The Good Place

I think this echoes or at least gets at what I was trying to say. I suppose it's fair to say there are restrictions on what "immaterial" can look like but again that assumes that someone would stubbornly adhere to being an "immaterialist" even if new discoveries were nominally called "physical" but were really what they had in mind, or something like it, all along. And again, I don't really have any issue with defining physical as such, as long as everyone understands that it doesn't mean the same thing as reductive materialism and the like. That's a broad definition of physical that goes beyond any traditional meaning thereof.


I'm on the same page that agreeing with what you said above is not equivalent to professing belief in physicalism or materialism. The other sort of trouble with defining things by "what we discover using physics" doesn't especially account for the fact that physics itself can, and may be very like to, change, at least in terms of how it approaches issues and what kinds of topics it covers in the future. I don't mean to suggest that calling such things physical is inherently bad - just that, if one is going to do so, they understand that what they are calling physical goes beyond the typical idea of such a thing. More specifically, that just calling it physical does not make a materialistic or physicalistic reductive model correct.


This seems to be getting at the heart of what I said in my most recent post, unless I misunderstand you. At such a point, though, the words we use to describe things are just words. It's the actual content, of course, that matters. It might be annoying, but in the case you laid out here there very well could/would be overlap between what we're calling "physical" in such a scenario and what immaterialists actually believe. So, at that point it may just be a word choice thing without much substance. In any event, I think I agree with your general premise here, if I understood it correctly.

I'm surprised. Now you see. Though it seems some think there are two magisteria. The material and immaterial and the twain shall never meet.