Philosophy Discussion Forums

A duality a singularity that exists in two different places as the same Time, being that a duality is Transcendental.
The Particle Wave Duality.

Monist materialism is not falsifiable
especially, though not only, given praxis.

Descartes’ duality of substance, said substance being body and soul, is flawed.
The Soul having no mass, is not a substance.

The Soul not being readily apparent, not being measurable as to location and momentum is Space-Time.

The existence, or non-existence of an Entity that is not, readily apparent, is not measurable as to location and momentum in Space Time, is Uncertain.

Man’s destiny in life is the proper evolution of the mind. I use the word proper because the evolution of the mind can be improper; man is evolving into a Beast, a Male Chauvinistic Pig.

The mentality of the Man Beast being the Greatest Cause of Unnecessary Suffering, all that is Evil.
The Man Beast having a perverted, distorted Sense of Manliness, Machismo, is sick in the Head; sic,sic,sic.

The Rider on the White Horse is born of the competitive nature that is necessary for the Man Beast, to win the Battle for the Survival of the most fit, to become the Ultimate Survivor.

Wayne92587 wrote: ↑May 6th, 2018, 3:08 pm Descartes’ duality of substance, said substance being body and soul, is flawed.
The Soul having no mass, is not a substance.

1) Gluons and photons have no mass in standard physics. If you are correct above this means modern science is dualist. Not to speak of fields, particles and even objects, in superposition, etc.
2)Substance refers to the essential nature of something. It is not a synonym for matter.

Karpel Tunnel;

Substance refers to the essential nature of something. It is not a synonym for matter.

The subject; an argument against Substance Duality, has become so convoluted that I must start over because, I do not even know what it is I am trying to say.

What is the argument against substance duality? Is not substance, as in the argument against substance duality, does not a immateriality, have Mass.

Descartes’ duality of substance would have to be, one being a materiality and the other spirituality, Mind and Body, Spirit and Flesh.

I believe this to be true for Mankind, he and she; Man is a duality, has a dual quality.

From my interpretation of Chapter One-1 of Tao Te Ching.
“As a Singularity issues for as a duality, the two are given different names because of the extreme differentiation in the Nature of the Two.” One being Empirical and the other being Immaterial, the Flesh Body, having Mass and the other being Spiritual, Immaterial, not being readily apparent, being Consciousness, the Soul.

The one above being the same as the one below, the one below being the same as the one above. (from Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus.)

A Duality having two qualities, is Transcendental, is able to transcend the Darkness, Nature, the Empirical, the Material World of Reality.

How is it that something can come from Nothing.

The Creative Process began with the Creation of the Reality of First Cause; First Cause being the First Singularity of Zero to become relative, to be trabsfigured, converted in to a Singularity having relative, a numerical value of One-1.

Something can not come from Nothing unless the Universe was born of Nothingness, rarified, thin air.

In the beginning the Universe was without Form, Void, there being only Darkness upon the Deep.

When the Day was separated from the Night, the light from the Darkness, what came to Light was the Reality of First Cause, the First Singularity to have relative, a numerical Value of One-1.

A Random Singularity of Zero-0, a Singularity having no relative, numerical value, having a numerical value of Zero-0; upon displacement became the First Singularity to have relative a numerical value of One-1, the Reality of First Cause, a Singularity of One-1 becoming the single direct cause of the System of Chaos, that has made manifest the Heavens and the Earth, the Universe, the Reality of Everything that exists in the Material sense of the word.

As the Light was separated from the darkness, a second great light was created, the Consciousness of the Rational Mind.

This second Great Light being reminiscent, being a Mere reflection of the Light of the Sun; the Sun being the Light unto the World, the World of Reality as seen in the Light of Day.

This second Great Light, twice light known to shine just before the rising of the Sun above the Horizon and just after the setting of the Sun below the Horizon, Also known to be the Twilight Zone.

This Twice Light, the Star of Lucifer is not Venus or Mars, is the Light of the Silvery Moon.

The man that worships this second Light as being the Light of Reality is a Lunatic; Reality born of the Twilight Zone, the Consciousness of the Rational Mind, Rationalizations, is susceptible to doing Evil, being, causing, a great deal of Unnecessary Suffering.

I miss the part in the above where you deal with the issue of massless particles.

karpel Tunnel;

Substance refers to the essential nature of something. It is not a synonym for matter.

Not True, according to the dictionary.

