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NancyLebovitz comments on Irrationality Game II - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (380)
Irrationality Game
Being a materialist doesn't exclude nearly as much of the magical, religious, and anomalous as most materialists believe because matter/energy is much weirder than is currently scientifically accepted.
75% certainty.
I'm having trouble understanding what you are claiming. It seems that once anything is found to exist in the actual world, people won't call it "magical" or "anomalous". When Hermione Granger uses an invisibility cloak, it's magic. When researchers at the University of Dallas use an invisibility cloak, it's science.
What I meant was that there may be more to such things as auras, ghosts, precognition, free will, etc. than current skepticism allows for, while still not having anything in the universe other than matter/energy.
Taboo "matter/energy".
Well damn. What is left? "You know... like... the stuff that there is."
Thank you. I was about to ask the same thing.
My point is that what counts as matter/energy may very well not be obvious in different theories.
Algebra.
Causes and effects.
Good point. But this 'cause' word is still a little nebulous and seems to confuse some people. Taboo 'cause'!
Upvoted, as many phenomena that get labelled "magical" or "religious" have readily-identifiable materialist causes. For those phenomena to be a consequence of esoteric physics and to have a more pedestrian materialist explanation that turns out to be incorrect, and to conform to enough of a culturally-prescribed category of magical phenomena to be labelled as such in the first place seems like a staggering collection of coincidences.
Do materialists still exist? In order to vote on this am I to imagine what not-necessarily-coherent model a materialist should in some sense have given their irreversible handicap in the form of a misguided metaphysic? If so I'd vote down; if not I'd vote up.
Upvoted for disagreement with the quibble that there is probably room for a lot of interesting things in the realm of human experience that while not necessarily relating one-to-one with nonhuman physical reality, have significance witin the context of human thought or social interaction and contain elements that normally get lumped into magical or religious.
Nitpick: do you really mean this? Current scientific theories are pretty damn weird. But not, in your view, weird enough?
I'm pretty sure that the current theories aren't weird enough, but less sure that current theories need to be modified to include various things that people experience. However, it does seem to me that materialists are very quick to conclude that mental phenomena have straightforward physical explanations.
May I remind you that scientists rescently created and indirectly observed the elementary particle responsible for mass?
The smallest mote of the thing that makes stuff have inertia. Has. Been. Indirectly. Observed.
What.
Downvoted for agreement. (Retracted because I realized you were talking about in our universe, and I was thinking in principle)