[FRIAM] flattening -isms

[Steven A Smith]

I prefer the loose interpretation of Heraclitus' "Life is Flux, all else
is Opinion".    Heraclitus was a material monist (fire being the
substance all other "things" are somehow derived of...  possibly
presaging the E/M unity as elaborated for us by Einstein)
> My guess is you're a methodological pluralist just like the rest of us.
>
> The trick is that monism is moot. Even *if* all things are somehow
> organizations of experience, to be pragmatic, you have to be able to
> *generate* 2 seemingly different things (like your experience vs. my
> experience) by different organizations (or timelines, or historical
> ephemerides, or iterations, or embeddings, or whatever). And so even
> if there is only 1 stuff, there must be different ways of organizing
> the stuff. So, there's, literally, no point in making a big stink
> about the 1 stuff. Multiplicities will *always* creep in. So, monism
> is one of: tautological, false, or useless, perhaps all three!
>
> Worst case, if we can't *show* (i.e. actually *do* it) how the 1 stuff
> is differently organized into different things and are only left with
> the different things, then reality may as well *be* pluralist because
> saying it's not is pure fideism/imputation/speculation and does no
> explanatory or predictive work.
>
> String theory and loop quantum gravity are *trying* to show how to
> construct multiple stuff from singular stuff. So, they're setting the
> bar pretty high. If you want to be a monist, why not work on those?
>
> On 11/17/19 8:42 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:> Gosh.  So Stuff of Stuff
> and plain old stuff are different stuffs?  So Nick
>> Thompson is a dualist?
>>
>> Damn!
>>
>> Perhaps to maintain my monism I  have to become an "of" monist.  It's
>> "of's"
>> all the way down.
>
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