The Argument from Logic

Thanks to Con for the the debate. One thing I'd like to note up front: Con has not even attempted to support this contention that the laws of logic are just an "intrinsic part" of reality which is crucial to his case. All Con's talk about the laws of logic being a "concept" lead to direct support of my contention that the laws of logic are thoughts. It appears that Con concedes my point.1. Propositions (such as the LNC) are real entities, but cannot be physical entities; they are essentially thoughts.Con demurs about my challenging him on his thesis that thoughts are physical products of physical minds; it appears, however, that part my challenging his thesis was due to his imprecise wording. Here is what Con says, "This is because a thought is a physical thing, a construct of cell activity in a developed and evolutionarily advanced brain." How is one supposed to read that? I think the most natural way to read it is to read it as Con saying that thought is identical to a set of cell activities working in unison (that includes neurons and chemicals and the like) - i.e. a construct. [1] Saying thought is a "product" of cell activity is not the same as saying thought is a construct of cell activity. If Con meant one and not the other he should have said so.1) Begging the QuestionCon asks me to substantiate my charge of begging the question; this one is easy. I provide an argument that leads straightforwardly to the conclusion that there must a non-physical mind that thinks thoughts. Con provides an assertion saying, essentially, "Well, thought is produced/identical to processes of/by a physical mind [and by implication] therefore there can't be any non-physical minds." Con's contention automatically assumes that all thought is produced by physical minds which just rules out my argument's conclusion by fiat in order to show what's wrong with my argument. This is a classic case of begging the question. Con did not provide an argument for this claim and just glibly asserts that this a matter of science and not philosophy. For one, that's odd because he's been engaging in philosophy this entire debate, and, for two, the empirical data we have doesn't settle the issue. All of the empirical data is perfectly consistent with a wide variety of contradictory accounts of the body-mind relationship - e.g. substance dualism, property dualism, hylomorphism, emergentism, non-reductive physicalism, reductive physicalism, and eliminativism. Just pointing to the empirical data isn't going to cut it; Con is necessarily wading into philosophical waters whether he likes it or not.2) No thought is literally a physical thing./No, thought isn't literally a physical thing.Con protests that he didn't say thought was identical to neural activity. 1) His quotation seems to suggest otherwise, and 2) saying that thought isn't neural activity but simply a product of neural activity (yet still physical) still doesn't alleviate some of the problems I outlined with conceiving of thought as a physical entity. Physical entities (for the most part) seem to be characterized by certain properties like spatiality and (maybe) mass, etc. Okay, so where is my thought located when I think? How much does it weigh? Can I touch it, taste it, or see it? Can others see my thoughts? Besides, this just ignores the arguments I gave in the first round. Surely some of our thoughts have propositional content. If so, then that means that they couldn't be physical entities as I argued in this point "Propositions are real entities, but cannot be physical entities; they are essentially thoughts." in my first round. So this point is moot in any case unless Con deigns to argue against my argument given there.Con asks a couple of questions (I'm paraphrasing here):Q: Could God stop thinking?A: No. Q: Why not?A: Because of God's nature as an essentially thinking being.Q: If God is essentially a thinker of the laws of logic then why can't the laws of logic just exist as a brute fact sans God? Y'know Occam's Razor and all that.A: My entire argument in round one answers that question. I argued that the laws of logic are propositions with intentional content and that these have to be conceived of as thoughts due to the nature of propositions. I argued that if there are thoughts there is a thinker and I argued that this thinker need be construed of as non-physical and necessary. 3) Hasty GeneralizationI think the charges of question-begging and non-sequitur are appropriate as I showed last round. If Con wants to also implicate himself as also committing the hasty generalization fallacy then he's more than welcome to it. :)And to exonerate myself from a counter-charge of hasty generalization and contradiction - I wasn't engaged in a process of inductive reasoning. My reasoning wasn't "all cases of thought we know of are had by thinkers so it's reasonable to believe that all thoughts are had by thinkers". It was a case of deductive reasoning; of conceptual analysis. My reasoning is that is incoherent to speak of thoughts without a thinker do to very definition and concept of the words. [2] There is nothing (prima facie at least) incoherent about saying there is a non-physical thinker; there is something deeply incoherent about saying there are thoughts without any thinkers. It'd be like me saying that fingers can exist without a hand and claiming that is not incoherent.Con says,"Thoughts that aren't had by organisms, eh...? Like what, Pro? The laws of logic being thought by God? Now that answer would be question-begging."Well, yeah, it would be question-begging if I hadn't provided an argument for that very conclusion in the very first round!2. If there are necessarily existence thoughts, there must be a necessarily existent mind; and if there is a necessarily existence mind, there must be a necessarily existent person.Again, there seems to be a confusion or misunderstanding here. When I say that thoughts are privately accessible I mean that necessarily you can only be the one thinking your thoughts; no one can think your thoughts for you. They can think about the same thing as you but that's not the same as saying they are literally thinking your thoughts. A useful and related instance I have in mind is qualia. [3] It's obvious that multiple people can be in pain but it's also equally obvious that one person can't literally experience anther's pain. They might be able to empathize with the pain but they can't literally feel or share the pain of another person. And Con asks how the laws of logic are accessible to everyone despite being thoughts; Welty says it best:"Why do I embrace this ‘functionalist’ account of abstract objects, defining them as abstract objects in terms of the role they play with respect to something else?...Instead, I want to endorse the claim that while God’s thoughts are numerically the same thoughts in relation to the creation and to God, God’s thoughts function as abstract objects only with respect to the creation, and not with respect to God. For example, God’s thoughts determine attribute agreement with respect to the creation, not with respect to God. To illustrate. God and I can have the same thought, ‘2+2=4’, in terms of content. But my thought doesn’t function in the same way that God’s thought does. My thought doesn’t determine or delimit anything about the actual world, or about any possible world. But God’s thought does. Thus, it plays a completely different role in the scheme of things, even though God and I have the same thought in terms of content. Thus, God’s thought uniquely functions as an abstract object, because of his role as creator of any possible world." [4]Thanks to Con for the debate! Sources[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com... [2] http://www.thefreedictionary.com... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org... [4] http://www.proginosko.com... [pg 50]