Le 27-juil.-05, à 20:11, Lee Corbin a écrit :
Build carefully upon what is simple and knowable, and keep the
wild theories to a minimum. Even then, the world is hardly
simple, but at least we've got a chance.
I agree completely.
In other words, dualists and materialists contravene Occam, not
idealists. I don't see how Johnson refuted that.
Materialists do not contravene Occam.
Subtance-materialists does. Imo. (but we can go back on this latter).
The simplest explanation is
that there is a world "out there" and that our brains are survival
machines designed by evolution to thrive in it.
I agree. But it is just the recent "logical" path. Atoms and waves also
are "survival" machines, then eventually the laws of physics themselves
emerge from simpler things (like immaterial relations between prime
numbers for example).
The phantasms that
occasionally infest our awareness and consciousness causally arise
as side-effects of how our brains work, that's all.
I disagree completely. Take a physicist of mass M, and another one of
mass m. physicists obey to the laws of physics, all right? (It is *the*
Everett motto). So the physicists will attract each other proportionaly
to mM/r^2 (r being the distance between the two physicists). Believe me
but that attraction is negligible compared to the usual psychological
repulsions and attraction among colleagues!
Consciousness is the most powerful force in the multi ... multiverses.
It entails the biggest self-speeding up of self-organisation of
information possible. Fears can transform itself into bombs, cathedral
or libraries.
And then, just defining "consciousness" by unconscious (automated)
inference of self-consistency, not only explains this self-speeding up
process, but it can explain why matter or consciousness *looks*
epiphenomenal.
(The self-speeding up is related to theorems by Godel and Blum in logic
and computer science.)
(This can also be related to works by I.J. Goods on a modelisation of
"free-will" in term of relative computations speed).
The simplest explanation does *not* start with perceptions and
all the rest of that stuff, for a number of reasons. The primary
reason is that you can't truly communicate them to others---after
all, your brain may not work the same as theirs. As Wittgenstein
said, "Of what we cannot speak thereof we must be silent".
Well, apparently, either Wittgenstein missed the opportunity to remain
silent, or we have the right to ask him "What are you really talking
about, M. Wittgenstein?". But I agree with Wittgenstein: there exists
propositions which although true cannot be communicated or justified.
(And, as a reminder, I recall that Dt or equivalently ~Bf, are such
proposition in the near death OMs of the Papaioannou's multiverses.
This at least gives a picture capable of making Wittgenstein
consistent. Good because with such sentences (also said by Lao Tseu
btw) we are playing near ... inconsistency.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
