Felix wrote:Consul wrote:And in a non-Berkeleyan world percepts and concepts are mental representations existing in the minds/brains of living bodies. Given that brains are extended objects, there's no problem with using the word "in" here.
There is indeed a problem with saying that thoughts "exist" in the brain. When science develops a means to scan people's brains and read their thoughts, you may make that claim.
The brain is the organ of thought, so where else could thoughts be?
Felix wrote:Consul wrote:It's a basic mistake to suppose that (transexperiential) reality or the "things in themselves" are imperceptible and unknowable "noumena".
Kant didn't suppose that so it's irrelevant - he said that phenomenon are an abstraction from sensuous intuition.
Yes, Kant did suppose that noumena or things in themselves are not possible objects of perception or cognition.
-- Updated September 23rd, 2016, 10:22 pm to add the following --
Quotidian wrote:Consul wrote:What can be said coherently is that the immaterial ideas of an immaterial soul are located at (not in!) the same point of space that is occupied by the soul.
You can only ever always think in terms of a realist paradigm, which is indicated by the necessity to locate everything you consider real in terms of space and time. So when asked about the reality of numbers and ideas, you can only ever do so with references to 'brains having thoughts'. It would take to take more than philosophical argument to change that.
"When asked about the reality of numbers and ideas" I answer that such abstract objects aren't real; and what isn't real is nowhere.
"It is a famous anomaly of recent science that while an influential number of physicists, once supposed to be students of physical nature, are suggesting that only conscious experience exists, an equally influential number of psychologists, once supposed to be students of consciousness, have suggested that only physical nature exists."
(Williams, Donald Cary. "The Existence of Consciousness." In
Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, 23-40. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966. p. 23)
Quotidian wrote:Felix wrote:When science develops a means to scan people's brains and read their thoughts, you may make that claim.
Many people will say that fMRI scans have done that already. But there are many major problems with that answer, one of them being that a great proportion of the experimental findings based on such data have been called into question.
We know that the brain is the organ of the mind, of consciousness and thought.
Quotidian wrote:Consul wrote:A materialist can alternatively favor Campbell's trope-field ontology, and hold that the universe is made of spacetime-pervading physical fields.
But then it's no longer 'materialism' at all, it is simply 'a commitment to whatever science, or rathr, some scientists, considers to be real! What is 'a field', anyway?
(We could discuss the ontology of fields in another thread.)
As you presumably know, many contemporary philosophers prefer "physicalism" to "materialism", because they think that materialism is associated with an obsolete metaphysical/ontological picture of the physical world. But in fact…
"The materialist, holding that the world is matter, is not wedded to any one doctrine of the nature of matter."
(Williams, Donald Cary. "Naturalism and the Nature of Things." In
Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, 212-238. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966. p. 220)
"Materialist metaphysicians want to side with physics, but not to take sides within physics."
(Lewis, David. "New Work for a Theory of Universals." 1983. Reprinted in
Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, 8-55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. pp. 37-8)
I still like and use the good old label "materialism", knowing that materialism is compatible even with the most exotic physical theories of matter, energy, space, and time.
"I say 'materialistic' where some would rather say 'physicalistic': an adequate theory must be consistent with the truth and completeness of some theory in much the style of present-day physics. ('Completeness' is to be explained in terms of supervenience.)
Some fear that 'materialism' conveys a commitment that this ultimate physics must be a physics of matter alone: no fields, no radiation, no causally active spacetime. Not so! Let us proclaim our solidarity with forebears who, like us, wanted their philosophy to agree with ultimate physics. Let us not chide and disown them for their less advanced ideas about what ultimate physics might say."
(Lewis, David. "Naming the Colours." 1997. Reprinted in
Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, 332-358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. p. 332, fn. 2)
"[Materialism] was so named when the best physics of the day was the physics of matter alone. Now our best physics acknowledges other bearers of fundamental properties: parts of pervasive fields, parts of causally active spacetime. But it would be pedantry to change the name on that account, and disown our intellectual ancestors. Or worse, it would be a tacky marketing ploy, akin to British Rail's decree that second class passengers shall now be called 'standard class customers'."
(Lewis, David. "Reduction of Mind." In
A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Samuel D. Guttenplan, 412-431. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. p. 413)
-- Updated September 23rd, 2016, 10:27 pm to add the following --
Quotidian wrote:Because materialism attempts to explain mind in terms of matter, obviously. Again, naturalist approaches wish to locate mind as a phenomenon within nature, not seeing that 'nature' is itself a matter of attitude and definition; what our culture understands as 'nature' might be entirely different to another culture's notion of it.
When materialists or (materialistic) naturalists speak of nature, they mean
physical nature, the MEST (matter-energy-space-time) world.
Mind is a state of matter because there is nothing else it could be a state of.