrett, J., & Rudolph, T. (2012). On the reality of the quantum state. Nature Physics, 8(6), 475-478.
Tommasini, D. (2002). Reality, measurement and locality in Quantum Field Theory. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2002(07), 039.
I don't think so, and this may be a topic for a future thread. Common sense is literally "the sense of the commoner," or the person averagely engaged in life. It cannot be wrong by virtue of being something that transcends the individual, and the individual knows in what sense he means things.Common sense is frequently wrong because it assumes you know what sense is.
"Learning" may indeed be the constant change of what is common sense--learning introduces something radical, something new. That something becomes newly common.We constantly change what common sense is in science, its called learning as lawrence krauss says. It could be said that its common sense that something cant be in two places in once, but electrons often are.
It's not a fallacy, though, to say that when you experience something you understand what you experienced. You understand precisely that much. I don't know what a limbic system is, but I understand anger.And its a fallacy to say that because you experience something it means you understand it functionally. Just because you feel anger doesnt mean you understand the limbic system. Similarly just because you experience consciousness doesnt mean you understand what consciousness is.
Apparently I wasn't clear. It isn't that you don't provide enough sources. It's that your sources are worthless. Popular science is rarely of value, and at best it can serve to educate one about the actual scientific literature, not serve as an indication of the state of any field.one of the things you accuse me of, like not providing enough sources
Unless, of course, one works in the field or keeps up with it.it's very difficult to go and cite a bunch of sources beyond google
Materialism isn't a theory. It's a philosophical/metaphysical perspective or stance. Assuming it is true, it must be, and assuming it false, there isn't any good epistemic justification for it. Assuming nothing (which is technically impossible), materialism led to one of the greatest contradictions in the history of science, the biggest ontological problem in the history of science, and a current paradox. Einstein spent much of his career trying to show that the problem was with physical theory and most famously by showing that, assuming the problem was "real", this led to clear, physical impossibilities. Then those impossibilities were empirically realized.Even if it was a weak position you would have tobshow how an alternative was superior or rather the best out of two crummy theories.
No, as 1) the laws of physics include things we know are wrong and 2) the difference between statistical physics and the irreducibly statistical nature of quantum theory which is not a statistical physics. Quantum mechanics posits "physical" systems that exist only in a mathematical (infinite-dimensional) space, while quantum field theory is even worse (the equations that govern systems in quantum mechanics can't allow for relativistic effects, and the simplistic Hilbert space or functional spaces in general are inadequate). Thus the standard model of particle physics doesn't describe particles but mathematical entities called "fields", the quantum-mechanical "observable" operators are replaced by with the topologies of field theories (complete with tensors, quantum algebras, etc.), but most importantly are even more removed from a connection to anything material.You seem to think that the laws of physics that deal with probability distributions are somehow a point against materialism.
There are no particles, at least according to quantum theory (including modern particle physics). It's just a misnomer.Materialism as i have postulated throughout this thread is just that all the phenomena we observe can be explained by the positions and configurations of particles as well as all the force carriers and the laws that correspond to them
They describe physical reality as consisting of things like probability functions. The "laws" of modern physics don't provide us with any apparatus, linguistic or otherwise, to relate fundamental physical theories to "physical" reality.in other words the laws of physics which include happen to include probabilities and stastics.
Which was what scientists since Newton held to be true: the nonlocality of classical magnetism was not just seriously problematic for physicists and philosophers, but a primary motivation for Einstein's relativity.Or it would be like saying magnetic fields disprove materislism becsuse they consist of force carriers which arent composed of matter themselves
Then it's obviously flaccid, as these "laws" are not held to be true by any competent scientist. Luckily, materialism isn't so flismsy as to require a misunderstanding of modern physics be true.But materialism has to obciously include the laws that material follow or else its entirely flaccid.
If you could tell us neuroscientists how, that would be great.Social sciences can be fundamentally reduced to material strutures in the brain
Utterly irrelevant, and demonstrably so (mathematically).Lets address simulated consciousness though. One major flaw of your argument is that there are multiple kinds of computers and computer architectures.
