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Not trying to start a dust up with you Constance, but you have a habit of throwing out extensive lists of papers for everyone to read, insist everyone read them all before you explain what it is you're trying to get at, and then even if people do read them, you tell them they got the point...

That's a very good point actually, and maybe why we're getting fussed by it Soupie. Here's my working definition: Physical universe: the set of things that contain matter, energy and spacetime, and their motion and interactions. The non-physical universe would be the set of things that do not...

I guarantee that if humanity doesn't extinguish itself, we'll continue to discover new fundamental laws of nature. That does not imply that the physical isn't all there is. Imperfect knowledge or understanding doesn't imply dualism. Just because you don't understand the causality doesn't mean...

I used to create expert systems and complex state machines for a living. "I am a Strange Loop" is one of my favorite books. I fully understand that complex systems and their interactions can create emergent behaviors that cannot be predicted, and cannot be reduced down to their component parts...

Not when it comes to dualism. Emergence from a physical process means that it's all physical. You can't create a physical process that has a non-physical outcome. It's turtles all the way down. Right. I'm with you. Except that process itself needs to be a physical one. The laws of...

Emergence from a physical process would be by definition itself a physical process. Therefore, there would be no dualism in play. Bosons emerge from a physical process, and they themselves are physical, even though they have zero mass. For example. https://home.cern/science/physics/higgs-boson...

Anybody else confused as hell at all the hullaballoo around 'the Debrief' article? https://www.thedebrief.org/fast-movers-and-transmedium-vehicles-the-pentagons-uap-task-force The cell phone picture looks fairly clearly like a high altitude balloon, and everything else is just a report of other...

Can you say more about that? Love the rest.

Forgive me if I'm being pedantic, but what's the functional difference between supernatural dualism and any other kind of dualism? I view them as somewhat abstractly equivalent. There's an attempt being made to approach the hard problem of consciousness by a non-physical process. That could be...

You also haven’t explained why a non-material explanation for consciousness solves anything, or is testable. A lack of an answer doesn’t imply that materialism is wrong. Godel’s inconsistency theorem didn’t invalidate math, for example. All he showed is that there are mathematical truths that...

Ah ok sure. We know the physical universe is a thing. It is a whole and complete thing. Down to being somewhat isotropic. There’s no need to have a non-physical force describe the smallest particle’s behaviour as well as we know. To posit a non-physical thing - say ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ or...

I struggle with that line of thinking. Let's use inertia as an example. Inertia is correlated with mass and velocity. Both are relativistic. We know the faster something goes, and the more mass that something has, the more inertia it has as a correlated consequence. By your line of thinking...

Been re-watching all the Bonds in order... and man, as hard as Lazenby tried, he just didn't have the swagger or the looks to compete with Connery. It was a decent movie, but it just didn't feel like a Bond one. Especially with that groaner line 'the other guy didn't have these problems.'

Ah ok cool! Have a good one!

That does not address the question at all.

Not sure it’s a ‘dumb faith’ to side with physicalism. Here’s my logic: 1. there’s no evidence for a non-physical universe (that I’m aware of). 2. if there were a non-physical universe, and our mind exists in that universe, then it has to interact with the physical universe to do stuff. That...

The how is easy. You can easily trigger a mental image via a physical process. The why is an interesting process. Can you say more?

I don't recall making such an assertion (but I've been away a while, apologies). Again, you seem to be responding to something else. I was asking you for evidence of your assertion. Instead, you are criticizing me for something else? Am I missing something?

One can easily trigger a program - a neural network, say - to 'entertain a mental image.' I can't say how (or if) that neural network experiences it, but the process of triggering such an event is straightforward. You can also trigger all kinds of 'mental images' by poking electrodes into...

It was actually one of my junior high school teachers that was into philosophy, and despised dualism. He made a very simple point: if the spirit is something other than physical, then how does it trigger our physical body to do stuff? That information should be measurable by definition because...