Looncall
Well-Known Member
"Energy" is just a shorthand way of describing states of objects. It is neither an object nor a substance. Your post is a category error.
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Materialism has officially become dangerous in my eyes.
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"Energy" is just a shorthand way of describing states of objects. It is neither an object nor a substance. Your post is a category error.
Energy is a quantity. It is not an object that has mass and volume (matter). If you believe that or anything else I've said here is erroneous, then prove it.
See survey results here
Preliminary Survey results | PhilPapers Surveys
Philosophers are never able to reach a consensus on what any of the terms in the survey above means. But each of them do stand for a cluster of related ideas, hence its not that ambiguous.
The evidentiary support for the statement that "All humans are mortal" is the observation that all humans observed so far do die. Here the evidentiary argument for naturalism is similar.
Why would properties of matter or fields have mass or volume. Does velocity have mass or volume? Does shape have mass or volume? Consider kinetic energy T = 0.5*m*v^2.
Do you disagree that, here, mass and velocity are properties of matter? Then how can their multiplication give anything other than another property of matter?
The thesis the everything that exists is "natural" is derived inductively? From what evidence? How is it possible to infer evidence for the thesis of "naturalism" when no one can define "natural"? How is it possible to infer anything about "everything that exists"?
I have no idea how to answer that question. What "properties of matter" have mass and volume? Are you suggesting that matter is a property of matter? That doesn't sound coherent to me.
Are any of these questions related to anything I've said, such as: "Energy is a quantity. It is not an object that has mass and volume (matter)"?
As I have noted several times on this thread, the existence of energy proves that thesis of materialism (definition quoted above, in which all phenomena are matter or motions of matter) is false. Do you agree or disagree?
A significant fraction of scientists and modern atheist philosophers define it as follows
Naturalism is the ontological claim that all phenomena are or supervene on entities that are discoverable by and explainable through the methods of the natural sciences.
Evidence for the above metaphysical claim is inductive, in that all phenomena observed so far satisfy this definition.
For philosophers who define naturalism otherwise, you will have to look at their own works to see how they use the word and provide evidence for it.
Completely disagree. Properties of matter are not themselves matter and this is obvious and has always been included in any materialist thesis. I am saying and have demonstrated that energy is a property of matter. Thus existence of energy no more refutes materialism as existence of shapes or dimensions does.
What are "the methods of the natural sciences"?
Do those methods include economics? Sociology? Computer science?
But energy is not matter. To claim that "energy is a property of matter" does not reduce energy to matter. And energy is not reducible to matter. Energy is a conserved quantity; matter is not.
The methods are any technique used by scientists. You are free to look up university websites to determine which fields are called sciences and which are not.
You are going round and round. Length is not matter. But it is a property of matter. Even old classical materialism (like Epicurus) posits that the world is made up of matter with its properties and various interactive activities. Nobody has ever claimed in any materialistic philosophy that properties of matter are also not part of the description of reality.
What could be more vacuous than espousing a metaphysical thesis that you can't even begin to define? That you can't even begin to infer from any evidence? It's bad religion.
People say "I am a materialist" or "I believe naturalism" not because there is anything substantive to those terms, but to belong to a group.
Scientific activities are vacuous?
I'll say it again: Energy is not matter. Energy is not reducible to matter. Energy is a conserved quantity; matter is not. If you disagree with any of that, prove your claims.
Read it again. That isn't what I said.
I will say it again. Energy is very clearly a property of matter, just like mass and volume. Properties of matter have always been part and parcel of the worldviews of materialism. You are engaging in gross caricature.
Given that energy is not reducible to matter, you are claiming to two different and distinct sorts of phenomena exist. That is not monism. And it isn't deduced or inferred from any scientific evidence.
The various methods by which the various scientific disciplines investigate the world are demonstrably not vacuous and I simply have to point to these disciplines and tell you that those are the things which I mean by the methods of science. That is sufficient to answer your question. Now you are free look up websites in Oxford, MIT to check out what those methods are. There are pages and pages of them. You can even learn them and get a degree.
There can be many different types of matter with many different types of properties that these matter possess. Then there would be forces that exist governing interactions between matter. After that there are extended entities like fields and their properties and forces including space and time. So, no, materialism is not, and has never been monistic.