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E J Hermann's avatar

Lot more respect for Plato - I was going to bring up Newton as well. He was trying to prove God's existence but came up short 😔

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Steve Phelps's avatar

Entities in the Platonic realm are reified. That is, if you are a Platonist, you believe in a separate, non-material, realm of existence . On the other hand, the abstract realm of latent scientific discoveries that I posit supervenes directly on the material world. Consider a chair. Chairs are not fundamental entities in the standard model.of physics. A materialist would say that a chair is an emergent abstract object that supervenes on its material constituents. Despite its abstract nature it is real because although it's properties are entirely determined by the behaviour of its underlying fundamental.l particles, it still has causal explanatory power in its own right; explanations of events involving chairs hold up, eg I didnt fall down because the chair held me up. A Platonist, on the hand, would explain the properties of chairs as deriving from an idealised abstract object that had a sepealrate existence in the third realm. If you are a materialist then this is basically a supernatural explanation. It is also completely unnecessary since the properties of chairs can, in principle,, be derived from quantum field theory. Sean Carrol gives clear explanations on the contrast between emergence (materialist explanation of chairs) versus the Platonic view. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/11/11/295-solo-emergence-and-layers-of-reality/

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