Wayne92587 wrote: ↑May 25th, 2018, 4:00 pm karpel Tunnel;

Substance refers to the essential nature of something. It is not a synonym for matter.

Not True, according to the dictionary.

But here were are in a philosophy forum where substance has a meaning that the person on the street does not consider. From Stanford's philosophy encyc...

There could be said to be two rather different ways of characterizing the philosophical concept of substance. The first is the more generic. The philosophical term ‘substance’ corresponds to the Greek ousia, which means ‘being’, transmitted via the Latin substantia, which means ‘something that stands under or grounds things’. According to the generic sense, therefore, the substances in a given philosophical system are those things which, according to that system, are the foundational or fundamental entities of reality. Thus, for an atomist, atoms are the substances, for they are the basic things from which everything is constructed. In David Hume's system, impressions and ideas are the substances, for the same reason. In a slightly different way, Forms are Plato's substances, for everything derives its existence from Forms. In this sense of ‘substance’ any realist philosophical system acknowledges the existence of substances. Probably the only theories which do not would be those forms of logical positivism or pragmatism which treat ontology as a matter of convention. According to such theories, there are no real facts about what is ontologically basic, and so nothing is objectively substance.

What things are made of need not be matter. The fundamental need not be matter within philosophy. It depends on your ontology or metaphysics.

It is Blasphemous, irreverent, to speak of, give a name to something that has no substance, can not be experienced, that is not measurable as to location and momentum in Space-Time, that can not be determined to exist or not to exist.

In other words being, something that exists, must have substance, must have a material presents, must have worth, must be relative,

Language is just so much Babble because of the use of technical terms, metaphors, specialized langue.

When you take a word like substance and give it a selective meaning you create, generate, a great deal of confusion, Hog Wash, B.S.

Karpel Tunnel wrote: ↑May 7th, 2018, 3:54 pm2)Substance refers to the essential nature of something. It is not a synonym for matter.

Right, but "substance" isn't a synonym of "essence" either.

Consul wrote: ↑June 17th, 2018, 2:00 pm

Karpel Tunnel wrote: ↑May 7th, 2018, 3:54 pm2)Substance refers to the essential nature of something. It is not a synonym for matter.

Right, but "substance" isn't a synonym of "essence" either.

Well, I didn't say it was. I defined it there as the essential nature of something (or everything).

There's been a range of uses in philosophy
I've seen definitios of substance as 'the underlying being'. I don't think that's very different from 'essential nature'

I quoted from the Standford site a couple of posts up. There substances are not always matter based.

Karpel Tunnel wrote: ↑June 17th, 2018, 4:54 pm

Consul wrote: ↑June 17th, 2018, 2:00 pmRight, but "substance" isn't a synonym of "essence" either.

Well, I didn't say it was. I defined it there as the essential nature of something (or everything).
There's been a range of uses in philosophy
I've seen definitios of substance as 'the underlying being'. I don't think that's very different from 'essential nature'

A substance qua substratum has but isn't an essence, with its essence being the totality of its essential attributes.

By the way, the nature of a substance is its essence, so the phrase "essential nature" is pleonastic.

Karpel Tunnel wrote: ↑June 17th, 2018, 4:54 pmI quoted from the Standford site a couple of posts up. There substances are not always matter based.

Given the general ontological concept of a substance, substances aren't material by definition; so immaterial (mental/spiritual) substances are conceptually possible at least (as opposed to e.g. married bachelors).

Consul wrote: ↑June 17th, 2018, 5:52 pm Given the general ontological concept of a substance, substances aren't material by definition; so immaterial (mental/spiritual) substances are conceptually possible at least (as opposed to e.g. married bachelors).

Which was my main point.

Karpel Tunnel wrote: ↑June 18th, 2018, 1:30 am

Consul wrote: ↑June 17th, 2018, 5:52 pm Given the general ontological concept of a substance, substances aren't material by definition; so immaterial (mental/spiritual) substances are conceptually possible at least (as opposed to e.g. married bachelors).

Which was my main point.

However, to say that the phrase "immaterial substance" isn't self-contradictory by definition is not to say that immaterial substances are really, i.e. ontologically, possible, that there can be such things in reality.

By definition, a Cartesian soul or spirit is an immaterial substance with mental properties but without physical properties. Immaterial substances are simple in the sense that they are spatially unextended, i.e. zero-dimensional, and thus lack proper parts. This means that they are like mathematical points except for having mental properties and hence being concrete objects rather than abstract ones. The basic problem with such "soul-points" is that even though points qua (ideal) 0D objects make logical and mathematical sense, they make little ontological sense as members of concrete reality. It seems that soul-points are much too insubstantial to be substances (and substrates of attributes).

