Dean is DNC Chair!

Optimism:

"We only have one way to go, and that's up," Georgia delegate Lonnie Platt said.

Mwa ha ha ha ha.

Update: This farewell to McAuliffe sounds like it was really painful. Via PoliPundit.

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Opinions/Politics | id 6530

13:50 (utc-5)
edited: 15:03 (utc-5)

 

Materialism is an indefensible position

I've been wanting to post this for a long while but kept putting it off. I keep thinking that it should take longer to say than it does, but the issue is actually very simple.

Now, it actually turns out that "the physical" or "the material" (I'm using the terms interchangeably) are hard to define precisely, but what I'm referring to by "the physical" is the common sense notion of what we experience with our senses - what we can touch, taste, see, hear, and so on (a more precise definition of the physical might be "all matter and energy"). By "materialism" I mean the view that holds that all that exists is the material.

I say that materialism is an indefensible position because if you hold to materialism you dismiss a whole bunch of reality that you really do want to be able to hold as being real. Take numbers for instance. The following: 1, uno, deux, ג, fünf, 八, etc. are numerals, symbols, letters, and words that refer to numbers. You've never seen or experienced a number, you've only ever experienced two of something, for instance. Numbers are abstract entities that have no physical existence. So, if you're a materialist, you have to give up using numbers.

Consider also the laws of logic. The laws of logic are non-physical rules of reasoning. A materialist might try to claim that the laws of logic are merely conventions among people, but clearly we want to be able to say that the laws of logic are in some sense necessary, not merely conventional or contingent upon what a few people will agree to. The same applies for the laws of nature. The laws of nature are not themselves physical, but are rules according to which the physical behaves.

My impression is that most philosophers realize that being a pure materialist is indefensible, so they often admit the existence of immaterial things. Only, they have no metaphysic that can make sense of these immaterial things. As a Christian, I know that the laws of logic and reasoning, abstract entities like numbers and classes, the maintenance of physical laws of nature, and abstract notions like good and evil, true and false, and identity all find their ground in God Himself. The materialist worldview specifically excludes the preceding, and "semi-materialists" remain without a way to justify the existence of all these things that need to be universal for them to have a rational worldview (indeed, for rationality itself to be possible). The choice truly is to be a Christian, or to admit the fundamental irrationality of your worldview.

Permalink | 5 Comments | Tags: Religion | id 6529

02:24 (utc-5)
edited: 02:30 (utc-5)

 

MySQL Reference Manual: Converting 4.0 Character Columns to 4.1 Format

MySQL Reference Manual: Converting 4.0 Character Columns to 4.1 Format. When transferring my site to TextDrive (my old host uses MySQL 4.0 and TextDrive uses 4.1) I kept running into problems when trying to make MySQL understand some Unicode. I used this as my test post -- some characters would be converted correctly and others would wind up as question marks. I never figured out exactly why my data was being trashed, so I gave up trying to make my columns in MySQL 4.1 work as UTF8 columns, and went back to essentially how I was doing things in 4.0, having MySQL assume my data is latin1, but storing UTF8 data in the columns anyway.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Programming, This website | id 6528

01:41 (utc-5)
edited: 02:06 (utc-5)