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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   30993 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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My understanding of physicalism is that its main point is very much not that intelligence can come from mechanical causation - I think that most modern self-identified non-physicalists would agree that intelligence can come from mechanical causation. Physicalism claims that consciousness comes from mechanical causation, which is a claim that is orthogonal to the claim that intelligence can come from mechanical causation.

I wasn't trying to use a specific meaning of 'physicalism', just a general sense that 'physics is all there is', but

In philosophy, physicalism is the view that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical,[1] or that everything supervenes on the physical.[2] It is opposed to idealism, according to which the world arises from mind. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality, unlike "two-substance" (mind–body dualism) or "many-substance" (pluralism) views. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.

this also works

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