Edward Feser, in a podcast discussion with Michael Egnor, offers this illustration:
Michael Egnor: How are humans able to reason, use logic, and think abstractly? Neuroscientists presuppose that our minds are entirely material things. But do you think it is possible to have abstract thought that has an entirely material basis?
Edward Feser: No, I don’t think it is… For example, we have the general abstract idea of triangularity, of being a triangle. And it’s one that we convey in words, like the words of a definition like “a triangle is a closed plane figure with three straight sides.”
When we grasp that formal nature of being a triangle, we are grasping something that is totally abstract. It applies to every single triangle that has existed, does exist, will exist or, for that matter, could exist, whether it is a triangle drawn in ink, whether it is a triangle drawn in sand, whether it is a triangle you construct by putting three sticks together, whether it is a triangle formed by the side of a pyramid, the idea or the concept is entirely abstract.
And part of the problem of identifying that with something going on in the brain is that anything that is taking place in a material object, let’s say, a symbol or a material representation encoded in the neural firing pattern of the brain, anything like that is always concrete or specific, or individual, as opposed to abstract or completely general, the way that a concept is.
“A simple triangle can disprove materialism” at Mind Matters News
See also: Why Abstract Thoughts Cannot Arise From Material Things (Michael Egnor) Consider the chiliagon.
Follow UD News at Twitter!
Is there any evidence that a gorilla, or a pig or a dog can have an abstract thought? I don’t know, but would like to.
Belfast @1, puppy dogs like to play, as do many young animals. When they play with humans, they do not appear to be fighting for dominance over other members of their pack (which frequently contains more humans than dogs). They appear to be doing it for FUN. In the case of playing Fetch, the dog quickly learns that if he or she brings the ball back to a human, even a little human, the human will throw the ball for the dog to chase again. The humans normally get bored with the game long before the dogs do.
So dogs ENJOY doing things that do not give them: food, shelter, better chances of mating, increased status in the pack, or a more comfortable place to sleep. I would then argue that Joy/Fun is abstract. You can’t measure it, but you know it when you see it. And when our dog comes to me not with the sad doggie face (PLEASE, daddy, PLEASE?), but with the SMILEY FACE (and there can be no word for it except a smile), there is no doubt in either of us that he wants to “play”.
Nah joy and fun are chemical addictions produced in the brain And caused by a sudden rush of dopamine in the appropriate areas of the brain it’s not that they’re actually thinking of joy and fun there just following the rush that they are getting the carrot that’s been placed in front of them and they will continue to chase it and fulfill that feeling
Just like love or any other concepts it’s nothing more than a chemical reaction inside the brain that forces you to take action to survive
Playing allows the body to get exercise and to develop muscular structure is to allow them to hunt later on in life or fight back
Hence evolution has created that mechanism to allow this development before you would have to use it so you’ll be here able to and prepared to use it when you have to
So there’s nothing abstract about it It’s just another chemical reaction
It’s not just triangles. Concepts like distance, volume, surface, length, width, height, time, beauty, ugliness, colors, tastes, order, disorder, etc. are all abstract. They do not exist in the physical universe. Does this mean that we can conceivably build technologies that will allow us to travel instantly from anywhere to anywhere? The answer is yes. Nonspatiality is nonlocality.
If you want to know whether something is abstract or physical, do like Immanuel Kant and ask the following questions: What is is made of and where is it? If you can’t answer, than it is abstract. Of course, the abstract requires a soul and a soul is a community of many mini-souls aka qualia. Materialism is nonsense.
AS1978:
What a bleak world you live in.
Physics explains Chemistry, Chemistry explains Biology, and Biology explains nothing. It’s all just atoms bouncing around.
Oh, and from now on, you don’t get to use the words ‘fun’ or ‘joy’ or ‘play’ because in a deterministic world they have no meaning as does logically your life.
But just maybe, a universe that has the concept of play embedded in it holds out a different possibility.
“Can A Simple Triangle Disprove Materialism?”
Not only triangles, but the entire field of mathematics and logic falsifies Atheistic materialism. As David Berlinski succinctly put it,,, “There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time….”
Indeed, as Dr. Egnor points out, “It is astonishing (and beautiful) that the very retinaculum of the universe, from the subatomic world to the cosmos, is drawn in elegant abstract mathematics. The universe screams intelligent authority.”
Besides the universe, abstract “Mathematics (also) underlies virtually all of our technology today.”
Like abstract mathematics, abstract logic itself does not exist in the space-time continuum,,,
And although many theoretical physicists today believe they can construct a purely mathematical ‘theory of everything’ without recourse to God, Godel, via logic, was able to prove that mathematics itself is ‘incomplete’. As the following article succinctly puts it, Godel proved that “Math could not play the role of God as infinite and autonomous.”
