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.

By consensus.

By whom and with what authority?

By consensus.

Where? r/atheism?

I'm surprised. Now you see. 

...now I see what? I responded with my own thoughts before Linda posted anything. I then responded to her post stating that as I understand it, her post seems to echo some of my thoughts. So no, I have not come to some grand realization as a result of your/her posts. I already thought those things, and have said them here before. If you were unaware of that, that's because you haven't previously read closely or paid attention.

...now I see what? I responded with my own thoughts before Linda posted anything. I then responded to her post stating that as I understand it, her post seems to echo some of my thoughts. So no, I have not come to some grand realization as a result of your/her posts. I already thought those things, and have said them here before. If you were unaware of that, that's because you haven't previously read closely or paid attention.

You see a perspective that each and every skeptic on both forums has promoted.
I generally don't read any of your postings above what's not directed to the topic at hand. However, none of your postings directed at me have been clearly stated as they were in your response to fls.

By whom and with what authority?

Where? r/atheism?

 A consensus devoid of any partisanship.

A consensus devoid of any partisanship.

Utterly unproductive as a response.  (Linda, herein lies an example of simply reading a poster's series of posts.)

What high priest determined membership Steve?  How did they tag one partisan and one not?

You see a perspective that each and every skeptic on both forums has promoted.
I generally don't read any of your postings above what's not directed to the topic at hand. However, none of your postings directed at me have been clearly stated as they were in your response to fls.

I have no idea what you mean in the first sentence.

If you don’t generally read those posts, how would you know whether they’re clearly stated or not?

A consensus devoid of any partisanship.

On this topic, such a thing exists nowhere outside your own mind.

If you can find support for it (you can’t because it doesn’t exist), please share it with us.

Some notice the hot water. And because we do that allows us to consider and be flexible too include unknown unknowns.
To emphasize the point in bold. Everyone I'm sure everyone knows Quantum theory is known by only two descriptions, they are quantum mechanics or quantum physics. It's physics.

Well, the hot water analogy breaks down fairly quickly, because the boiling water is meant to be a bad thing for the frog, but is a good thing for physics (it implies a more complete understanding).

I don’t think we realize/notice the extent to which we’ve become comfortable with findings which would have been very hard to swallow a bit more than a hundred years ago - that seemingly solid matter is almost entirely empty space, that all the stuff we can detect represents only about 5% of all the stuff in the universe, that indeterminism isn’t just hidden variables, etc. Yet nobody suggests that it’s no longer science or physics or even physicalism, which all seem to be flexible enough to subsume any new discoveries (as you pointed out)..

Linda