Materialism in society... what impact does it have?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I think I've figured out why this doesn't make sense. My problem is not with "materialism" generally. It is with "Eliminative Materialism" that wants to say that qualia and subjective experience based upon individual consciousness does not exist:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism

Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind (or folk psychology) is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist. Some eliminativists argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. Rather, they argue that psychological concepts of behaviour and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level.[1] Other versions entail the non-existence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.[2]

Eliminativism stands in opposition to reductive materialism, which argues that a mental state is well defined, and that further research will result in a more detailed, but not different understanding.[3] An intermediate position is revisionary materialism, which will often argue that the mental state in question will prove to be somewhat reducible to physical phenomena - with some changes to the common sense concept.

Nunki,

You are aware that you can reject "god did it" and not be a materialist, right?

[OnionAhaiReborn]

Scot, you should know that the possibility that it's dualism that turned you into an airplane reclining sociopath has not escaped my notice. :P

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

OAR,

;)

[Castel]

Must say this is my take on the OP aswell..

Though my knowledge of Pickup Artists is limited to Prince Alexander, I'd say the phenomenon has nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with douches wanting to brag about their ability to get laid.

It also has to do with enough pop psychology being out there that we are becoming (heh, are) skeptical of the magic "soul" (yes I know that this isn't the only option) as well. You start being exposed to things that claim to know what makes people tick regardless of whatever they say to themselves then you're on the road.

This seems more like an empirical issue to me. It doesn't matter if you believe in any special "soul", it's really up to science to decide just how exploitable we are or how much of a "miracle" consciousness is.. All you need to believe is that the rules of the universe are consistent.

Does materialism make it easier to see people a certain way? Maybe. But we have to question how much harder the non-materialist views of most people truly make it, and whether it has done so on legitimate grounds.Certainly they haven't been waging a holy war against the flood of pop psychology texts flooding the market.. Most of the debate I've seen seemed to be concerned with what consciousness is, not whether all X particular quirk of psychology exists or not.

[Sci-2]

This seems more like an empirical issue to me. It doesn't matter if you believe in any special "soul", it's really up to science to decide just how exploitable we are or how much of a "miracle" consciousness is.. All you need to believe is that the rules of the universe are consistent.

Is it an issue science can answer? (Cue dexterity save against attempted stoning.)

Consider Nagel's thoughts on this:

"If emergence is the whole truth, it implies that mental states are present in the organism as a whole, or its central nervous system, without any grounding in the elements that constitute the organism, except for the physical character of those elements that permits them to be arranged in the complex form that, according to the higher-level theory, connects the physical with the mental. That such a purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted out of the properties and relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic."

A how explanation - in this case at least - is far away from a why explanation, in the same way that a cook need not be a chemist to perform excellently at her craft.

This doesn't mystically prove a Scriptural God - in fact IMO these sorts of metaphysical issues are a sign of the Universe's plausible absurdity. Perhaps Trickster does make this world...

[Castel]

Is it an issue science can answer? (Cue dexterity save against attempted stoning.)

Consider Nagel's thoughts on this:

"If emergence is the whole truth, it implies that mental states are present in the organism as a whole, or its central nervous system, without any grounding in the elements that constitute the organism, except for the physical character of those elements that permits them to be arranged in the complex form that, according to the higher-level theory, connects the physical with the mental. That such a purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted out of the properties and relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic."

A how explanation - in this case at least - is far away from a why explanation, in the same way that a cook need not be a chemist to perform excellently at her craft.

This doesn't mystically prove a Scriptural God - in fact IMO these sorts of metaphysical issues are a sign of the Universe's plausible absurdity. Perhaps Trickster does make this world...

The nature of consciousness? Maybe.

It doesn't matter here though, does it? The how is the important bit for Scot's complaint. If the means can be discovered then all the talk of the miracle of consciousness is indeed meaningless, even if consciousness isn't mundane, because his beef is with the sort of person that believes that the "how" is something that can be known and used. The true miracle that gets rid of that person is there being no consistent path, not the lack of a concrete theory or the lack of respect for the mysteries of consciousness.

[Sci-2]

On the level of stopping pickup artists, I agree that their metaphysical positions are probably too varied to be influenced by materialism. I think the idea that women are robots of meat & bone isn't the biggest motivator for pick up artists - it's not like immaterialism in the form of religion has been all that good to women either.

It also seems this kind of dehumanization, in some sense, actually relies on the weird kind of Platonism gender essentialism requires?

[Solmyr]

I, too, came in this thread expecting to debate the more common definition of materialism; instead I found what seems to be the academic definition from the field of philosophy. To clarify:

materialism

1.

a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.

2.

(Philosophy)

the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.

I am still not 100% certain as to whether Scot wishes to debate solely within the scope of (2). But if it is indeed (2) that we are debating, then I think most rational people would agree that everything we are and that we know is matter (or anti-matter ), but this is no way makes us dehumanize others and lead us down a road of manipulation and sociopathy. For one, those who truly understand what complicated sacks of meat we are, also know that it is impossible for us to predict or control other sacks of meat. As powerful as the brain is, it's more complex than it is powerful - i.e. the brain does not fully understand itself ;). Or, in other words, people do not fully understand themselves. That is more true for others, but also true for the individual - many people cannot truly know what they may do given a specific set of factors until they actually come to experience them.

It is not dehumanization to accept facts proven through observation.

[Sci-2]

then I think most rational people would agree that everything we are and that we know is matter (or anti-matter ),

Call me crazy then b/c I think the likelihood of materialism being correct is slim to none.

@Ser Scott:

Some words of my fav atheist Raymond Tallis should put your mind somewhat at ease:

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves

There has been much breathless talk of late about all the varied mysteries of human existence that have been or soon will be solved by neuroscience. As a clinical neuroscientist, I could easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that I believe has a better claim than mathematics to being Queen of the Sciences. For a start, it is a science in which many other sciences converge: physics, biology, chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, and psychology, among others. In addition, its object of study is the one material object that, of all the material objects in the universe, bears most closely on our lives: the brain, and more generally, the nervous system. So let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.

What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. Its descriptions of what these phenomena are and of how they arise are incomplete in several crucial respects, as we will see. The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith...