Re: Cool visual illusion


"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43a5620a$0$16718$ed362ca5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> What you say makes no sense. There's only so much you can candycoat your
> opposition to a position.

Well, I'll consider the claim that I make no sense as soon as you explain
what "candycoat your opposition to a position" means and how that relates to
what we were talking about. Or, to put it more simply, I'll think about
whether or not I make no sense as soon as you start making sense. And your
digression here doesn't fit the bill.

Your extremely naive in your vision of what can be
> refuted. Consider your own position that the mental could trigger action
in
> the physical but that that would not make the mental physical.

You miss the point of the argument. The point was that the "mental" and the
"physical" might be able to interact without the "mental" having to be
physical. Whether or not this statement is true depends precisely on what
materialists mean by "physical".

> This amounts
> to the position that you will assign any property you wish to the mental,
> yet steadfastly refuse that it is mental.

Even if I correct what I can only assume is an error on your part and
substitute "physical" in for the last "mental" in that sentence, it doesn't
follow at all, and the comment only reveals that you didn't actually read
the position you claim I am positing. The position does not follow from the
first view, nor did I ever advocate that it did. The first position need
say nothing more than that the mental and the physical can interact without
the mental thus having to be physical in the same manner that light can
interact with my eyes without making my eyes light. The position you are
claiming is "not refutable" above does not follow from that. Not only that,
it is in fact refutable, since you would still have to have a property that
the mental has that the physical does not, or a property that the physical
has that the mental cannot. If you instead had all of the physical
properties and all of the mental properties as being identical, then they
would be the same thing and so there would be no distinction.

But if you had actually paid attention to that "position", you would have
noted that I actually allowed it to be "refuted", in a sense, in that when
Milan argued that the mental had to contain energy and since everything that
has energy is physical that would make the mental physical, I said that my
position was that if that was the sole defining quality of physical then I'd
concede that the "mental" is physical, but would still see no need to
concede that it was therefore simply the product of neurons. (I also
digressed into showing that that blanket statement still didn't refute an
energy-less mental interacting with the physical, while pointing out that I
think that it interacting with neurons -- critical for dualist theories of
mind -- WAS probably precluded by it).

However, your charge is much more fairly levelled against materialists than
dualists. Dualists generally have a VERY specific set of properties that
they assign to the mental, usually those that physcial things cannot have.
It's materialists that tend to define "physical" so loosely that anything
that they know exists is considered physical, so that they can claim that
there is nothing that is not physical to maintain their base assumption.
And if they want to claim that physcial means nothing more than "existent",
then I have no problem considering mind to be physical. It doesn't deal
with the claims and issues that myself and Descartes are concerned about, so
the debate doesn't end, but it would end the terminological wars.

> How can one refute something like
> that? At least 3 other people have said exactly the same thing about your
> insipid nonsense. But, of course, that's no "refutation."

It is not a refutation of my position to simply baldly assert that if you
can interact with the physical, you must be physical. First, you'd need a
definition of physical, and I already dealt with someone who insisted that
it was dualists who were trying to define that (we aren't, but are simply
using the definition materialists come up with). And then you'd need to see
what that definition actually means. So your assertion does not disprove or
refute anything, and if you truly believe that assertions with no evidence
or argumentation can refute points, then you sorely need training in ...
MANY areas.



.

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