At what point should we look for a non-materialistic explanation?

Well your basic argument here is simply irreducible complexity, which has been dealt with in innumerable threads all over the forum, it isn't a convincing argument against evolution.The assumption that all of the mutations required to change a primitive system into a more complex one must all happen at the same time is a creationist fantasy. As I said before, there are several threads on how evolution can produce irreducibly complex systems (such as Irreducible Complexity and TalkOrigins. This is little more than an outright lie. It is slightly confused by the focus on germ cells. Obviously at the germ cell stage it is going to be impossible to say if there is a novel beneficial mutation because you can't tell if a new mutation is beneficial until you see how it affects the organisms phenotype. There are many instances of offspring with heritable beneficial traits that their parents did not have however, which is as close as one can possibly get to observing beneficial mutations in germ cells.TTFN,WK

Hi Lyx2NO, gobbledgoop was not meant to pretend confusion as profundity. There is no confusion in wondering about something. Not knowing a answer and and wondering about it is what drives humanity to discovery in my opinion.

hi ∅ Your gobbledygook expressed no wonder. The first three sentences were absolutes, and the remaining two were rhetoric betraying a misconception that material = mass and volume. ("At what point do quantum waves manifest physical reality?" At the point that they exist.)True enough if one isn't using wonder as the end point. A child who wonders how to tie her shoes will not have an advantage over a child who tries to tie her shoes.

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The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.

The child who ties her shoes is the one who dares wonder if she can. Half the battle of application is the courage to think one can achieve. rhetoric betraying a misconception that material equals mass and volume. How is this a misconception? Granted the physics that makes up our reality can be counter intuitive. Why would you have a problem with someone thinking mass and volume can describe material? And why would you want to lable someones post as gobbledgoop? When the questions are legitimate and cogent and honest and reasonable. Whats up with that?

Hi ∅ Not if she stopped at wondering as religion and mysticism encourage. They say things like "Better to be ignorant in wonder than certain in nihilism." Makes a truly curious person want to hurl. One has to dare to get past the wonder. Have you changed sides then? No longer sated by wonder? If you type [qs]This is what you said.[/qs] you'll get and then you can tell me why it's wrong. Because neither mass nor volume are required for an explanation to be materialistic. Gravity has neither. Is the answer to cavediver's question "when we drop a ball."? I don't. Whereas something with mass or volume is clearly material (and let me be sure we're not equivocating here; by material we're not talking about stuff. We're talking about the philosophical concept of materialism.) materialistic explanations are not restricted to mass and volume. When you went on about energy, quarks or strange charm(?) did you have the slightest clue as to what any of it meant? Yet you use it in an argument against materialistic explanations* while all of them, if not inventions of your own making, are materialistic explanations. And you missed that little point because you were burying it in gobbledygook. I read something somewhere sometime about philosophy being the art of confounding a subject until it is no longer possible to form an argument against it. Was that you?Please, ∅, don't take what I say to heart. I mean no slight. If I start talking utter rubbish I will rely on you to tell me (that goes for all of you). It's why I'm here, and I've got skin like a old pudding.*I'm granting myself the liberty of answering the question for you in the negative.

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The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.

If I am guilty of invoking gobbledgoop,
I apologize, but it is not intentional.There has been nothing in any of my post that were unreasonable imo.
I simply stated that it is wonderous how a man without arms can move a machine hand with his thoughts. If I said what I really wanted to say like....it is miraculous I fear your coffee would blow through your nose. There are certain words that tend to flare the nostrils, words like wonderous, curious, supernatural, spiritual, etc..
They are just words, ambiguous amorphose abiguity, or gobbledgoop.
Words that can invoke wiggle room or fudge factors to otherwise sober discussions. Guilty as charged. For my penance I will say a prayer to the LHC. Peace.

