Some people around then were well ahead of their time.
The Epicureans theorizing around all mass as made up of indivisible parts realized that if deterministic movements governed those parts that free will could not exist and thus ended up with their idea of the ‘Swerve’ and how indivisible parts of matter could have multiple probabilistic outcomes - much closer to 500 BCE than the 20th century experimental evidence both proving mass was made up of indivisible parts and that those parts have multiple probabilistic outcomes.
Maybe ideas you dismiss just haven’t had the proper supporting experiments dreamt up yet.
The Epicureans started with the idea that people were just bits of mass doing the things bits of mass do. Only by making a materialist assumption were they able to reach an interesting, novel, and possibly correct conclusion.
The thing that was the biggest contributor to the Epicureans being right about so much was their commitment to avoiding false negatives and insistence on not discounting explanations for things when they weren’t certain.
What is why it was weird they were so committed to the idea of the soul’s dependence on the body, particularly when their belief in eternal recurrence effectively provided the conditions for that not to be the case.
You can start from a materialist beginning and yet arrive at a non-materialist conclusion.
Dualism isn’t even that old, Cartes is from AD, and it’s not even the only competition to Physicalism there is
Physical Reductionism is weak as it requires all sciences to be reduced solely to physics, which just isn’t feasible nor is there precedent for one science to be made obsolete by the existence of another. (I mean Alchemy -> Chemistry, Astrology -> Astornomy sure, but… There’s never been a case of something like “We know enough about Psychology to know that we don’t need Marine Biology anymore!”
Dualism was exposed as bankrupt at least 2500 years ago. Not everyone has picked up on that, obviously.
Disciplines are collapsing in on each other. Both chemistry and biology are slowly collapsing into physics. The only reason biology might not completely fold into physics is practical: Biology is too complex. There isn’t any theoretical reason why it shouldn’t.
Edit: Psychology is the study of the human brain, but humans are mutated fish, so all that’s needed to link Marine Biology to Psychology is to ground Psychology in Biology, which is happening more and more.
Materialism is cringe
Ewww, dualism is so fifth century BC.
Some people around then were well ahead of their time.
The Epicureans theorizing around all mass as made up of indivisible parts realized that if deterministic movements governed those parts that free will could not exist and thus ended up with their idea of the ‘Swerve’ and how indivisible parts of matter could have multiple probabilistic outcomes - much closer to 500 BCE than the 20th century experimental evidence both proving mass was made up of indivisible parts and that those parts have multiple probabilistic outcomes.
Maybe ideas you dismiss just haven’t had the proper supporting experiments dreamt up yet.
The Epicureans started with the idea that people were just bits of mass doing the things bits of mass do. Only by making a materialist assumption were they able to reach an interesting, novel, and possibly correct conclusion.
The thing that was the biggest contributor to the Epicureans being right about so much was their commitment to avoiding false negatives and insistence on not discounting explanations for things when they weren’t certain.
What is why it was weird they were so committed to the idea of the soul’s dependence on the body, particularly when their belief in eternal recurrence effectively provided the conditions for that not to be the case.
You can start from a materialist beginning and yet arrive at a non-materialist conclusion.
Dualism isn’t even that old, Cartes is from AD, and it’s not even the only competition to Physicalism there is
Physical Reductionism is weak as it requires all sciences to be reduced solely to physics, which just isn’t feasible nor is there precedent for one science to be made obsolete by the existence of another. (I mean Alchemy -> Chemistry, Astrology -> Astornomy sure, but… There’s never been a case of something like “We know enough about Psychology to know that we don’t need Marine Biology anymore!”
Edit: Psychology is the study of the human brain, but humans are mutated fish, so all that’s needed to link Marine Biology to Psychology is to ground Psychology in Biology, which is happening more and more.
That would be an incredibly impressive feat to disprove it more than a millennium before the idea was even proposed in philosophy
Citation needed