Dear George,
The problems that I have
with Bruno's thesis is Digital substitution and
that it does not address the problem of epiphenomenona found in both Idealism
and Materialism. Digital substitution seems to assume that consciousness
and awareness and related notions can be completely explained in terms of how
one number relates to another.
I think that your would agree that Bruno's
thesis is a very sophisticated form of Idealism. It is widely recognized that
"matter" and physicality in general is an epiphenomenona within any Ideal
theory. This in turn makes the notion of a physical substrate suspect as it does
not exist apart from its properties as encoded in numbers, e.g. our
consciousness is merely information thus what that information is "encoded" in
is irrelevant.
What I am trying to do is to make the
point that it is not sufficient to just take as an article of faith or
postulation the idea that digital substitution is actually possible, especially
when the epiphenomenona problem is not even addressed! OTOH, if it can be shown
that digital substitution is possible in practice then Bruno's thesis will go
along way to explaining many things. But there is more to my difficulties than
this! Copying, to me, implies that something is doing the copying. What is that
which does the copying? Physical states are mere epiphenomenona...
Stephen
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- Re: duplicatability or copying is problematic Stephen Paul King
- Re: duplicatability or copying is problematic Bruno Marchal
- Re: duplicatability or copying is problematic Bruno Marchal