The Democrat Party Hates America

[Immanuel Can]

Yeah, left is manifestly associated with evil by the likes of Walker and Mr Can. The French for left is gauche and in Italian it's sinistra; clumsy and sinister in English. There's stuff in the bible about God's left hand which Mr Can would know more about than me, but I think that's the root of it.

Actually, it's FAR deeper than that.

The political Left, today, is Socialist and Neo-Marxist. And I have a good acquaintance with Marx, Adorno, Foucault, Derrida (though less: he's nearly unreadable), Baudrillard, Lacan...and also with Hegel, from whom Marx stole so many of his essentially-unoriginal philosophical concepts like the dialectic. And in the world of applying those ideas, Socialists have crashed every economy and educational project they've been allowed to manipulate, and have killed more people in history than anybody else, by orders of magnitude -- some 140 million, conservatively estimated, in the last century alone.

So evil and the Left are already closely associated. There's no work to be done there.

[Will Bouwman]

Yeah, it is. You're not "admitting the limits of what you can know," but rather, asserting an open-ended optimism about what science can achieve, based on nothing more than its success in an unrelated area.

That's news to me. I remember saying I don't know what the limits of physics are several times. Are you sure you have the right Will Bouwman?

I just go by what you write. I have no more to go on. This is a written format.

Oh? Perhaps you could show me where I asserted an open-ended optimism about what science can achieve.

[FlashDangerpants]

left

The most elegant argument against freedom of will is the way in which one can operate Immanuel Can like a puppet simply by mentioning that word in his presence.

It's almost as unfair as saying "woke" anywhere near veggie.

[Immanuel Can]

That's news to me. I remember saying I don't know what the limits of physics are several times. Are you sure you have the right Will Bouwman?

I just go by what you write. I have no more to go on. This is a written format.

Oh? Perhaps you could show me where I asserted an open-ended optimism about what science can achieve.

How about here?
IC: do you believe physics can describe every real phenomenon, or just some real phenomena?

WB: I do not believe either. I have told you a number of times that I don't know which is true, and it doesn't strike me as the sort of question to which I need to commit any belief.

"I don't know which is true"? You should. Unless you're behaving like an eliminativist, of course. And "I [don't] need to commit any belief" to it? Really? Because you're holding out the eliminativist hope, and don't want to cut it off?

So in other words, you're saying you don't need to recognize that physics cannot describe every real phenomenon. You simply refuse to acknowledge the obvious fact that -- at least at present -- it cannot. You say you don't "need to commit any belief" to the answer, which is no more than a way of saying, "I'm not thinking carefully about the facts regarding physics' present limitations, and I refuse to." And, of course, the only reason for taking such a position would seem to be to hold open the door for a possibility that has no basis in reality -- namely, that physics will one day miraculously show itself able to perform what it could not at all perform today.

And then, to back that up, you provided the example of detecting colour qualia by logging changes in the physical brain, as if that represented some physics inroad on the world of mind. Of course, it doesn't, as the video you posted also says.

So you'll have to forgive me for labouring under the delusion that you're behaving just like a speculative eliminativist. You've sure given enough evidence you are.

[FlashDangerpants]

I am willing to offer an entire fortune (17) of FlashDangerPoints to whomever can successfully explain to IC what eliminativism actually means.

He currently seems to still think it means "eliminating the immaterial" or something.

[henry quirk]

Me, I don't know what it is, but my duckduckgo assist sez...

Eliminativism, particularly in philosophy of mind, is the view that many common mental states, like beliefs and desires, do not exist as we typically understand them. It suggests that our everyday psychological concepts should be replaced with explanations based on neuroscience and physical processes.

...and that sounds a lot like eliminating the immaterial to me...a least in the same ballpark.

[FlashDangerpants]

Me, I don't know what it is, but my duckduckgo assist sez...

Eliminativism, particularly in philosophy of mind, is the view that many common mental states, like beliefs and desires, do not exist as we typically understand them. It suggests that our everyday psychological concepts should be replaced with explanations based on neuroscience and physical processes.

...and that sounds a lot like eliminating the immaterial to me...a least in the same ballpark.

Ah yes, the famous philosophical school of "sounds a lot like". I do so miss the carefree days of my youth, spent reading Frege beneath the leafy willows and marvelling at his argument that it's a little bit like there can be more than one denotive reference to the same denoted object.

