Tag Archives: physicalism
Yesterday I re-posted (with a few small edits) a Substack post from last September about my basic metaphysical stance: physicalism and realism. I’d posted here about the latter back in 2018 [see Realism], but the more recent Substack post reflects eight more years of thought on the matter.
My view has evolved some without really changing. I’m still committed to physicalism and realism. Nothing I’ve learned or heard argued has persuaded me towards idealism or anti-realism.
In this re-post I’m focusing on a couple of philosophical topics that have gotten a little under my skin:
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4 Comments | tags: color, idealism, physicalism, realism | posted in Philosophy, Science
During the two years that I was active on Substack I never managed to quite find my “voice” there. I never fixed on exactly what I wanted my Substack blog to be beyond being just a version of this one. That ended up feeling like a dilution.
With a view towards re-concentrating my efforts, I decided to reprise (with minor edits) some of my Substack posts here. I started this last month with The Noise is Deafening, and I’ve got two more somewhat related posts for this week.
The first one is an elucidation of my basic metaphysical stance:
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3 Comments | tags: idealism, physicalism, realism | posted in Philosophy, Science
The ideas of free will, causality, and determinism, often factor into discussions about religion, morality, society, consciousness, or life in general. The first and last of these ideas seem at odds; if the world is strictly determined, there can be no free will.
But we are confronted with the appearance of free will — choices we make appear to affect the future. Even choosing not to make choices seems to affect our future. If reality is just a ride on fixed rails, then all that choosing must be a trick our brains play.
These questions are central to lives, but answers have remained elusive, in part from differing views of what the key ideas even mean.
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23 Comments | tags: causal determinism, causal system, causality, determinism, deterministic, free will, physical determinism, physical system, physicalism, quantum physics | posted in Opinion, Philosophy
Last week we took a look at a simple computer software model of a human brain. (We discovered that it was big, requiring dozens of petabytes!) One goal of such models is replicating consciousness — a human mind. That can involve creating a (potentially superior) new mind or uploading an existing human mind (a very different goal).
Now that we’ve explored the basics of calculation, code (software), computers, and (computer software) models, we’re ready to explore what’s involved in attempting to model a (human) mind.
I’m dividing the possibilities into four basic levels.
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18 Comments | tags: AI, algorithm, brain, computationalism, computer model, computer program, consciousness, enchanted loom, human brain, human consciousness, human mind, Isaac Asimov, mind, physicalism, positronic brain, qualia, René Descartes | posted in Computers
One of the things I mentioned in my recent Material Disbelief post was that, if you accept everything physics has discovered in the last 100 years or so — and if you believe in philosophical materialism — you are faced with the very strong possibility that all of reality is some sort of simulation or machine process.
Not only does all the evidence, as well as some basic logic, seem to point in that direction, but as a model of reality it provides easy answers to many of the conundrums of modern physics (e.g. Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” and some basic questions regarding the Big Bang).
Today I want to lay out the details of the arguments for this.
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31 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, Bell's Theorem, DisneyQuest, DNA, EPR paper, Leopold Kronecker, materialism, metaphysics, Philosophical materialism, physicalism, reality, simulations, virtual reality, Zeno's paradoxes | posted in Physics
Two things collided. I saw Leon Wieseltier on The Colbert Report and was enthralled by his view of modern social life. That moved a friend of mine to look for other YouTube videos of Wieseltier. She posted a good one that then moved me to look at more. Bottom line, I ended up watching a fair bit of the man last week. Still enthralled.
Meanwhile, after my last post about religion and atheism, a reader commented that she found the article so balanced she couldn’t tell on which side I stood. As an agnostic, that’s the goal. Yet, in one of the videos, Wieseltier expresses an idea that really grabbed me.
It has to do with on which side of what line I stand.
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57 Comments | tags: Dualism, Leon Wieseltier, materialism, Monism, Philosophical materialism, physicalism, reality, spirituality, teleology, The Colbert Report, virtual reality | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
Despite the title, this post isn’t as strongly related to the previous three as the naming convention suggests. I don’t really have much to say about religious predestination. If anything, my views on spirituality are key to a belief in free will and choice. The religion I was raised in seems (at least to my eye) quite clear that we are allowed to choose our actions.
The connection to those other posts lies in picking up the thread of physical determinism — normally a necessarily atheist point of view — and doing a riff on religion, spirituality and atheism. This is the post I started to write last Sunday when my mind took off in a completely different direction.
This time I’m going to try sticking to the subject!
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66 Comments | tags: atheism, atheists, beliefs, Dawkins Scale, deism, Dogma (movie), God, Grand Canyon (movie), ideas and beliefs, materialism, physicalism, science and spirituality, Spinoza, spirituality, theism | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
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