(Apr 24, 2018 04:00 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]There are no minds, no abstracts, no concepts, no philosophy and the list goes on, without a universe containing coalescing matter forming stars and planets. I don't think philosophy or the scientific understanding of QM means anything until we know how the universe began.
We might call that one of the "operating presuppositions" (necessary principles prescribed for the possibility of _X_) derived from the coherence and objective lawfulness of the "internal story" (of outer experience). Which anti-metaphysics stances like positivism, phenomenalism, and later variants of such can replace the need of reason's version of the external world with. Also, the fact that other people report and react to inter-subjectively sharing the same exteroceptive environment is part of that internal coherence.
Unlike what Penrose suggested in that prior quote, positivists like Hawking (or what Hawking said he was back then) do not deny the obvious slash original external world (the one presented by perception / consciousness, when treated as "real"). But instead either deny or merely suspend belief about the metaphysical version (which the mathematician Roger Penrose was a realist about in especially abstract terms). Or they at least doubt any claims of validation / certainty regarding the latter's nature, which would be the epistemological pessimism of Humean and Kantian tradition.[*]
Quote:When I start thinking metaphysical, and I've been doing that lately, I forget that the physical is still being studied & learned. A lot of shit had to happen just to get to the thinking/philosophical stage.
Yah, you're grokking the need for metaphysics. Or at the least the need for the majority of people who aren't of some positivism or anti-realism persuasion (anti-metaphysical).
Physicalism itself, though, is a philosophical thought orientation varying from ontological to an explanatory approach (or the latter can just be "physical", with the -ism left off). IOW, it was outputted slash formulated by intellect rather than given by observation in a non-reflective and non-experimental way (like contingently finding a cricket under a rock). Treating it instead as fundamentally intuitive could be figuratively expressed as:
"We gradually climbed up to the roof of the building and then kicked the ladder away, as if to pretend that we had always been on the roof and never got there by the ladder".
Physicalism is
usually not to be confused with older "materialism" though. Since some versions of materialism are arguably compatible with phenomenalism. There were some thinkers and scientists in the 19th-century who were called "materialists" but were actually phenomenalists. Or what Lenin called the corruption of Ernst Mach's "empiro-criticism". Materialism can also refer to a mechanistic relationships in space approach to explaining events and circumstances, rather than a matter-substance ontology (or inventing a metaphysics from physics). Which as aforementioned, is also somewhat interchangeable with the likewise explanatory-approach alternative meaning of current "physicalism" or what can be implied practice-wise by "physical".
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[*] Positivism isn't directly descended from those, since it's said that Auguste Comte wasn't much aware of Kant's philosophy and accordingly perhaps not Hume, either. Ernst Mach did read both, however, and that arguably influenced his tweaks to positivism and phenomenalism. If it can be said he introduced any at all, since the following passage seems pretty much in line with anti-metaphysics orthodoxy.
ERNST MACH: This happens, for example, when all experiences are regarded as "effects" of an external world extending into consciousness. This conception gives us a tangle of metaphysical difficulties which it seems impossible to unravel. But the spectre vanishes at once when we look at the matter as it were in a mathematical light, and make it clear to ourselves that all that is valuable to us is the discovery of functional relations, and that what we want to know is merely the dependence of experiences or one another. It then becomes obvious that the reference to unknown fundamental variables which are not given (things-in-themselves) is purely fictitious and superfluous. But even when we allow this fiction, uneconomical though it be, to stand at first, we can still easily distinguish different classes of the mutual dependence of the elements of "the facts of consciousnes "; and this alone is important for us. --The Analysis of Sensations
Mach both half-misunderstood and rejected Kant's "things-in-themselves", but was influenced by Kant's pessimism that specific knowledge about a meta-phenomenal archetype of the sensible world could ever be obtained. Since by definition if something lacks empirical properties it can never be verified by observation (made "real" in an immediate, given or "picture" respect), only supported by arguments and inferences of rational activity (language, manipulation of symbols, rules, etc).
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