Hermagoras
Posts: 1260
Joined: June 2007
|
Daniel King posted his devastating response to Kairosfocus, but I never saw it in the "recent comments." Did it ever show up, or was UD somehow manipulated to keep it out? Perhaps by keeping it in the moderation queue until a sufficient gap existed between the stated posting time and the ones in the recent comments?
Anyway, here's the nub:
| Quote | I think this is a fair representation of kf?s argument, but to make it clearer, I will reorder it, with premise II, which I consider to be the major premise, on top:
I. Mind cannot be reduced to the physical.
II. Materialists believe that everything is physical.
III. Therefore, materialists deny that they have grounds for believing they have minds.
In a nutshell: Materialists can?t account for minds, because minds are not physical (material).
I argue that premise I is unfounded. A premise is either an a priori truth or a hypothesis. Since a priori truths are true by definition, they are tautologies. Since I do not believe that kf is arguing that premise I is true by definition, it must be a hypothesis.
However, hypotheses are statements about the world of experience that must be tested for truth. As such, they require evidence and they can never be proven with certainty.
Evidence against premise I: There is much empirical evidence against premise I in the medical literature, and an easy test for the person who doubts the physical basis of his mind is to try to do arithmetic when he is unconscious.
Unproven nature of premise I: If there is empirical evidence for an entity (mind) that exists independently of the brain, it must be presented.
Unprovable nature of premise I: Since the premise is a hypothesis, it can never be absolutely proven. If its proponent accepts this limitation and then says, ?Premise I is probably true,? then the conclusion (III above) is also a hypothetical and its truth is not logically binding.
In summary, kf?s premise that mind cannot be reduced to the physical is fatally flawed, and therefore so is his argument. I have already argued in this thread that any claim of intellectual or moral incoherence on the part of materialists has no practical consequences (the pragmatic test) and now I have disposed of the logical basis of that claim.
A final note: Premise II is also flawed, because it imputes to ?materialists? globally a belief that some (philosophical) materialists may hold, but this is not true of methodological materialists. The latter do not categorically deny the possibility of a non-material mind; they simply await evidence that such an entity or substance exists. |
Sweet. And in terms that kairosfocus, with his syllogism fetish, can grasp.
--------------
"I am not currently proving that objective morality is true. I did that a long time ago and you missed it." -- StephenB
http://paralepsis.blogspot.com/....pot.com
|
