A FEW WEEKS BACK I posted a Youtube of the philosopher Jeffrey Kaplan in which he presented the paradox at the quest to found mathematics absolutely in logic and why, through an analysis of the linguistic study of predication, the paradox couldn't just be dismissed as a product of mathematical games.
I listened to another of his videos of The First 7 Philosophy Texts You Should Read. Any such list is bound to be a matter of disagreement, especially if you're limiting yourself to such a small number of texts. I think anyone who makes such a list is bound to expose their personal bias, which his does.
One of them was not a book but a letter that the Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote to Descartes posing the materialists' favorite putdown of Descarte's dualistic model of minds and bodies. It's become an old saw of barroom style atheism and the allegedly less vulgar kind of atheism that used to drink more refined booze at the high table, how does an immaterial entity move the physical body, now does it motivate it since it has no mass or energy such as physics attributes movement of physical bodies to.
I posed the question that I think rather defeats that famous question by noting it has within it the logical flaw of insisting that the preferred outcome of the materialist is contained within the premises of the question, that it would insist that an entity proposed to not be physical have exactly and only the properties, abilities, characteristics of matter and energy as understood by physics. That the proposed non-physical mind have to conform to the limits of what physical objects can be shown to be able to do and no others. That it be a material object.
Princess Elizabeth and apparently you make several mistakes in her challenge to Descartes' theory. You seem to believe that something which is proposed to not be the same thing as matter would have to have exactly the same qualities of matter, in which case it would be matter for all intents and purposes. I wonder why that doesn't seem to impinge on materialists considering the observer effect in physics, which has experimental confirmation as being a real thing.
You do understand that lack of an explanation of something so impervious to observation or to experimental disconfirmation is a far cry from a refutation. Materialists have never successfully addressed problems in this area and it's never considered to be a problem for their ideological preferences. Which is what I think this is, a matter of ideological preference, not actual truth.
To insist that non-physical entities must be restricted in the ways that physics and the primitive human experience of non-living objects seem to be limited is to beg the question in a rather obvious way.
That it isn't possible for us to investigate such a non-physical entity in the ways that humans have invented to study objects and even organisms by cutting out even some of the most obvious features of, especially, animals, so as to come to determinations about them as physical objects is hardly surprising. When it is a question of the minds of people which we can gain some possible knowledge of by the articulations of those who experience their own minds and, I say even more so animals who can't articulate their experience of their minds, the idea that you could possibly use methods devised to study physics, chemistry, legitimate aspects of biology to study minds is worse than irrational, it is delusional.
I posted that comment on Jeffrey Kaplan's video three weeks back hopeing that he or one of his more intelligent fan base would take up the question, but, alas, no response has been made to it. The glory days of materialists defending their ideology against even the mildest of implications opposing them a seem to be gone. Or, maybe, he's got no answer to the problem. I would have hoped if that's the case then he would have pointed out that that famous objection to "Cartesian dualism" was philosophically incompetent. Of course, it doesn't "prove" Descartes was right, I don't think he was, I think his mechanical model of the universe was highly imperfect and basically flawed. I think he's a good example of how a fixation on mathematical abstraction can lead to depravity. I have gone on and on about his incredible cruelty in dissecting his poor wife's dog alive, attributing the poor dog's cries of agony to being nothing more significant than the sounds a malfunctioning machine makes. I cannot fail to think it was a sadistic act of cruelty, perhaps hostility to his wife, too, that was looking for a philosophical excuse. I hope he's spent considerable time in hell for that one, and I'm a universalist.
I also asked how the observer effect theorized in quantum physics and which has some actual experimental confirmation wouldn't blow the entire assumption contained in the Princesses letter out of consideration. No answer to that, either. As has been pointed out over those experiments that materialists detest, those experiments are not only very careful in their experimental methodology but they support the theoretical predictions made by thoroughly conventional physicists. I doubt there is any materialistic theory of minds that has that kind of confirmation.
Maybe I'll revive those questions I pestered atheists with a few years back, maybe I'll read the posts and the reactions to them and update them to be even more provocative.
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