The Diagonal Argument Against Reductive Materialism

In which I deal the death-blow to all forms of reductive materialism for ever and ever, amen.

Check out EpistemicDuty's vid, which has a link to a very interesting discussion between Grim and Plantinga about the use of similer Cantorian diagonal arguments in theology and modal logic:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=EHilabPBPHI

Category:

Education

Tags:

• positivism
• vienna
• circle
• reductionism
• materialism
• holism
• jaegwon
• kim
• ned
• block
• hilary
• putnam
• philosophy
• randy
• helzerman
• Multiple
• Realizability
• functionalism
• physicalism
• neuroscience
• mind

[RoboJasonMan]

A more interesting line of arguing would be to ask Reductive Materialists how they are lumping all of these material things together to form the idea of a bit. Clearly there is some property of sameness between the different objects, but bit is really this property which they are trying to capture. It's very circular.

[randyhelzerman]

@RoboJasonMan I've asked reductive materialists that, and their answer was that it was perfectly possible to express what all of the bits had in common using physicalistic language. After all, its perfectly possible to express, say, what all electrons have in common using physicalistic language, why should we expect not to be able to express what all bits have in common using physicalistic language? This video is my answer to that question.

[RoboJasonMan]

I don't get your point. All you've shown is that there are uncountably many possible ways to represent a bit materially. There's no contradiction there. Maybe you believe that this contradicts some finiteness assumption of the universe? Obviously, we can't realize all of them at once. However conceptually, we can think of uncountably many ways to physically represent a bit. So what?

[randyhelzerman]

@RoboJasonMan What this proof shows is not that there are an uncountably infinite number of ways to represent a bit materially. What this proof shows is that there is literally no such thing as "all the ways" to represent a bit materially. For the same reason that there is no such thing as the universal set--the very concept is self-contradictory.

[Frutoses]

Go read Wittgenstein and then post a different video.

[randyhelzerman]

@Frutoses *chuckle* I've both read Wittgenstein and posted videos which are different from this ;=0 what's your point?

[Frutoses]

@randyhelzerman What makes you think you created a new thing when you put together a beer can and a yes/no switch? Those two things already existed in the world and no new thing magically appeared in the world when you created the Frankenstein yes/no bit made with a beer can and a yes/no switch. You're not adding anything to the world as it is.

[Frutoses]

@randyhelzerman I seriously can't remember why I told you to read Wittgenstein and post another video, lol. Anyway, are you assuming that there's a finite list of yes/no bits? If you are, your assumption is wrong. I don't think physicists say there's a finite list of yes/no bits. Furthermore, when Jaegwon Kim tells you to reduce the concept of a yes/no bit to all possible material implementations AND all their combinations (that's implied).

[harmonicdog]

A set of all true/false bits is just that, ALL true/false bits and you can't just add a new one that you 'thought' of. If you allow for infinity you can prove anything. Unfortunately for your argument, infinity does not exist in this universe and this is easy to prove.

[JohananRaatz]

(cont.) If the world is indeed information then physics would suggest that the fundamental stuff is in fact "bits" rather than particles!