It requires realism. "Local realism" is just another way of saying "realism". Also, measurements are never made at the microscopic level (as problem so fundamental it's actually called the measurement problem). However, if you can't tell me how modern physics relates to the "material" other than by vague and inaccurate descriptions that anybody with access to Wikipedia could manage, then essentially your perspective is simply a collection of misunderstandings regarding the sciences, from physics to neuroscience.I think again you're reflecting a naive understanding of materialism.
Quantum non locality shows that measurements made at the microscopic level defy local realism supported by classical physics. But in no way does materialism rely on determinism or classical physics.
Which is what?It just relies on material
It doesn't need to be independent, just ontological. If a functional property/process exists (is ontological rather than some epistemic component of a model that we used for simplicity or understanding), it is not a material entity. Materialism holds that everything is reducible to the material (the way e.g., all waves were reducible to fluctuations in physical systems in classical physics). There is no room for an ontological function, yet we cannot reduce cellular processes to material parts without relying on such an entity.I simply reject the assertion that a functional component exists independently of it's material parts.
The problem is that the dynamics of the atoms and molecules require the mapping to have causal efficacy or, more simply, to interact causally with the material without being material. Materialism doesn't admit such interactions.the mapping in f could not exist without atoms and molecules.
Apparently I wasn't clear. It isn't that you don't provide enough sources. It's that your sources are worthless. Popular science is rarely of value, and at best it can serve to educate one about the actual scientific literature, not serve as an indication of the state of any field.
Unless, of course, one works in the field or keeps up with it.
Materialism isn't a theory. It's a philosophical/metaphysical perspective or stance. Assuming it is true, it must be, and assuming it false, there isn't any good epistemic justification for it. Assuming nothing (which is technically impossible), materialism led to one of the greatest contradictions in the history of science, the biggest ontological problem in the history of science, and a current paradox. Einstein spent much of his career trying to show that the problem was with physical theory and most famously by showing that, assuming the problem was "real", this led to clear, physical impossibilities. Then those impossibilities were empirically realized.
No, as 1) the laws of physics include things we know are wrong and 2) the difference between statistical physics and the irreducibly statistical nature of quantum theory which is not a statistical physics. Quantum mechanics posits "physical" systems that exist only in a mathematical (infinite-dimensional) space, while quantum field theory is even worse (the equations that govern systems in quantum mechanics can't allow for relativistic effects, and the simplistic Hilbert space or functional spaces in general are inadequate). Thus the standard model of particle physics doesn't describe particles but mathematical entities called "fields", the quantum-mechanical "observable" operators are replaced by with the topologies of field theories (complete with tensors, quantum algebras, etc.), but most importantly are even more removed from a connection to anything material.
There are no particles, at least according to quantum theory (including modern particle physics). It's just a misnomer.
They describe physical reality as consisting of things like probability functions. The "laws" of modern physics don't provide us with any apparatus, linguistic or otherwise, to relate fundamental physical theories to "physical" reality.
Which was what scientists since Newton held to be true: the nonlocality of classical magnetism was not just seriously problematic for physicists and philosophers, but a primary motivation for Einstein's relativity.
Then it's obviously flaccid, as these "laws" are not held to be true by any competent scientist. Luckily, materialism isn't so flismsy as to require a misunderstanding of modern physics be true.
If you could tell us neuroscientists how, that would be great.
Utterly irrelevant, and demonstrably so (mathematically).
Materialism isn't a theory, so there are no alternative theories.first I'm still waiting for any alternative theory you could propose that would be superior.
Materialism isn't a theory, so there are no alternative theories.
In the sciences, theories serve as frameworks for the development and empirical testing of hypotheses. Materialism is a fundamental assumption about the nature of reality itself. It is a much a theory as "religion", "realism", "ontology", etc. It is completely untestable, because any test that might serve as confirmation must assume materialism to be true.When you make a claim like that perhaps you should provide some rationale