: I'm a (fair weather) materialist (everthing that exists
: is physical), and think that in some way the mental
: has to be a subset of the physical. That's an
: assumption, of course, but I'd call it a forced move.
: The apparent physical causes of mental illness for
: example, are too regular to be coincidence. And I hold
: that the physical world is closed wrt causation.
: Ergo....
Ergo we agree, insofar as we've thought this out at all. :-)
: The first thing that popped up on google was this:
: http://www.xrefer.com/entry/551291
: Which seemed decent at first pass. The source is Kant's
: Critique of Pure Reason, which is not a fun read
: overall, but the section on the antinomies is great
: and is highly recommended. He puts forward arguments
: for both sides of the four antinomies, and his
: resolution is a real via media. As Quine says at that
: url above, it's a repudiation of tradition. If that
: web page stirs your interest, I suggest checking out
: the antinomies in Kant. It's somewhere in the middle
: of the text as I remember. Each one is only a few
: pages long, and is readable (as opposed to much of the
: text).
: Since reading it, that's been my method for dealing with
: apparent paradoxes. The nature of substance, for
: example.
I'll check it out, thanks. Kant's ethical arguments (or the summaries in the World Book) made quite a bit of sense to me, so I imagine I'll enjoy it.
: By the way, where does you grandfather teach? What's his
: name? I was in a PhD program in philosophy for a few
: years (Rutgers), and escaped with a Masters.
He's Benson Mates, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley. Specializes in Greco-Roman skepticism and Logical Positivism, so you see where my leanings come from. :-) He's published quite a few books--the ones you're most likely to have seen are an introduction to elementary logic and a discussion of the Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus.
: It's also dependent on constraints of the language chosen
: to express the idea. Ever notice how something can be
: easy to say in, say, English and difficult in French?
: I remember learning the French word 'selon', which
: means 'according to', and found 'selon' so much
: simpler and elegant that I used it in taking notes for
: classes, otherwise writing in English. Similarly for
: mathematics. What's a complicated expression is due in
: part to convention.
True. I would say, though, that the conventions our brains operate by--whether or not we could be taught a more efficient operation via some advanced and probably horribly sadistic method of child-rearing--make some expressions which involve non-observables less complicated than their counterparts which do not involve such.
: Prima facie reasons to exclude non-observables absolutely
: ABOUND!
But the Apollo myth involves a lot of non-observables. What about something simpler? Like "This 'sun' is actually a permanently existing object, which moves across the sky and then returns to its original position via a path beneath our feet?" Still non-observable--unless the Earth becomes transparent--but what immediate reason is there to reject it?
: Semantics at this point, I'm sure. I never really thought
: about it. But we agree there's a difference between
: something's being testable and something's being a
: part of a larger scientific system. I think your
: proposed number list is testable but useless, and I
: think you agree.
Well, useless except as a reference tool. But yeah.
--SiliconDream
