On 7/19/2019 3:18 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:
...
You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without
using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the
possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the
other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are
bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow
that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave
with modern language.
Telmo.
I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that
there is something other than matter) came to be.
The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine
you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be
useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math
is as good as any, for part of that anyway.
The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter.
Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?
It came from death; from observing that there was no difference between
a dead man and that same man who was alive a few minutes ago except that
the former was missing something, some animation, some spirit, some
magic sauce. And this thing seemed to go temporarily missing if you
took a blow to the head. It didn't seem to be matter because it
couldn't be detected leaving the body at death. And yet you could lie
perfectly still and still have this internal narrative and feelings.
Brent
*The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental
(and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material
home.*
@pphilipthrift
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