On the "physical" might come to include "mental" meme.
Just a snippet from a dialog. I had mentioned I have very little idea what "physical" and "material" even mean.
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don't know what "physcial" means when applied to a substance or entity.
I understand what the laws of physics are.
Thus I can construct a sense for "physical object" as "object governed by the laws of physics."
All the current presumed laws of physics exclude freedom (quantum indeterminacy being no place to locate freedom).
When someone, anyone, can give me a reason, any reason, to think that they know what a completed physics will look like, I'm all ears.
Until then, the only sense of "physical object" I can make any sense of is such that no physical object is free.
Let's consider the following thesis:
SPEC-P Possibly, "physical" comes to extend to consciousness.
This is distinct from
SPEC-L Possibly, physical laws come to encompass consciousness in such a way to allow for freedom of the will.
What reason do we have to think SPEC-P is true? I can't think of any. Well, one: maybe lots of people want, for whatever reason, beats me, to have the sentence "humans are wholly physical in their constitution/composition" come out true and also want to hold that humans are free, and maybe these people have the power to change the language.
Perhaps mere possibility claims get the benefit of the doubt and so we don't need a positive reason to accept them (dubious). So suppose SPEC-P is true. Is this of any philosophical substance? I don't see how it can be, since it's about a word, not a portion of reality.
What we'd need for it to be substantive is to discover some underlying similarity between consciousness, and, say, rocks. I played around with the concept of energy. The reasons I don't think that will work has to do with SPEC-L.
Why think SPEC-L is true? I can't see any reason at all. And without the concept of a law of physics to to give a semantic tether to "physical" I'm still adrift with the term.
In fact, I think I can see a reason to think SPEC-L is false. What possible sense of "law" could cover a truly free will. I think "law-like" analytically entails "not-free." Some of our behavior (the not-free part) is law-like, but our free choices cannot in principle be predicted. [Complication: I actually don't accept PAP for Frankfurtian reasons, and I do think that there's one important sense of "free" which applies to choices which could be predicted, ones which issue from a freely formed character, but I think this sense of "free" is parasitic on the deeper sense. The latter sense is the one that gives rise to PvI's "Mystery of free will" problem. As a consequence of this view, I do not accept that there are true counterfactuals regarding this class choice-points. A few people--Richard Swinburne, Alicia Finch--have mentioned that these rare moments are the fulcrum of freedom (my phrase).]
Now regarding Thomistic "monism." I'm unhappy about this. It is "monistic" only in consequence of a different definition of "substance." Thomists are substance dualists in the modern definition of "substance." Thomists think the soul can subsist without the body, they think that when the body is dissolved, the person/soul/whatever survives. Mileage may vary, but they all believe in something that can subsist without the body in some form or other. This is what naturalists oppose, no matter what you call it.
Naturalism is more tied to the concept of a law than to any conception of substances, entities, particles or whatnot.
Anyway, the concept of a law is much more fundamental to naturalism than the concept of an object/entity/particle/whatever. What inspired Enlightenment materialists was *mechanism*. So suppose there's reason to think that the concepts of object/particle/entity/substance/whatever will all drop out of physics and be replaced with the concept of energy or field or, as Polkinghorne thinks, information. That's not going to bother the naturalist. It's all law-governed, that's what matters to the naturalist. Even if they loose the battle over "physical" (the word) and all sorts of merry dualists are running around calling themselves "physicalists" they'll just move to "science-ist" or some such thing (whatever the "-ist" of "scientism" is, LOL).
And the essence of science, they'll say, is to discover the most fundamental law or laws which determine the course of events of nature, and, this is where the "-ism" comes into play, NOTHING IS BEYOND THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE (or at least nothing rational). That's the bottom edge of the bottom line. (Science = search for fundamental laws) + (Nothing outside scope of Science). Given the disjointness of the law-governed and the free (in the relevant senses), this scientistic worldview has no room for substantive freedom, the kind of freedom libertarians have been thinking about (this should not be identified with PAPists, though the term has sadly come to be used as if that's what "libertarian" means).
It is this notion of science's ability to, in principle, predict all future events, to discover the laws which allow them to do this, that is at the core of physicalism. "Physics" just stands for "fundamental science.' If that identity fails, if there's a science more fundamental than physics--call it "fundics"--then fundics is the fundamental science (the "new physics"). Then all the former "physicalists" will be "fundicalists" and all the same debates will be with us: is consciousness fundical? Does causal closure of the fundical hold? Etc. Only the names will have changed...