The truth is that the object denoted by the phrase "eliminative materialism" is not the same as that which is denoted by only "materialism" because there are many types of materialism. All materialisms purport to describe the world in full without need to any additional supernatural realms which is all it takes to meet your current sounds-a-lot-like definition. But non-eliminative versions don't say that all talk of Beliefs and Desires is mistaken, while the eliminative versions do claim that, and thus they eliminate BDM (which is not a sex thing).

Willy B has never to my knowledge expressed any eliminativist intent if that concept is properly understood. But mister Can doesn't respond well to the idea that he has made some sort of mistake or hasn't quite understood something properly.

[henry quirk]

Willy B has never to my knowledge expressed any eliminativist intent if that concept is properly understood. But mister Can doesn't respond well to the idea that he has made some sort of mistake or hasn't quite understood something properly.

I wouldn't know: I'm not following the squabble. Your lil request caught my eye and I butt'd in.

My mistake.

[Immanuel Can]

Willy B has never to my knowledge expressed any eliminativist intent if that concept is properly understood. But mister Can doesn't respond well to the idea that he has made some sort of mistake or hasn't quite understood something properly.

I wouldn't know: I'm not following the squabble. Your lil request caught my eye and I butt'd in.

My mistake.

You're actually right, Henry. Eliminativism arose in the middle of the 20th Century, in association with the mind-brain theories of Paul and Patty Churchland. They argued that when neuroscience has progressed sufficiently, it will inevitably eliminate all need of explanations drawing on non-brain explanations.

Of course, they were being silly in that...for two reasons. One was that science manifestly had not YET done anything of the kind, and in fact, had made no real inroads on questions about mind-phenomena at all; so they had no evidence to warrant their confidence. But secondly, they were making a wild category error: it was as if they were theorizing, "We've travelled to the Moon, therefore space travel will one day take us to another dimension of existence," or "The good ship Queen Elizabeth II has already floated, therefore, one day it will fly."

[FlashDangerpants]

Willy B has never to my knowledge expressed any eliminativist intent if that concept is properly understood. But mister Can doesn't respond well to the idea that he has made some sort of mistake or hasn't quite understood something properly.

I wouldn't know: I'm not following the squabble. Your lil request caught my eye and I butt'd in.

My mistake.

But you are so close to the prize Henry. All you have to do is get mister Can to understand that in Paul Churchland's famous 1981 paper "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes", Paul Churchland presents several arguments in favour of dropping common-sense psychology that have shaped the modern debate about the status of ordinary notions like belief. And that Patricia Churchland’s provocative 1986 book, Neurophilosophy, suggests that developments in neuroscience point to a bleak future for common-sense mental states.
Which is all text that I have borrowed from the exact same source that you got your definition from, the SEP...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mate ... iminative/

You can earn 17 whole FlashDangerPoints just by explaining that what is eliminated via eliminativism is specifically a set of psychological verbs and nouns, such as belief and desire...

His pride will never allow him to learn anything from me or WillyB, but you are his guy, his amigo, you're sort of his pet, maybe you can teach him one thing that would help him pose as a philosopher just that little bit more persuasively in future.

[henry quirk]

You're actually right, Henry.

[henry quirk]

you're sort of his pet

[Impenitent]

"what is eliminated via eliminativism..."

this one is pure magic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9-cYq8g_tg

-Imp

[Immanuel Can]

"what is eliminated via eliminativism..."

this one is pure magic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9-cYq8g_tg

-Imp

The eliminativist is like the newspaper: the bunny just don't fit.

[FlashDangerpants]

"what is eliminated via eliminativism..."

this one is pure magic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9-cYq8g_tg

-Imp

The eliminativist is like the newspaper: the bunny just don't fit.

Kind of, yeah. Because the eliminativist materialist agrees to some extent with the dualists' argument that they cannot reduce some mental phenomena such as desires into a purely physical description of the world, they make those things disappear instead... a bit like the bunny in the video.

So they aren't eliminating metaphysical whatnots. That sort of thing isn't even in the picture, metaphysical explanations are gone before the story begins. They are eliminating psychological objects that are still in the picture when the action starts, but which they reckon we are mistaken in supposing to be discrete parts of the world, or in any other way explanatorily useful.

There is hope for you yet Mannie. We can kick that brain of yours into some kind of life.