Edit: When I said disembodied behaviors I didn't mean non-material. I was referring to more base substrates than the full human body, animals, etc.
But behavior doesn't end at genes, cells, etc. It extends to more complex behaviors like speech, reading, social etiquette, etc.
It's an aside but yes, there is computer language. Humans created the computer and the computer language. You don't have the computer to speak the language or the language itself without many prerequisites.
It's a specious move to say that "because things might have been some other way, how they actually are doesn't matter." It's very Rawlsian. It's true that theoretically there's no necessity, but not actually.
I didn't say that because things could be different, how they are doesn't matter. In fact, I'm saying that how things are does matter. Language matters, social organization matters, communication matters--all as much as the ground we walk on. Just because our experience is contingent on a series of past events (also entirely contingent) doesn't mean our experiences don't matter. It does mean, however, that our judgments about our experiences are also contingent, and dependent upon our perceptions as much as they are dependent on material conditions (a porous distinction in the first place).
Whenever we have this conversation, you tend to extend my emphasis on perspectivism to a radical extreme: i.e. that nothing matters except what we perceive. That's not what I'm saying. I am saying that our perceptions exist as part of the material world, and are therefore as important as any other aspect of reality (however we define it).
Finally, it's not true that actually there's no necessity, as it's been defined scientifically and philosophically. Or rather, I should say that it's only
possible necessity exists, and it's certainly not proven to exist; empirically speaking, it's impossible to observe,measure, or quantify. The statement "theoretically there's no necessity, but not actually" is, actually, a specious claim, as it's impossible for you to prove it. The very fact that things happened a certain way doesn't prove necessity; all it proves is that things could have happened one particular way (i.e. the way they did).
Scientific evidence supports contingency more than it supports necessity, given the variability of repeatable experiments. Of course, there's no perfectly repeatable experiment (that I'm aware of); but all signs point to the idea that if you could perfectly replicate past conditions, there's still no reason to assume things would turn out the same. That might be theoretical, but it concerns the actual. Your observation that things did happen a particular way is a value-less observation. You're attributing value to it based on the preconceptions you already hold.
It's also not necessarily true that there's no flying spaghetti monster.
Again, this is your fallback move. I can't disagree; but we're not talking about flying spaghetti monsters. You're retreating from logic and resorting to rhetoric.
As far as Point B, I just don't see why you find this to be such an amazing argument. It's like arguing the territory only matters because we have a map. That's quite the perversion of "the map is not the territory."
"Matter" is a fun word. Territory matters regardless of the map--mainly because it is matter (but then again, so is the map).
Again, you're twisting my words into meaning that language is more important than life, soil, rock, the planet, the universe, etc. etc. You're inverting the argument. I'm saying that words and language
are also matter. They're figures on a page, on cave walls, they're sound waves issuing from our mouths, they're grooves in a phonograph. They also matter, and they matter as much as life, soil, rock, the planet, the universe, etc. etc. I'm not trying to diminish the importance of non-linguistic objects.
Your central point seems to be, as far as I can tell, that chronology bestows greater and lesser degrees of importance on various things. Example:
Oxygen allows humans to live; without living humans, we wouldn't have computers. Ergo, oxygen is more important than computers. The logic of this statement is that oxygen permitted computers to come into being, and without oxygen computers would never have come into existence. This is where things fall apart, theoretically and actually. You're simply choosing chronology as your metric of importance, but nothing about it is absolute or guaranteed. You also can't prove that computers would never come into existence without oxygen.
If you want to be a true materialist (not in the Marxist sense, but in the scientific sense), then your best bet is to abandon the idea of an absolute, universal chronology grounding some kind of fixed hierarchy of value.
Whoo--sorry if there are errors or any other idiosyncrasies above, this is getting long and involved and I'm typing quickly.
