“It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.”? Philosophy as hegemony? If we cannot go beyond how we’ve been conditioned to think then doing philosophy would be a waste of time. The coherency and consistency, the validity and plausibility, of ideas does not depend on their socio-cultural origins.
You are cherrypicking again. You left out “will”…Schopenhauer and Kastrup’s preferred option. If you are going to quote me then quote the whole.
I’ll write an OP if I feel moved to and your diversionary challenge doesn’t move me. Of course it would be much easier to write an OP if I used AIs as I believe you do without acknowledging it, but I’m time-poor, living on the land as I do, and I don’t approve of using AIs in any way to enhance my thinking and writing.
If the question you are posing is not one of those I have suggested, then just what is the question? A single sentence should be able to say just what your central question and your position on it is.
Yes, that is the question and it would help if those “people” explained clearly just what it is that they do want to defend―but that never seems to make an appearance.
Someone once stated that there’s an austere beauty, a solemn grandeur to the universe - the trillions of glittering stars, billions upon billions of planets, some with life, some where it rains diamonds - just hanging there in cold, dark, empty space, purposeless, meaningless, ex nullus, pro nullus.
Physics and chemistry intersect in biology, but neither of the first two ever possessed the conceptual scaffolding for the last. So while physics studies motion and chemistry studies reactions, they can’t fully capture what biology is, what it is to be alive. To understand my hands folded in prayer, I need to know physics, to understand my mental state when praying I need to know chemistry, but there’s this sense of incompleteness to this purely scientific understanding.
Agreed — the OP and its defenders seem to be engaging in empty philosophizing without truly nailing down what they believe in, such that anyone else such as you or me can make arguments about it.
The OP clearly does not seem to believe that ‘purpose’ is something that is created by humans. The OP clearly believes that ‘purpose’ is something special about life… except that when the OP’s defenders are pressed they will extend it to inanimate objects like rocks. The OP denies that ‘purpose’ is created by God or that ‘purpose’ is a ‘vital force’ to the universe.
Yet the OP and its defenders have not elucidated what they do believe in, and when pressed dance around the subject with arguments about things ‘history’ and whatnot rather than addressing the matter at hand.
I will say that appeals to historical arguments are completely irrelevant. It does not matter how historically people arrived at the position that there is no ‘purpose’ in the universe. All that matters is our arguments here and now. Anything else is a red herring, a distraction from the matter at hand.
I will also say that the idea that the universe does not have any inherent ‘purpose’ is not a matter of us somehow ‘removing’ the concept of ‘purpose’ from the world, as this very argument implies that ‘purpose’ should be part of the world; it presupposes its conclusion. The lack of any ‘purpose’ posited in the world is simply a matter of what model of the universe is most parsimonious — one should assume the simplest model of the world that answers all observations made of it, and the simplest model does not include any special metaphysical quality of ‘purpose’.
You refuse to provide a coherent argument — if you reject creationism, then your model of ‘purpose’ is equivalent to a ‘vital force’ (which when pressed you then extend to rocks), but you deny this too despite all appearances from your arguments that you do believe in this.
I have no interest in discussing it further with you. I’ve provided a lot of information, many references, you simply re-state your view that consciousness is obviously epiphenomenal and physicalism is clearly right, without ever having said anything to justify it, other than your belief that it’s obvious. That’s all I have to say on it.
My problem here is that you clearly argue for a ‘vital force’ yet you stubbornly deny that you argue for such. I am not arguing that you secretly believe in intelligent design — just that if you truly are not arguing for a ‘vital force’ then intelligent design is the only other option consistent with your arguments. So if you do not believe in intelligent design — and I take your word for it — then you must be arguing for a ‘vital force’. It just happens that you steadfastly refuse to recognize that this is what you argue for.
Wayfarer’s post above this shows that he has no interest in any serious critique of his views (whatever they actually are!), that he is here as a preacher not as a philosopher. I have witnessed this strategy of evasion over and over over many years. When the going gets tough he gets going…right outta here.
I.e. taking your ball and going home, after complaining about how people somehow did not understand your arguments (when they were completely unclear to begin with), when pressed on one’s arguments.
And also another thing I sense is the use of ‘physicalism’ as a pejorative, as if it had to be wrong a priori and one does not actually have to make arguments against it.
I’m suggesting that this is based a stereotype. I explained that if Bergson’s ‘elan vital’ is taken as a metaphor for the ability of living organisms to grow, heal, maintain homeostasis, etc, then it is a reasonable metaphor, but that if it is interpreted as a literal ‘force’ then there’s no way of validating the existence of such a proposed force. And it’s stereotyped in that you presume the alternatives are ‘vitalism or physicalism’, whereas this is another kind of argument altogether, and one you might not have previously considered.
What I’m arguing is that living organisms of all kinds have an attribute that is not described in physics, that is, the attribute of being a subject of experience. That argument is based on my reading of phenomenology and related philosophies. As another contributor noted, this is related to the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ rather than being a vitalist argument,
I am quite upfront about challenging physicalism. It’s not intended in a personal sense, although of course it is challenging to have beliefs challenged, but then it is a philosophy forum and it goes with the territory.
Any special characteristic of living organisms that is not described in physics is a ‘vital force’.
The point is that you seem to be of the view that ‘physicalism’ is basically invalid and that you do not need to actually argue as to why you see it as being invalid beyond purely historical arguments, which are not valid because arguments have to apply in the here and now and how the ideas themselves came to be from a historical standpoint is basically irrelevant.
The limitation of physicalism is precisely that it is grounded on a perspective from which the observer has been excluded as a matter of principle. And the reason for that can be traced back to the advent of early modern science. I assure you, this is not an observation that is peculiar to me, it is the subject of a lot of literature.