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http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DDA4661AC27815DA

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A rock is a rock is a rock.

I'm wondering why he didnt pull the old philosophical question: If a tree falls in the forest, and noone is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? The whole argument seems to be over this. The caller is clearly not getting it. His logic seems to be that logic needs to actually be stated or conceptualized or be physical in some sense in order to "exist". The thing about abstracts is precisely that they dont really exist the way physical objects or thoughts or statements exists, thats why we call them abstracts.

Caller was trying to relate two unrelated properties of a thing. The two properties are "conceptual" and "physical". Things can be either conceptual or non-conceptual. Things also can be either physical or non-physical. A thing can therefore have 2x2 combinations of these properties: conceptual and physical, non-conceptual and physical, conceptual and non-physical, and non-conceptual and non-physical. It's unfortunate the host didn't recognize this, I think he was just too flustered to come back to it.

Asking for a third option between "conceptual or physical" is comparing apples to oranges. That is, unless conceptual is non-physical and non-conceptual is physical, which is not necessarily true according to the host's argument (because of the definition of "conceptual" meaning "of the mind").

One could say that there is a third option available between physical and non-physical, that being the idea of "null" or "unknown" or "undefined", but it could then be argued that just because it isn't known to us doesn't mean that it isn't "known" to someone, something else, or to the universe.

Fun video until the caller stopped listening and stopped considering the host's points. I'm impressed with the way they sling terminology around... they obviously did well in ancient philosophy.

there was a misunderstanding of the semantics of some words by the caller.
he sees the word logic to mean 'to reason something' rather than that things in the universe can simply run in a logical order. they should have slowed down and simplified the argument without the terminology perhaps then the reason for the disagreement would be obvious.

What is with that insistence on thinking of logical absolutes as objects of some kind? The concepts are objects of course, but the absolutes themselves do not exist as such in the conventional sense of the word - they are the limits on reality that exist only in the sense that we can deduce what is and is not logically possible. To require them to actually be something in the sense that a physical object or a conceptual object is something seems to me to imply logical absolutes might be contingent on something, that they might be mutable, which would render them invalid. They are not part of reality, they do not even exist in the sense that somewhere outside reality you have absolutes hanging around, doing their logical A=A schtick. A strange kind of circular reasoning here perhaps, but the absolutes are absolutes because if they were not, they would not be. I don't see why they must stem from something.

Nice to hear an intelligent debate for once, even though it got hung up by the caller's misunderstanding of the definition of certain words and the utility of certain logical principles.

Two thoughts on this:

1. In precisely the same way that "not A" is not equal to "B", "non contingent" does not equal "physical", but just because we can't list everything that it does equal doesn't invalidate our claim - it only means we don't know.

2. I don't like the way they used "mind". Personally I think brain would be a better word, as I am a monoist.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Atheist, Experience, Transcendental, Argument, God, Existence' to 'Atheist Experience, Transcendental, Argument, God, Existence' - edited by xxovercastxx