On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 11:01 AM, Dr. Matthias Heger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Armchair reasoning is a bad word.
I think it's a rather good one ^.^ > It is not an empirical question. It is a question what answers we can get > from science in principle. Therefore it is a philosophical question. By the > way: The idea of the existence of atoms came also from "armchair reasoning" > of philosophers, isn't it? And people used to have arguments as to how atoms would remain forever purely philosophical, and how the composition of the stars would be forever unknowable, and yet here we are with STM pictures of atoms and spectrographs of stars merely a Google image search away. Now you've got an argument as to how qualia will be forever unexplainable, but for all I know, a hundred years from now maybe there will be a generally accepted, quantitative and tested, explanation of qualia in terms of ordinary mathematics. > And I think we can now prove that any explanation of qualia must have self > references and therefore will be no valid explanation. An explanation in terms of ordinary mathematics, if we can find one, will be plenty valid enough for me; I'll predict that such an explanation, if we can find and verify it, will be generally accepted as valid. You can call it self-referential and therefore invalid if you like; I'll disagree and note that the truths of mathematics were true before qualia, before the Big Bang itself. But all we're really doing there is ascertaining that you're not a Platonist and I am :) The important question is whether an explanation of the sort that most cognitive scientists would consider an explanation, can be found; and to put that to the test we'll have to actually invent full brain scanning first. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
