Do you have phil topics in mind that would be cool to discuss? I'd like to create a new thread soon but I'm looking for inspiration. Hope you're well, mate.
..cont'd for verbosity...But it's not really conceding much, since it's just a subtle point and ultimately accommodates views that are very very close to physicalism.
Im still working on collating our conversation. Its going to take more time to organize all the ideas we have discussed. And then even more time to flesh them out in a way thats easy to read.
Sure. And/or if you like, we could just focus on you telling me what fundamentals of your epistemology we need to both go through before I'll fully appreciate your view. From my end, I think the biggest thing is I wouldn't think neutral monism suggests all our old knowledge is describing things that don't exist. Rather, that it's actually describing stuff that exists but that is mind-physical neutral.
Howdy/hope you're well--Here's another little suggestion: let's be sure to clarify what you mean by "independent existence" a-la Deutsch, and how this relates to your worry about neutral-monism and science.
And how independent existence is more than just "not emergent"; this is important because some neutral-ers would say you can derive physical statements from more intrinsic neutral properties of the neutral substance. Some may even agree spacetime exists and is simply mind-physical neutral.
I owe you an apology, I definitely got a little carried away. I'm sorry about my post~ My abilities to interpret meaning and context have been pretty off lately (honestly). Not that it excuses my actions/words, but I was pretty anxious and in a rush-- More often than not I agree with your posts here, you bring a lot of helpful knowledge and perspective to this forum~
Yeah I think I totally agree with you here after your clarification...namely that you're referring to the so-called more flexible notion of "reasonable" and not the more doggedly objective one.
I agree, there is that stronger definition of "reason" that is linked to logic and actual reality, but I also think this is not the one people use when defending religious claims about God. I do think the kind of reason talked about is subjective. After all, what is a reasonable belief? I wouldn't think a reasonable belief has a ground in actual reality, at least not directly. The reasons surely must, but not the belief itself. If the reasons hold, but reach an objectively false conclusion (the belief), a person may still be rational. I think we are both agreeing, lol :)
FWIW when I used the word "irrational" it's Jung's funny terminology which means closer to "a-rational" meaning beyond, rather than contradictory, to reason. I think claims of religion could be interesting as long as they stick to this kind of Jungian irrational, rather than truly colloquial irrational (aka contradictory to reason).
Lol, sorry. I commented about it in that thread before I saw this. But yeah, I agree with you here. Something I like to point out, and might in that thread, is that religion is not inherently irrational. It just takes an assumption. For the reasons of belief, one assumes there is a God (as it is not a logically derivable claim, at least in deduction. It gets interesting when one starts talking about other logics ;) ). This is not significantly different (opinion) than the assumption of science, that there is an external world. The external skeptic points out there is no way to know with certainty that we are not under a complete illusion: a matrix. We make an assumption that we are not, and so assume there is an external world. That way we can do science. I know of no argument to avoid the skeptic beyond arguments of practicality. It is practical to assume an external reality, for look at how well science works! But notice this doesn't deny the skeptic's point. A matrix might be completely logically coherent, and so obviously science would work. It might actually be weirder to assume that there is an entire world of an external reality than it is weird to assume there is some creator of our world (whatever that may be), and that creator is the thing we call God.
