Tangible or intangible?

[ohnoitsbonnie]

You need to choose which you prefer, but you can have both

[ohnoitsbonnie]

Is love tangible? Heat is something we constantly make while alive. When you hold your beautiful rat daughter, do you feel her heat and fur and relaxed muscles? Her love radiates through her body

[ohnoitsbonnie]

When you smell a good one that makes you nostalgic or whets your appetite those molecules of aromatic compounds truly do exist. Are the thoughts and therefore brain chemicals they spark tangible? Could I hold a lb of oxytocin in my hands?

[Disco King]

I don't know if it's possible to have tangibles without intangibles, because it seems that tangible things must have properties, and properties are intangible.

If your mug is red, you can touch your red mug. But you can't touch the mug's "redness."

Processes also seem to be intangible. One can pluck a flower's petals, but one cannot pluck photosynthesis. Your brain is physical, but thought isn't; it's the consequence of the physical, something your physical brain does.

This seems true regardless of whether these "intangibles" are simply the result of mental and linguistics constructs that group physical things into "concepts" that are more useful fictions than ontological realities, or if abstract entities are as ontologically "real" as non-abstract ones. It seems either is compatible with physicalism, because if the consequences of the physical can be non-physical, the world can still be reduced to the physical, keeping physicalism safe.

[Disco King]

There's something fishy about my argument... I feel like there's a flaw somewhere in there that should unravel the entire thing, but I don't know what it is.

[LaBelle]

The Bonnie's back in town!!

[LaBelle]

To answer the question, I prefer the tangible.

I like to touch, smell, etc...

[reprise85]

Originally Posted by Disco King

I don't know if it's possible to have tangibles without intangibles, because it seems that tangible things must have properties, and properties are intangible.

If your mug is red, you can touch your red mug. But you can't touch the mug's "redness."

Processes also seem to be intangible. One can pluck a flower's petals, but one cannot pluck photosynthesis. Your brain is physical, but thought isn't; it's the consequence of the physical, something your physical brain does.

This seems true regardless of whether these "intangibles" are simply the result of mental and linguistics constructs that group physical things into "concepts" that are more useful fictions than ontological realities, or if abstract entities are as ontologically "real" as non-abstract ones. It seems either is compatible with physicalism, because if the consequences of the physical can be non-physical, the world can still be reduced to the physical, keeping physicalism safe.

You can't pluck photosynthesis, but it is physical process. You can't touch redness, but the perception of redness is based on the cones in your eyes, which are physical things. And are thoughts not physical at some level? We seem to not have a way to measure them (except vaguely in some cases), but that doesn't mean it's not a physical process.

Just devil's advocate, this stuff hurts my brain

[ohnoitsbonnie]

Originally Posted by Poots

that's just the hantavirus talking

Norway rats can carry hantaviruses but Clover and Victoria and Barnaby have been raised in capitivity and do not spread nor carry any diseases that a domestic cat or dog could not also.

[ohnoitsbonnie]

Everything made of matter, even thoughts, is real and tangible. Weird right.