On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 4:51:22 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > > > 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 > - > > Epicurus was an advancement soon forgotten:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/ Had a description of nature based on atomistic materialism, and a naturalistic account of evolution. On the basis of a radical materialism which dispensed with transcendent entities such as the Platonic Ideas or Forms, he could disprove the possibility of the soul’s survival after death, and hence the prospect of punishment in the afterlife. Soul atoms are particularly fine and are distributed throughout the body, and it is by means of them that we have sensations and the experience of pain and pleasure. Body without soul atoms is unconscious and inert, and when the atoms of the body are disarranged so that it can no longer support conscious life, the soul atoms are scattered and no longer retain the capacity for sensation. @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/5241f768-ba25-4348-b3e7-0cd488f9439b%40googlegroups.com.
