Stuff it

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Philip Thrift

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Aug 9, 2019, 4:27:10 PM8/9/19
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The Right Stuff
Ned Markosian

Things are also known as “objects” and “entities,” and stuff is also known as
“matter” and “material.”

This paper argues for including stuff in one’s ontology. The distinction
between things and stuff is first clarified, and then three different ontologies
of the physical universe are spelled out: a pure thing ontology, a pure stuff
ontology, and a mixed ontology of both things and stuff. (The paper defends
the latter.) Eleven different reasons for including stuff (in addition to things)
in one’s ontology are given (seven of which the author endorses and four of
which would be sensible reasons for philosophers with certain metaphysical
positions that the author does not happen to hold). Then five objections to
positing stuff are considered and rejected.

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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 11, 2019, 2:07:02 PM8/11/19
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Honest and clear defence of stuff!. I appreciate his distinction between things and stuff.

So with mechanism, we can say:  many things no stuff! 
(Many things like numbers, machines, persons,  physical objects, physical experiences, etc.),


Feel free to defend any of the eleven reason he gave. Up to now (I read slowly) I am not  convinced.

I am more sure that 2+2=4 than of the existence of plumb, .. not mentioning the existence of a  plumber !

Bruno





@philipthrift


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Philip Thrift

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Aug 11, 2019, 6:16:07 PM8/11/19
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On Sunday, August 11, 2019 at 1:07:02 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 9 Aug 2019, at 22:27, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



The Right Stuff
Ned Markosian

Things are also known as “objects” and “entities,” and stuff is also known as
“matter” and “material.”

This paper argues for including stuff in one’s ontology. The distinction
between things and stuff is first clarified, and then three different ontologies
of the physical universe are spelled out: a pure thing ontology, a pure stuff
ontology, and a mixed ontology of both things and stuff. (The paper defends
the latter.) Eleven different reasons for including stuff (in addition to things)
in one’s ontology are given (seven of which the author endorses and four of
which would be sensible reasons for philosophers with certain metaphysical
positions that the author does not happen to hold). Then five objections to
positing stuff are considered and rejected.

Honest and clear defence of stuff!. I appreciate his distinction between things and stuff.

So with mechanism, we can say:  many things no stuff! 
(Many things like numbers, machines, persons,  physical objects, physical experiences, etc.),


Feel free to defend any of the eleven reason he gave. Up to now (I read slowly) I am not  convinced.

I am more sure that 2+2=4 than of the existence of plumb, .. not mentioning the existence of a  plumber !

Bruno


 I don't know about a plumb, but of a plum, I am more sure of any of my experiences of eating a plum than 2+2=4.

2+2=4 is a heuristic of mathematical language. Useful for us, but not "real" like a plum-eating experience.

Language bewilders us, and thus we talk and write and think of things, but it's the plum stuff that matters.

@philipthrift


Bruno Marchal

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Aug 12, 2019, 5:17:04 AM8/12/19
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But the experience of eating a plum is not a proof that the plum is made of matter. I dreamed a lot eating things, for example. A first person experience never proves anything, except the existence of that experience for the one who remember it.




2+2=4 is a heuristic of mathematical language. Useful for us, but not "real" like a plum-eating experience.

With mechanism, we do have an explanation of where such experience come from.




Language bewilders us, and thus we talk and write and think of things, but it's the plum stuff that matters.


Then mechanism is false. Maybe, but the evidences side with mechanism, not with materialism. Yes, language bewllders us in making us believe in stuff, but if digital mechanism is correct, all the argument you might find for better are find by your counterpart in arithmetic, and here we know that they are invalid, but that shows that your intuition is not well sustained, or that mechanism is false (and the “you” in arithmetic becomes p-zombies.

Bruno





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Philip Thrift

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Aug 12, 2019, 5:49:37 AM8/12/19
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This is the whole panpsychism (here the Galen Stawson, Philip Goff, Hedda Hassel Mørch‏, ... materialist panpsychist kind, not the idealist version of maybe a few) enterprise.

Either:

Mechanism is true.

       or

Panpsychism is true.


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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 14, 2019, 6:06:11 AM8/14/19
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Why?

It seems to me that if Mechanism is false, *many* different sorts of non-mechanist theory can be true, including pure arithmetical one, or set theoretical one.

With Non-Mechanism, weak materialism *might* become consistent, but that does not (yet) make it  necessarily true.

Bruno







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Philip Thrift

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Aug 14, 2019, 6:39:14 AM8/14/19
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Basically, you replace mechanism with an experiential mechanism (e-mechanism), where 

      Φ+Ψ: both numbers (information) and [real!] qualia (experience) are processed.

Now matter (in the panpsychist view) supplies Φ+Ψ but maybe there's an alternative.

It comes down to what real Ψ is.


A recent paper from Hedda Hassel Mørch here:


A real Ψ vs an illusory or simulated Ψ is the key issue.

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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 14, 2019, 8:42:00 AM8/14/19
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Hmm…. With digital mechanism, the simulation concerns the machine ([]p, [] is Gödel’s universal Löbian predicate: it is a Universal machine capable of proving its own universality).

In the case, as I say, it is “[]p” which is simulated. We cannot really simulated “p” (that would not even have a meaning), but the machine which says []p, is confronted with the truth of p (or its falsity, but let us assume that the machine is sound), and in this case, we get a being described by ([]p & p), associated logically to the machine, and which is not Turing emulable. It plays the role of the machine knowledge. Is non emulability comes from the fact that we cannot define a knowledge, or a truth predicate. If Tarski theorem was wrong, we would be able to build a truth predicate, like True(‘p’) and simulate []p & p by computing beweisbar(‘p’) & True(‘p’), but a predicate like true cannot exist (Tarski theorem). 

The truth predicate plays the role of Plato’s Truth, or Ploitinus’ One: we just cannot define it in the language of any machine. But that does not mean that the machine cannot guess it, and develop theories pointing on it.

Bruno







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Philip Thrift

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Aug 14, 2019, 9:39:00 AM8/14/19
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In the common view, machines do more than process information (numbers).

Car engines process gasoline to make motion.

Star Trek food machines process atoms to make dinner.

etc. 

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Bruno Marchal

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Aug 15, 2019, 7:34:38 AM8/15/19
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You are right on this. But I was using “machine”  to mean “digital machine”. They are the one which do nothing more than processing numbers or Turing equivalent. Then the non digital machine, like a soap film, or a car engine, are constuct in the mind of the universal numbers relatively to each others.

Bruno





etc. 

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