Part of an ongoing conversation. This is in answer to several comments by Dr. A, our local materialist. He is suffering spasms of frustration, and accuses me of not heeding his arguments and being frivolous in my reply:
If all this time you have not understood what I meant by final versus mechanical cause, or qualitative versus quantitative statements, or measurable phenomena versus non-measurable numena, then, despite my many many examples and very patient explanations, the conversation has been in vain.
As I said when we reached this same impasse last year, you are motionless in a set of axioms that you have not (I assume) yet examined. Because have not examined them, you are reduced to merely repeating your axioms as if it were self evident.
Just take my word for this: it is not self evident that all things both material motions and non-material ideas and their non-moving logical relations can be reduced to a description of a material motion. I have given you not once but many times an argument that alleges to show that the matter is not only NOT self-evident, that it is in fact self-contradictory. Whenever I do, you start talking about your magical brain atoms or going off on some unrelated tangent.
These kind of communication failures happen for one reason and one reason only: one of the two persons involved, or both, are making an assumption not yet articulated at a more basic level of philosophy.
In order for the conversation to continue, that more basic level has to be addressed.
The idea that either one of us is deliberately being stupid, or deliberately not listening, or deliberately is ignoring the evidence or the argument is childish. It may happen among politicians or public speakers or other persons with a reason to treat the argument like an opportunity for rhetoric, but if either one of us were merely trying to score points and not have an earnest conversation, we both would have quit months ago.
We did not quit months ago. Both of us are serious. Both of us are listening to the other. Neither is making sense to the other. Ergo: what is the hidden assumption that severs our worldviews one from the other?
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