John C. Wright's Journal

I have spent time I dare not spare pursuing this topic, but hope ever springs eternal from the human breast that I can someday actually explain my position. It is not the disagreements that are based on a correct understanding of what I said that puzzle me, it is disagreements that merely repeat points I had thought were already covered.

But, looking back, I realize journal posts on the Internet can only scrape the surface of what are by their nature very deep topics indeed, requiring a precision of thought and a technical vocabulary tedious or impossible to agree upon in a format like this.

For example, I take for granted that most educated readers know the difference between final cause and mechanical cause, or have read my (or someone’s) explanation of the difference. Not so!

I take for granted that any sane person knows the difference between a word and the object the word represents. Perish the thought!

I take for granted that educated people read Aristotle, preferably in the Greek. Ho ho and ha ha and surely you don’t think the education establishment wants their technopeons able to reason each man for himself?! Nope, all modern education wants is men proficient in technical specialties able to service that great blind machinery we call the modern world, and woe betide he who ponders the whys and wherefores thereof! No Aristotle here!

I am beginning to wonder if I am being absurdly obscure and technical, but I can only confess the ideas seem simple enough to me.

Let me try to explain:

There is a difference between materialism and radical materialism. Read the remainder of this entry »

The only answer I have gotten so far to the question “what experiment proves materialism to be true” is the proposal that brain scans or ingesting alcohol proves that some tentative measure of correlation of some sort that might some day show that material brain conditions influence or affect states of consciousness.

Full answer is here: http://ynglingasaga.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/further-argument-with-john-wright/

This answer is so woefully inadequate that it cannot even be mocked with the mockery it deserves.

From the premise “drinking alcohol can effect your powers of concentration” the conclusion “all non-empirical statements of any kind whatsoever in this or any possible universe, including statements about abstract concepts such as justice,  can be reduced to descriptions of the mechanical causes of eternal pressures affecting brain atom motions, so that what seems to be a statement about justice is merely a report of a person reciting his own internal brain-atom-motion algorithm of that part of the cortex that reacts to encoding on the topic of justice, etc.” does not follow.

Our Viking friend simply assumes that we would all would agree that an hallucination of the smell of a rose caused by electrochemical stimulation of the brain is the same in every way as the scent of a real rose smelled with a real nose in reality. The map is the territory, the word is the thing it represents, justice is not an abstract concept, it is a mere report or recitation of the position of brain atoms in the cortex.

Not only does this not follow, but if we substitute the word ‘materialism’ for the word ‘justice’ we are left with a self-refuting statement: materialism is the proposition that materialism is not a concept, it is merely a report or recitation of the position of brain atoms in the cortex.

The real answer, of course, is that materialism is a metaphysical proposition, not an empirical or scientific conclusion of any observation or experiment.

Read the remainder of this entry »