I think a number of discoveries in psychology and neuroscience are relevant to the physicalism vs. anti-physicalism question.
I think relativity basically destroys the case for A-theory. The idea of an “objective present” loses all attraction (for me at least) when you realize that there is no such thing as objective simultaneity.
I think there’s plenty of evidence that God does not exist (and there is plenty of potential evidence that would convince me that He does).
There’s two things you could mean here. First, you could mean that the notion that their is no objective simultaneity removes your motivation to accept an A-theory. Second, you could mean that it makes an A-theory untenable. I take it you meant the first of these, but if not it might be worth checking out the second half of Craig Borne’s book “A Future for Presentism”.
In your examples, evidence from other disciplines has bearing on questions in philosophy. The problem is that information rarely flows the other way. All the philosophical debate on these (real) questions did not contribute significantly to our understanding. And then useful data came in from the relevant sciences and settled them, and would have done so even without the philosophical arguments in place.
Yeah, I was responding to your original claim that none of the questions here have any link to anticipated experience. Your claim here—that philosophy does not produce any knowledge of use to other disciplines—is a different criticism, and one that my comment was not intended to address. I think this criticism is also false, by the way. Well, it may be true in the sense that as a matter of fact very few people in other disciplines pay much attention to contemporary philosophy, but it is false that there is nothing of value in philosophy for these other disciplines.
I think a number of discoveries in psychology and neuroscience are relevant to the physicalism vs. anti-physicalism question.
I think relativity basically destroys the case for A-theory. The idea of an “objective present” loses all attraction (for me at least) when you realize that there is no such thing as objective simultaneity.
I think there’s plenty of evidence that God does not exist (and there is plenty of potential evidence that would convince me that He does).
There’s two things you could mean here. First, you could mean that the notion that their is no objective simultaneity removes your motivation to accept an A-theory. Second, you could mean that it makes an A-theory untenable. I take it you meant the first of these, but if not it might be worth checking out the second half of Craig Borne’s book “A Future for Presentism”.
In your examples, evidence from other disciplines has bearing on questions in philosophy. The problem is that information rarely flows the other way. All the philosophical debate on these (real) questions did not contribute significantly to our understanding. And then useful data came in from the relevant sciences and settled them, and would have done so even without the philosophical arguments in place.
Yeah, I was responding to your original claim that none of the questions here have any link to anticipated experience. Your claim here—that philosophy does not produce any knowledge of use to other disciplines—is a different criticism, and one that my comment was not intended to address. I think this criticism is also false, by the way. Well, it may be true in the sense that as a matter of fact very few people in other disciplines pay much attention to contemporary philosophy, but it is false that there is nothing of value in philosophy for these other disciplines.