Reductio ad absurdum
Posted by LaudateAgno on 2024-December-26 20:00:08, ThursdayIn reply to Re: Humph! posted by diogenes on 2024-December-10 05:03:08, Tuesday
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I apologize for having forgotten this thread! Your reply was interesting and I thank you. Anyway, to the meat of the matter: Your physicalist position renders the concepts of free will and moral responsibility completely meaningless. If thoughts are identical to physical (esp. neural (why only neural?)) states and processes, then every thought, including every intention, desire, judgment, or feeling, is an epiphenomenon of forces, forces over which "we" thinking, intending, desiring, judging, feeling subjects have no control, from a purely physicalist perspective. Subjective states are obviously real (though there are physicalists who deny even that; for a taste, try the Churchlands), and not dissociable from the brute mechanics of the physical world. But to equate them is outright determinism. It eliminates the possibility of free will, and therewith relieves all of us of any responsibility for wrongdoing or praise for behaving well. Even your sense of knowing or believing anything at all, including your belief in physicalism, has no independent significance; it is simply one physical state among a variety of others. If physical and mental states are truly identical, then any belief I hold must be identifiably homomorphic with some physical state, at least in principle. 1. Good luck with establishing any empirical evidence for that! 2. What can it then mean to believe anything is true? If my "brain state" can be interpreted as a belief that h^2=a^2+b^2 in a right triangle (and vice versa, as these are supposed to be "identical"),then how can that brain's physical state be understood as reflecting truth or falsity? What properties does the physical brain have when it "knows something true" that it fails to have when it "knows something false"? Physicalism is a classic case of reductio ad absurdum. It is a metaphysically incoherent position, fun to entertain, entertaining to watch collapse, but as painful to see maintained as it is painful to see Christian "fundamentalists" argue for six-day creationism. You say, and I agree, that a truly beautiful aspect of physicalism is that it is so clear-cut. But that beautiful virtue translates immediately into its own downfall: the incoherence of its internal contradiction shines as brightly as a falling star. It "liberates" us, yes, but only from its own claim to clarity. You describe physicalism as "liberation from all mysticism and intellectual flabbiness and nonsense..." Yes, such liberation would be nice, and that's been the Enlightenment project for some time now. But it seems to me that you generally agree with the failure of that project, so it surprises me that you should seek "liberation" through recourse to a rationalism that so directly contradicts itself. |
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