Comment by coffeecantcode
2 months ago
The comparison was risky, I’ll give you that. I think we’ve both already come to the conclusion that neither of us is going to prove much to the other, as you’ve stated our belief systems clash in multiple important ways. I would argue that my idealistic and (more importantly but not yet mentioned) my humanistic views of the world are not wholly incompatible with naturalism, given you are willing to give wide berth to aspects of natural forces like consciousness and what we do with it, which you may not be. On materialism, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere.
And to your apple example, I never implied that numbers do not originate in the material world or are not derived from there, only that their true utility is realized when they have been abstracted over all the other types of fruit, and animals, and crops, etc. What started as piles of apples becomes something like one level of abstraction higher than a pile of apples, it becomes 10. But you have specifically said you have no interest in discussing things of this nature so I’ll stop. But I’m leaving this paragraph because I took the time to write it.
Your request for an abstraction that does not derive from the material is a bit of an impossible task isn’t it? And like I said I never claimed that these abstractions did not originate in the material, just that over time they accumulated related truths to become greater than the material itself.
I know our discussion is most likely over but wanted to apologize for being unclear. I wasn't asking for an abstraction that was divorced from something material; I was asking for an example of an abstraction which has shown something true, where that true thing could not then be verified in the material world, as in my apple example. Basically I'm asking for an example of "they accumulated related truths to become greater than the material itself."
No worries! I’ve only done a bit of thinking on this specifically but I struggle to understand why you are asking for an abstraction that could not be verified in the material world. From my understanding the only value that abstractions have is if they can be effectively verified and acted out in the material world. Otherwise why bother abstracting on them!
The abstraction itself exists outside of the material world, we’ve already beaten that horse, but for an example of ‘accumulating related truths to become greater than the material itself’ I would point to food.
Materially, food serves to nurture and satiate, to be found and eaten. But one level up, when abstracted upon, food becomes information. It becomes where to find the food, when the food appears, how much of the food is around. It provides an advantage to those that think in those terms instead of those that react to the appearance of food and eat it and move on to find some more. Animals over time evolve around food and food availability, they move seasonally to find it, they give birth near it, etc. That is not the same as abstracting information from food—this has spearheaded our evolutionary course from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to squeezing the life out of our planet in pursuit of absolute control of our surroundings (food).
Yeah, this doesn’t work for me at all. I don’t agree that food has been abstracted away at any level, much less that it somehow turned into where to find food, etc. All of that is just information. Thanks for the discussion though.