Posted: Oct 06, 2018 6:09 pm
Andrew4Handel wrote:[1] People who defend physicalism or materialism what is the alternative that you are opposed to?
[2] Are you opposed to things not being reducible to atoms or matter?
[3] Are you opposed to things not having causes?
[4] Or are you opposed to things being inexplicable or to or uninvestigatable by the scientific methodology?
[5] Maybe there's something else?
I don't really defend physicalism or materialism. But just for the hell of it:
[1] Idealism is the alternative that's most often proposed, and on the whole it involves more assumptions than materialism does, which makes it even less appealing to commit to.
[2] It depends how you define matter. Obviously baryons or photons are not reducible to atoms. Nor are branes, but they seem perfectly sensible objects for theory and experiment. Nothing has ever been shown to reduce to the non-physical.
[3] It depends which things. Radioactive decay at a specific time seems to have no causal explanation.
[4] No. But I quite literally laugh at anyone who says something is inexplicable and uninvestigable and then proceeds to try and explain it. People have frequently been wrong before about things in both categories as well.
[5] Maybe!