[MD] The Edge 2006 Annual Question

[ian glendinning]

Scott

First point
You said "By "fundamentally wrong" I mean that a metaphysics is
starting from the wrong assumptions."

Look Scott, you can't have it both ways - my assumptions
(common-sense, metaphors and world-views) cannot be wrong, just more
or less pragmatic than yours.

I'm not saying yours are wrong.

Just pointing out that yours seems to require a major upheaval in
working metaphors about time (and causality) - possibly long overdue
(I've agreed time is seriously weird compared to common sense
metaphors) - but you will have your work cut out constructing the
whole thing in a satisfactory way.

Mine is simpler (more pragmatic) in the Occam sense. Staring from here
and now, though I have sympathy with the Irish bystander who said "If
I wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." :-)

Second point
You said "physicalism is fundamentally wrong in starting with the
assumption of the ubiquity of a physical substrate, while the MOQ is
not fundamentally wrong in starting with the assumption of the
ubiquity of value (though, again as I see it, it gets subsequently
wrong pretty quickly by not recognizing the mutual implication of
value, consciousness, and semiosis)."

Ignoring "fundamentally wrong" again. You seem to be deliberately
ignoring the fact that my view of phsyicalism acknowledges that value
(quality) is the substrate of all physics (all reality). In fact as
I've said many times, all physics, consciousness, metaphor, semiosis
co-evolves from there. Nothing pre-exists quality in my physicalism,
and it is in that sense entirely consistent with the MoQ (as is a
common sense view of time, incidentally.)

Ian