Does this answer to which point I should look for non-materialistic explanations? As I look in wonder at the Grand Canyon, should I consider a non-materialistic explanation for its formation rather then the more prosaic 10 million years of erosion? Should we not examine this materialistically? There are many point in the system where we can interject ourselves. If we fail to connect the electrodes to his body his thought no longer move the arm. If we disconnect the arm from its power source his thoughts no longer move the arm. If we connect the electrodes to the pick-ups of an electric guitar (through a suitable attenuator) would we not have robot jazz hands? What is there to indicate that a non-materialistic explanation is in order?For the sake of argument let us say he is moving the arm with his thoughts, should we not still examine this materialistically? Our successes with alchemy, curses and love spells has been less then stellar. I have five handbooks of aeronautics; the oldest dating to 1909. None of them list flying carpets. Is this due to flying carpets flaring the nostrils of aeronautical engineers. It isn't the use of certain words but the abuse of certain words that flair the nostrils. Please, ∅, say what you really want to say that we might stop beating around the bush. But could you include in what you really want to say something about when a non-materialistic explanation ever explained anything? We can work on that.

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The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.

Hello lyxNO, I suppose I should ask what would be an example of non material. Perhaps the only thing that is non material would be something smaller than plankes length. Or something that has no mass, something not composed of matter. Or perhaps something that can not be measured.Flageston was once an example of the nonmaterialistic explanation of the material. Then there were those who suggested ether may be the reason light can propagate as a wave.I think the best example of a nonmaterialistic explanation of the material is the fundamental forces:
Gravitational,electromagnetic,nuclear.
I realize the electromagnetic and nuclear have particles associated with them, but the gravaton is still not confirmed.So there ya have it. non material forces acting on matter to make stuff happen. I guess one could ask from whence these forces came.
At what point should we look for the wondrous would be just that I wonder where the forces that manifest our cosmos came from?Then there is the mind, consciousness, thought. I suppose a thought could be likened to a boson of consciousness. The particle of consciousness. The brain the medium.How does the non material consciousness affect the material. What force can explain that? EM explains the neurons transmission, but where does this cascade begin? If one where to describe the mind as non material then it would follow that the mind could be an example of a nonmaterialistic explanation for consciousness.Don’t tell me, let me guess...more gobbled goop.

If you define gravity as being 'non material' then the question could be asked of gravity, or electromagnetic radiation. The answer is that they are not necssarily seperated in the way that you suggest - and almost certainly not in the sense that the OP meant.Material is a somewhat old fashioned term, that is used now because of convention. Physical is often a term used nowadays in philosophy to avoid this linguistic confusion. That which is is physical is basically that which is describable via the methodology of physics. So gravity is physical.Are thoughts? Well until you define what a 'thought' actually is, we can't say. It certainly seems that thoughts have a physical basis, just like 'colour' has a physical basis. Physicalism:

quote:

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Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don't deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don't seem physical items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical.

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The question is: is there a circumstance where we have to abandon this idea - and does it actually help to do so?

Well that is the catch all statement. Are dimensions physical? Particle theorist postulate that the most fundamental thing that can be is a string.
So what is the string?Reality is quantized according to quantum mechanics. So when electrons move between energy states they do so by what is know as a quantum leap. Where are they going? Leaping to where to reappear.
Described a probabilities and waves......sounds very non physical to me. All this going on within every googleplex of a second to what end.
Schrdinger’s Cat smeared out into a amalgamation of possibilities.
I am no scientist. But it seems at least to me that the someone who thinks something can exist from nothing is no more ridiculous than someone who thinks it cant. In regards to the posted definition of Physicals I concede there is no free lunch in the universeEdited by 1.61803, : spellingEdited by 1.61803, : add quotebox

