Is the physical actually spiritual/immaterial?
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Over on Pais' Eliminative Materialism thread, this contention has been raised. Essentially Paisley is saying that the true nature of the physical is sufficiently obscure and mysterious to call the nature of material into question.
"What is the physical?" asks Paisley. "Oscillating quantities (mathematical abstractions) of mass/energy in space-time (clearly abstractions)? The bottom line is that the picture science paints of the physical is not really physical."
"Quantum indeterminacy appears to be the key."
It's an interesting point. I personally would argue that matter is made of molecules and atoms of the 115 elements on the periodic tables and that regardless of its character at a quantum level, matter is observable. But there are grey areas. There's baryon asymmetry and its production of antimatter, a theory supported by CERN's production of antihydrogen atoms.
My personal view is that rather than relating to any sort of matter-based reality, spirituality is an exploration of the human imagination and its ability to project places, people, concepts and feelings. I think the brain is adapted by social living and the demands of survival to be adept at creating alternative realities in order to comprehend motivations and to plan for hunt or conflict, playing out the ramifications of possibilities in a mental landscape that is without risk.
What do people think? Does the peculiar nature of the physical call into question the material?
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
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Doesn't "physical" mean anything that's described by physics?
I think that's why people moved from the term "material" to "physical" because it started to look like physics might discover more than traditional "matter".
yep, this is it. Materialism is still what is commonly referred to as what people believe when many actually subscribe to physicalism (I think, and hope).
And AE, I'd rather posit that the 'spiritual' and immaterial are actually natural, i.e. supernatural, as a concept, doesn't do any good as far as explanation is concerned (though I'm sure you already knew my position regarding the supernatural... lol)
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I don't think there is a spiritual or a supernatural, personally. I think there is a material and an imaginary and a we don't know yet. Of course, this is a position Pais describes as irrational.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
To me, 'spiritual' implies supernatural. Most people who call themselves 'spiritual' want the universe to be fundamentally mysterious and unknowable.
There's another alternative to materialism/physicalism, which is idealism, and IMO, this implies 'mind'. Whether this is a kind of pantheism, or a kind of solipsism, it means that 'mind' permeates the universe, either because 'everything has/is mind' or because 'everything is a product of my mind'. In a sense, this is also a hankering for the mysterious and unknowable, since you're not allowed to ask, "Where did 'mind' come from?"
I think materialism/physicalism works best because it makes the fewest assumptions. Why assume that things are unknowable and not merely unknown? Why assume that mind is fundamental when we can explain mind from non-mind fundamentals?
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I think that materialism is an obsolete concept in society and, more to the particular, in science; by and large due to modern physics (and yet to a philosopher, materialism - as a concept - always equaled naive realism).
We should rather think in cybernetic and process-oriented terms of interactive energy quanta (where qualia is little more than the names we give to things).
This discussion, however, reminds me of the word battles between Berkeley and Hume in the mid-1700's; that some witticist summed up with the sentence 'no matter, never mind'. In saying that, I am also suggesting that this discussion is obsolete. Trying to read just about any thread created by Paisley and/or Fortunate Son (or whatever the hell they are all called) very rapidly brings me to the point of utter disgust; where the word REDRUM starts doing a Jack-in-the-box act in my mind. Why? Because it is blatantly obvious that he/they has/have an agenda with their God babble - and it isn't an honourable one. It is essentially a dualistic position where the objective (God) is lending power and credence to the subjective (the self) through a process of ritualistic behaviour patterns, i.e. magic. In principle no better than the looney "God warrior" from the video I posted a couple of days ago, only equipped with more clever bullshit. But the core problem remains the same: Through the primary act of constructing and believing in an imaginary concept and in the secondary act of submitting his (or her, as it were) will to said concept, the "God warrior" (or whatever else freak, such as the afore mentioned characters) gains the power and justification to shake and move; i.e. to dominate their surroundings, advcating the principle of transcendental submission.
Without getting too far into the Pythagorean number mysticism, I will only state that it begins with monad -> dyad -> triad (multiplicity); which is as good a creation myth as any, but it also holds a truth about the human body-and-mind-complex and the nature of perception: What we call observation should more properly be called interaction. The big question, then, boils down to speculation about non-interacting phenomenons and whether or not their (proposed or imagined) existence is relevant to us. To me, it seems obvious that the God concept is just a name given to a compound complex of memes that essentially are auto-toxic. It makes no difference whether or not there is a God. It is imperative that we as humans learn to separate what's unknown from what's unknowable. We can know the world. You can even call it Creation if you like. But we can only know it as human beings, because that's our terms and conditions of interactivity. So why try to be something else - more - than what we are? The term for that is hubris. Very unbecoming. And quite indistinguishable from both stupidity and evil on a cause-and-effect scale of things.
"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind." (Alphonse Donatien De Sade)
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I think that Satan, I mean, Satin, no...Silk, eh...Cashmere, I mean, Paisley, is right. What is physical? Physicality is a particular rate of vibration. Objects with particles that have a similar rate of vibration to our particles, seem physical to us. If they have significantly higher rate of vibration, then they less or more pass freely through us, like ghosts or neutrinos. And by vibration, I mean the most fundamental level there is, possibly the strings. Majority of the universe actually can and does pass through physical objects. Materialism is therefore far from being objective. Dense matter is rather a kind of anomaly, in cosmic view. Majority of the universe is non-dense-material and invisible to our eyes and mechanical detectors.
But there is an important detail. Our body is not composed of the slowly vibrating matter only. It has components of dense-physical matter, subtle-physical matter called etheric, and a few more components of matter of higher string dimensions. The important detail is, that we use these bodily components of higher dimensions for functions like feeling, emotionality and thinking and others. The physical brain is an organ, that relays these impulses into physical world and back. As long as we are in the physical world, we need our brain and it determines us. But if we leave it, our reasoning and feeling ability should not be affected at all, possibly opposite, it should be enhanced, without physical limits. Because it is our higher-dimensional component that is intelligent, not the brain itself. The brain only determines by it's quality how much of that wisdom is let through into physical world.
The mind itself contains the brain, but is not restricted to it.
Let's consider that by performing things like meditation, visualization and introspection, we exercise the components of ourselves, that are not material, but higher-dimensional. Therefore, it is possible through meditation to explore the part of universe, that is not accessible through dense-material detectors. It is therefore perceived as finding another universe inside ourselves, "inner worlds", let's say. These are not inner, but accessible through our inner qualities. The rest is a result of human factor - which is mostly about training. If people would spend just as much time and effort on exploring spiritual reality, as they spend on let's say academic studies, they would be just as succesful.
Finally an interesting topic! I thought that slack season is supposed to be in the summer.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
That's not what the rest of us means by it.
It means anything describable by physics.