(I know that physicists have postulated 0D point-particles and space(time)-points as ingredients of concrete, physical reality; but in my view they are nothing but mathematical idealizations or fictions.)

"[T]o take away all extension is to reduce a thing only to a mathematical point, which is nothing else but pure negation or non-entity[.]"

(More, Henry. The Immortality of the Soul. 1659. Pref., §3)

Moreover, like materialist or spiritualist substance monism, substance dualism [SD] is based on substance-attribute ontology, according to which a substance is different from (the complex of) its attributes, being the possessor or instantiator, the substratum or fundamentum (ground or cause) of the latter. So SD implies the rejection of the reductionistic (Humean) view that substances are nothing but/more than/over and above a complex (bundle/cluster) of attributes.

It follows that immaterial substances are irreducibly different from their mental properties; but in order for that to be the case, they must have some non-mental properties, some non-mental nature or essence in addition to their mental properties, since otherwise they would be nothing over and above their (conscious) mind. And since immaterial substances lack physical properties by definition, the required non-mental properties cannot be physical ones; but what other kind of properties could they be? One might say that they are "neutral properties", properties of concrete objects which are neither mental nor physical; but to postulate such properties is to postulate a mystery, because nobody has any idea what such obscure properties are. And their postulation seems quite ad hoc, because the only reason for postulating them is to protect SD from collapsing into pure-event/-process dualism [PD], according to which mental events/processes involve mental attributes but no mental substances.
This view is in effect identical to the Humean bundle theory:

"So we have no idea of substance other than the idea of a collection of particular qualities, and such collections are all we can meaningfully refer to when we talk or think about ‘substance’."

(Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739/40. Bk. I, pt. I, sec. VI)

"I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement."

(Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature. 1739. Bk. 1, pt. IV, sec. VI)

Now, given that there is no plausible reason to accept that the additional non-mental attributes of immaterial substances are neutral ones, they must be material/physical ones; but then SD collapses into materialist substance monism (substance materialism [SM]). So it turns out that SD is no ontologically coherent and stable alternative to SM and PD.

(And PD is no ontologically coherent and stable alternative to SM, because the concept of an absolute or "free-floating" process or event that doesn't involve and depend on any propertied objects or substances is ontologically incoherent too. I know of course that the defenders of process ontology disagree with me; but I disagree with their disagreement.)

Another anti-SD argument is that, as far as we know from science, mentality requires complexity, which is to say that having a complex mind such as the one we have is incompatible with its substratum being a simple substance, let alone an immaterial one. The simplicity of immaterial substances—their lack of any (non-mental) structural and functional complexity—prevents them from being an ontological realizer and sustainer of a complex mind.

What is more, even the most primitive sensation or emotion seems to require and to depend on an enormous complexity as we find it in the neurological structure and functioning of brains. The human brain is the most complex material object/substance in the known universe; and there are strong scientific reasons to believe that all possible realizers and subjects of mentality must be extremely complex. (By the way, this constitutes an argument not only against SD but also against panpsychism, which ascribes mental properties to single physical particles.)
But, absurdly, the substance dualists tell us that simple substances (soul-points) can have highly complex minds, with the simple divine substance, God, even having the most complex mind possible. This just doesn't make any coherent ontological sense!

Material point-particles possessing a complex of physical properties make little ontological sense, and immaterial soul-points possessing a complex of mental properties make no ontological sense at all.

"Elementary particles in the ordinary view of things are point particles. A point can’t have many, many properties. A point is too simple to have properties. However, we know that elementary particles have a lot of properties. They have spin, they have electric charge, they have something called isotopic spin, they have a quantum number called color – it’s not got anything to do with ordinary color – they have generations that they belong to, there are whole catalogs of different kinds of quantum numbers, of different kinds of properties that quarks, electrons, netrinos, or photons have. It sounds unreasonable for a point to have that structure. So the feeling most of us have is that, at some level, if you look deeply enough into things, you‘ll discover that particles aren’t points. That they must have all kinds of internal machinery that gives them these properties."

(Leonard Susskind, interview by George Zarkadakis, April 27, 2009. Feline Quanta Blog. http://felinequanta.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... skind.html.)