In the same sense that colours are physical, yes. Physical. And that's string theorists, not particle theorists - some of whom may not subscribe to string theory They don't 'go' anywhere. The 'leap' is an analogy. They just change energy states. They 'go' to the new energy state. Why is it non-physical?Remember - I'm not referring to the physical to mean 'that which is bosonic matter'. Quantum physics is still physics. If you want to argue for a definition of 'non-physical' such that quantum physics is 'non-physical' then again I am fairly sure are using a different definition than the OP.I could define physical as 'something that is orange', but that wouldn't really have any impact on the actual metaphysical argument. Anything and everything can be the subject of ridicule. But that isn't the question at hand.According to a physicalist, if you created an identical universe that shared all the same physical properties as this one - the universes would be completely identical. A non-physicalist might argue that a person is not solely determined by physical properties such as the state of their brain, but that a 'soul' exists seperate. So even if the bodies were identical, the brains identical and the experiences identical...if the souls are different then they are different people who react differently to the same stimuli and thus the universes are different.

No, not gobbledygook. I do not use the term that I might dismiss your arguments but to dismiss gobbledygook. Your arguments will be met with arguments; or, on rare occasion, agreement. Now you've got me legitimately stumped. I don't know. Every time I try to think of something non-material I run into the word magic and that's just a synonym.In my confusion let me make an example, if I can. Say Joe has PK. I stick Joe in a Faraday cage inside an access proof both full of gages and meters for everything I can think of. Joe sits naked at a table facing a floor to ceiling lexan panel separating a second table with a 10 gram weight on it. Using only his thoughts he lifts the 10 gram weight a decimeter into the air with all the showmanship and surely as I would use to pick up a pencil with my hand. My gages and meters are unaffected before, during or after the lift.Has Joe demonstrated a non-material ability, or am I (and maybe joe) not bright enough to figure out what He's doing? It could be that there is a materialistic, or physical, per the mighty modulous, way for the mind to effect dark matter and energy that my gages and meters are insensitive too. I don't know. How could I know without a full and complete understanding of the workings of the Universe?

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Thank you, modulous, for your post. But by way of warning, as envy is a sin, your posts are leading a small child away from the righteous path. I've heard you can get-it big time for that. How do you manage to be so consistently good?

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*With apologies to Miss Joplin.Edited by lyx2no, : Like, a gazzlion typos.

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The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.

Hi lyx2n0, I do not believe in magic other than it's ability to confound. However if someone could levitate a object with his mind I would not think magic but some unknown force this person can tap into. Dr. Dean Radin research, Top Gun pilots where tested to try and find out why they have an "edge". The were hooked up with sensors on they're head and figertips. A series of randomly selected images shown on screen. Some pleasant images, some disturbing. The pilots where showing vitals signs consistent with the disturbing images milliseconds prior to the random image being displayed. Alluding to them obtaining knowledge prior to events.
Are they tapping into the future milliseconds before the average person can? Is this why they can make those split second decisions in the cockpit that always seem to be the right choice? Is this perhaps a form of ESP? It is intriguing regardless. Not magic, just unexplained phenomenon with rational explanations.
Another weird one is Masaru Emoto's workDEFINE_MEpsuedo science, probably. But still intriguing. Edited by 1.61803, : spelling

Hello Modulous, The problem I have with this premise is that initial conditions can never be the same. So this in itself would prevent a duplicate world.
And although it is true reality is deterministic there is also a level of randomness to it. But given that this world somehow comes to be identical I would say it would be identical. Souls and emotions and everything else. Would the iron molecules in a indviduals would be the same? Would spontanenous mutations in genes be the same? Would these two worlds evolve on every level of physics end up the same? I can not see how. Just one non functioning microtubual in a sperms flagellum would wipe out Hitlers whole family line. Or perhaps the man who kept him out of art school would not be there to discourage the young Hitler to persue art rather than facism and world domination. Many worlds theory run amuck!!! I do not know what the soul is. It is comforting to think such a thing exist. It is also comforting to think we are truly individual, one soul per occupant.
But some people believe there is one universal soul to which we all tap into. The Collective soul, or Collective conciousness. The brain being the hardware to access the connection and the mind the software.
When we die the connection is terminated. I do not know. I am not a physicalist though, I still think the mind is non physical.

Our argument seems to reduce to "some stuff is neat." Agreed.

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The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.