>Oh dear. More quantum mumbo jumbo and obvious fallacy.
If you were a philosopher you could actually refute my so-called fallacies with logic rather than insults :\
>1. Quantum mechanics tells us that matter obeys the Schrodinger equation and has wave properties. Therefore, the classical definition of matter is slightly wrong. This in no way implies that matter doesn't exist.
It's not "slightly wrong"... it's TOTALLY wrong. Schrodinger's cat is completely incompatible with classical materialism. You can't just be "slightly wrong" at this.
>You're right that "matter" as imagined by many classical scientists doesn't exist (because they didn't fully understand it), but you're ignoring the fact that it obviously still exists independently of how classical scientists imagined it to work.
It doesn't exist but it obviously exists???
It either exists or it doesn't, or we don't know either way. "Matter" is no longer treated by science, the concept has been dropped by physics. Science has "mass" but this mass behaves nothing like "matter."
>Quantum (in)determinism is still up in the air. We don't know exactly how it works. Anyone who uses it for philosophical arguments is probably not making a good argument.
Tell that to every physicists who speaks in public then. All of them try to reason about quantum physics and this is a major area of interest. I agree that it is "up in the air" but... philosophy has ALWAYS been about stuff that is up in the air. So to say that quantum physics is somehow off-limits to philosophical argument is just absurd.
>In what way do bosons refute materialism? Is helium-4 immaterial? Obviously not. I can hold it in a bottle. I can feel it on my skin. I can fill my lungs with this boson and talk in a squeaky voice.
Well you are just flat out not familiar with the standard philosophical canon, because none of those empirical phenomena depend on matter to be explained. They can all be explained by, for instance, empiricist idealists like Berkeley. No empiricist is claiming that sense perceptions don't exist. We are claiming that sense perceptions are not underpinned or explained by matter, that is to say, we are saying that materialism does not actually explain those things at all and that materialism can't be right. Materialism being a 2500 year old philosophy that everything is deterministic, solid, extended, based on atoms, etc etc.
The fact that we (the empiricist idealists) made these arguments before quantum mechanics proved us right is just grist for the comedy mill. When all of reality is shown to be underpinned by substances that have none of the classical properties of matter/materialism, then that philosophy is debunked.
But for some reason people still cling to the word and want to then redefine the word to mean its 180 degree opposite.
If you were a philosopher you could actually refute my so-called fallacies with logic rather than insults :\
>1. Quantum mechanics tells us that matter obeys the Schrodinger equation and has wave properties. Therefore, the classical definition of matter is slightly wrong. This in no way implies that matter doesn't exist.
It's not "slightly wrong"... it's TOTALLY wrong. Schrodinger's cat is completely incompatible with classical materialism. You can't just be "slightly wrong" at this.
>You're right that "matter" as imagined by many classical scientists doesn't exist (because they didn't fully understand it), but you're ignoring the fact that it obviously still exists independently of how classical scientists imagined it to work.
It doesn't exist but it obviously exists???
It either exists or it doesn't, or we don't know either way. "Matter" is no longer treated by science, the concept has been dropped by physics. Science has "mass" but this mass behaves nothing like "matter."
>Quantum (in)determinism is still up in the air. We don't know exactly how it works. Anyone who uses it for philosophical arguments is probably not making a good argument.
Tell that to every physicists who speaks in public then. All of them try to reason about quantum physics and this is a major area of interest. I agree that it is "up in the air" but... philosophy has ALWAYS been about stuff that is up in the air. So to say that quantum physics is somehow off-limits to philosophical argument is just absurd.
>In what way do bosons refute materialism? Is helium-4 immaterial? Obviously not. I can hold it in a bottle. I can feel it on my skin. I can fill my lungs with this boson and talk in a squeaky voice.
Well you are just flat out not familiar with the standard philosophical canon, because none of those empirical phenomena depend on matter to be explained. They can all be explained by, for instance, empiricist idealists like Berkeley. No empiricist is claiming that sense perceptions don't exist. We are claiming that sense perceptions are not underpinned or explained by matter, that is to say, we are saying that materialism does not actually explain those things at all and that materialism can't be right. Materialism being a 2500 year old philosophy that everything is deterministic, solid, extended, based on atoms, etc etc.
The fact that we (the empiricist idealists) made these arguments before quantum mechanics proved us right is just grist for the comedy mill. When all of reality is shown to be underpinned by substances that have none of the classical properties of matter/materialism, then that philosophy is debunked.
But for some reason people still cling to the word and want to then redefine the word to mean its 180 degree opposite.
Shrug