Even Hawking himself conceded that, “Kurt Gödel halted the achievement of a unifying all-encompassing theory of everything in his theorem that: “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove”.
It is also important to note that, although atheistic materialists deny the existence of free will, never-the-less, free will is essential to our ability to practice mathematics in the first place. As the following paper points out, “Creating new axioms and free will are shown to be different aspects of the same phenomena: the creation of new information.”
And as James Franklin put it, “the intellect (is) immaterial and immortal. If today’s naturalists do not wish to agree with that, there is a challenge for them. ‘Don’t tell me, show me’: build an artificial intelligence system that imitates genuine mathematical insight. There seem to be no promising plans on the drawing board.,,,”
In fact, our ability to argue in a logically coherent fashion in the first place would be impossible if we did not first have the free will necessary to do so. As the following article put it, “The claim (from atheistic materialists) that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.”
The denial of free will and/or agent causality by atheistic materialists is simply insane. As Paul Nelson put it, Methodological Naturalism “MN entails an ontology in which minds are the consequence of physics, and thus, can only be placeholders for a more detailed causal account in which physics is the only (ultimate) actor. You didn’t write your email to me. Physics did, and informed you of that event after the fact. “That’s crazy,” you reply, “I certainly did write my email.””
Besides just pointing out the sheer insanity of Atheistic Materialists denying the reality of their own free will, the Intelligent Design advocate can now also point to the empirical evidence of neuroscience and quantum mechanics to support the reality of free will:
As to evidence from neuroscience:
As to evidence from quantum mechanics, the last major ‘loop-hole’ that was left to be closed in quantum mechanics was the ‘free-will’ loop-hole:
That “creepy” and “far-fetched” possibility “that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting”, (which is exactly the “creepy” and “far-fetched” possibility that atheists hold to be true), has now been, for all practical purposes, closed.
Anton Zeilinger and company have now pushed the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago by using quasars to determine measurement settings.
In a more direct way that is easier for people to see, free will is also now validated in quantum mechanics with Contexuality and/or the Kochen-Speckter Theorem,
With contextuality we find, “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation” and “Measurement outcomes depend on all the other measurements that are performed – the full context of the experiment. Contextuality means that quantum measurements can not be thought of as simply revealing some pre-existing properties of the system under study. ”
And in the Kochen-Speckter Theorem we find, as leading experimental physicist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, that “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
This finding is simply devastating to the atheist’s deterministic view of humanity, i.e. to their view that we are merely ‘meat robots’.
Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level has a fairly profound implication for Christianity in particular.
Allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”.
As Isabel Piczek and Chuck Missler note in the following video and articles, the Shroud of Turin reveals a strange ‘event horizon’:
The following study states that ‘The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image.’
Moreover, besides gravity being dealt with, the shroud also gives us evidence that Quantum Mechanics was dealt with. In the following paper, it was found that it was not possible to describe the image formation on the Shroud in classical terms but they found it necessary to describe the formation of the image on the Shroud in discrete quantum terms.
Kevin Moran, an optical engineer working on the mysterious ‘3D’ nature of the Shroud image, states the ‘supernatural’ explanation this way, “This suggests a quantum event where a finite amount of energy transferred abruptly. The fact that there are images front and back suggests the radiating particles were released along the gravity vector.”
Moreover, the following article found that it would take 34 Trillion Watts of what is termed VUV (directional) radiation to form the image on the shroud.
Thus, when we rightly let the agent causality of God back into the picture of modern physics, (as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned), and as quantum physics itself now empirically demands with the closing of the free will loophole, (Zeilinger and company), then a empirically backed reconciliation, (via the Shroud of Turin), between Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, (i.e. Quantum Electrodynamics), and General Relativity, i.e. the ‘Theory of Everything’, readily pops out for us in Christ’s resurrection from the dead. i.e. The infinite gap between the eternities of special relativity and general relativity was bridged when Christ was resurrected from the dead.
On this read through it occurred to me that for LOTS of humans in the world who have never been TOLD that a doodle with 3 connected straight lines is a “triangle” would NEVER make the mental jump to “ALL doodles with 3 straight sides are SAME shape”. And of course they would NOT naturally call it a “triangle”.
Similarly, a person who had never seen a “dog” would not naturally conclude that chihuahuas and malamutes were both dogs. Or conversely, I often think that our dog assumes humans are ALSO dogs because why else would we welcome each other when someone returns to the Pack? Going from known examples of specific things to grouping individuals into classes is one of those HUGE leaps in thinking that separates humans from earthworms.