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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29311 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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That aside, I'm actually curious what makes you think "mind" or "soul" or whatever it is you think explains and unifies ESP, free will and supernatural beings wouldn't be "material" in some relevant sense? Like, the material world already has radio waves and magnetism and many other forces that we can't see, but which we see the effects of in our everyday lives. What makes you so sure that ESP, if it exists, wouldn't just be one more invisible force that operates in our material world?

Cartesian Dualism separates mind from matter and attempts to study matter separate from qualia or mental properties. The difference between ESP and Magnetism is that Magnets exist outside of an independent observer. There could have been a universe without life, but still had an electro-magnetic field. A universe without life wouldn't have psychokinesis, ESP, etc, because these are all things that require a mind.

That isn't to say that they couldn't be observed in a scientific and methodological way, nor that the laws governing them couldn't be discovered. But that is why they are typically withheld from the Materialist worldview.

I'm not sure I buy this explanation. Even if our minds are somehow made of soulstuff and not reducible to purely physical processes, I don't know why ESP would need to be explained using soulstuff?

Our eyes somehow get information to our minds/souls, and yet we can explain the basics of sight in purely physical terms. Light bounces off of objects, and hits our eyes. So a physical process gets information into our minds/souls.

Why would ESP need to be a non-physical, non-material process? I could easily see an explanation along the lines of:

  • ESP-particles are constantly hitting physical objects, and travelling large distances.
  • Our ESP-eye is a sensory organ in our brain that ESP-particles can hit, and much like we have visual processing that takes place in our brains, we have ESP-particle processing that is capable of processing the ESP-particles that hit our ESP-eye.
  • It is this process that we call ESP.

Even if the specifics could be a little different from the above, I think it's a good starting point for thinking about what ESP even means in practice. Why do you think that is not what Western science will discover to be the case?

Why do you think that is not what Western science will discover to be the case?

I'm not a Cartesian Dualist, so I don't have a horse in the race. But to test your hypothesis we would need to see if a non-mental physical substance can interact with ESP particles or if only living minds interact with ESP particles. If you lobotomize someone and remove the ESP sensory organ, do ESP particles still hit it? Or do ESP particles only hit sensory organs attached to a thinking mind?

There are some ways that Quantum Mechanics gets phrased that I wonder if it is touching on this mental issue, but sometimes it just seems to be sloppy phrasing by researchers.

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