Could you be more precise than ontologically basic mental entities, I’ve read over the Carrier article on the subject and more and more the concept appears like a subtle rhetorical trick—where the term (especially what qualifies as mental) takes on slightly different meanings at different times.
As it is, I’m tempted to treat the whole idea as dangerously shaky—especially as depending on your ideas of “mental” and “basic” you could consider thermodynamics to be unambiguously supernatural and the medieval Christian God as natural.
I apologize, though, as I realize is somewhat off topic. But it might be important to note that it is unlikely for pure Untheist to develop rhetorical strategies based on Theism without having encountered them before.
Mental entities can be modeled as Agents — with a utility function.
Thermodynamics can’t. It’s an entropic process, all it does is uniformly increase entropy in the universe. It does not do work in order to shape reality into a set of desirable states.
In fact all basic laws of (continuous, Hamiltonian (if I got that one right)) physics are entropy increasing and are only poorly modeled as agents.
Humans are much better modeled as agents. As are fictional deities and spirits.
An ontologically fundamental mental entity is 1) inherently indivisible (like an electron or a photon) and 2) an agent.
Could you be more precise than ontologically basic mental entities, I’ve read over the Carrier article on the subject and more and more the concept appears like a subtle rhetorical trick—where the term (especially what qualifies as mental) takes on slightly different meanings at different times.
As it is, I’m tempted to treat the whole idea as dangerously shaky—especially as depending on your ideas of “mental” and “basic” you could consider thermodynamics to be unambiguously supernatural and the medieval Christian God as natural.
I apologize, though, as I realize is somewhat off topic. But it might be important to note that it is unlikely for pure Untheist to develop rhetorical strategies based on Theism without having encountered them before.
Mental entities can be modeled as Agents — with a utility function.
Thermodynamics can’t. It’s an entropic process, all it does is uniformly increase entropy in the universe. It does not do work in order to shape reality into a set of desirable states.
In fact all basic laws of (continuous, Hamiltonian (if I got that one right)) physics are entropy increasing and are only poorly modeled as agents.
Humans are much better modeled as agents. As are fictional deities and spirits.
An ontologically fundamental mental entity is 1) inherently indivisible (like an electron or a photon) and 2) an agent.