On 8/15/2012 4:31 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 14 Aug 2012, at 19:14, Roger wrote:
Hi Jason Resch
You got it right. Descartes never troubled to explain how two
completely different substances--
mind and body-- could interact. And Leibniz was too hard to understand.
And it was also easy to follow Newton, because bodies acted "as if"
they transferred energy or momentum.
In Descartes' model, God was external to the mind/body issue, being
essentially left out.
Not in the meditation. God is needed, actually the goodness of God is
needed to avoid the dream argument consequence. When you feel
something real, it is real, because God will not lie to you,
basically. I don't follow Descartes, on this, but his text "In search
of the truth" makes me think that Descartes was himself not quite glad
with this.
Dear Bruno and Roger,
We can avoid the intentionally not a liar question by noticing that
a physical world requires incontrovertibly (no contradictions) so that
there could be persistent objects. My conjecture is that this obtain
automatically if all interactions require a "floor" or level where all
statements that might be communicated are representable by a Boolean
algebra. I suspect that the "substitution level" of COMP is a version of
this idea.
So using the Descartes model, God (or some Cosmic Mind), who actually
did these adjustments,
could be left out of the universe. And mind was then treated as material.
At the time of Descartes and Leibniz, there was a fork in the
road, and science took the more convenient path of Newton and
Descartes (materialism),
which works quite well if you gloss over the unsolved mind/body
problem ---
until you look for a self or a God or a Cosmic Mind. Not there, as in
Dennet's materialism.
No wonder scientists are mostly atheists, since God doesn't fit into
their model
of the universe. While in Leibniz, God is necessary. for the universe
In my opinion, Descartes too, but was perhaps willingly unclear to
avoid problems with the authorities.
Many writers in that epoch had to moderate their words, especially
given the example that was made of Giordano Bruno
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno>.
--
Onward!
Stephen
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon
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