(May 20, 2018 05:02 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]Is the afterlife world or any metaphysical place where one's soul can spend eternity subject to entropy? The physical universe eventually crumbles and the non physical realm acts like a life raft, is that how it works? The metaphysical world seems nothing short of perfect. The physical world seems like the worst place to put life, so why even have one? So for those who figure there's a place for them in the afterlife, there is no concern about what you may encounter?
Well, going all the way back to the
Eleatic school, the ancient rationalists tended to view their inferred version of the external world (the so-called "real world") as static and unchanging. It was the cosmos of appearances (as manifested by experience or consciousness) that was ephemeral, unreliable, and corruptible because it was constantly changing. Even physics has to rationally abstract mathematical models (that are treated as immutable) from the empirical circumstances and thereby offer reliable principles for predicting what the perceived environment is going to do next. Just like the ancients, that abstraction then gets treated as existent in scientific realism.
Materialism is a family of metaphysical theories. This is from circa 1909, when the anti-metaphysical attitude of positivism was influential in science and philosophy (especially the flavor of it spawned by Ernst Mach). Lenin is being sarcastic, of course; he's a materialist of the Engels persuasion and the lineage which the latter is intellectually descended from.
V. I. Lenin -- Anyone in the least acquainted with philosophical literature must know that scarcely a single contemporary professor of philosophy (or of theology) can be found who is not directly or indirectly engaged in refuting materialism. They have declared materialism refuted a thousand times, yet are continuing to refute it for the thousand and first time. All our revisionists are engaged in refuting materialism, pretending, however, that actually they are only refuting the materialist Plekhanov, and not the materialist Engels, nor the materialist Feuerbach, nor the materialist views of J. Dietzgen -- and, moreover, that they are refuting materialism from the standpoint of "recent" and "modern" positivism, natural science, and so forth.
. . . I shall refer to those arguments by which materialism is being combated by . . . . Machians. I shall use this latter term throughout as a synonym for "empirio-criticist" because it is shorter and simpler and has already acquired rights of citizenship in Russian literature. That Ernst Mach is the most popular representative of empirio-criticism today is universally acknowledged in philosophical literature . . .
The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable -- "things-in-themselves" -- matter "outside of experience" and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of "experience" and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the "unknown," nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers. --Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
Because "metaphysical" in popular usage has acquired varying semantic baggage (especially becoming conflated with New Age stuff), I often feel like discarding it for "metempirical". Which more dependably means "beyond experience" or what's prior-in-rank to appearances (the given, non-controversial external environment delivered by sensation). But using it can run into problems when it comes to something like
scientific realism (SR).
Going against the grain, I consider SR to actually be a refinement or abstract supplement to the nature of the experienced world rather than dealing with some "ultimate reality" that the perceived cosmos is taken to be either a representation of or only the result of (the latter similar to a dream being caused by the brain, but not being an attempt to represent the brain itself).
That in turn forces me to place SR in an "immanent" orientation of metaphysical practice (extended rational speculation within experience -- about its non-visible levels, sometimes tied to experiments) instead of the usually exercised "emanant" orientation (metempirical; outward). Or IOW, scientific realism forces me to introduce those very distinctions, to give it a more practical resonance. An "immanent" modification wouldn't work with "metempirics"; since the term (again) lacks the ambiguity which metaphysics has fallen into over the centuries (i.e., metempirics specifically refers to "beyond experience"). And the counterpart "emanent" adjective would be redundant if applied to it.
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