On 17 February 2014 00:29, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
You don't suggest that I can't understand comp, but you suggest that I am > impervious to reasoned argument about it...why would that be the case if I > understood comp as you seem to think it deserves to be understood? You said that I understood that you could not possibly understand comp. I have never said that nor do I believe it. I do however expect that you will persist in attacking a parody of comp of your own devising as long as you fail to engage with the genuine argument in its own terms and this is not necessarily so easy. But not only is genuine understanding not equivalent to acceptance, it is the only generally accepted route to refuting any argument on reasonable grounds. When I previously suggested this, you deflected my proposal with some slightly disturbing remarks about seduction and Kool-Aid (which I presume to be some delightful US beverage unfortunately unavailable in my neighbourhood). Oh, and some tendentious psycho-babble about too-clever people losing touch with common sense, as I recall. I don't know whether you regard me as a die-hard defender of comp, but I certainly don't see myself in that light. My own original predilections tended towards sensory-motive ideas and the so-called computational theory of mind seemed to me to be obviously wrong-headed, based on arguments not dissimilar to Searles' classic Chinese Room. The idea of the reversal of comp-physics simply hadn't occurred to me before I encountered Bruno's theory and I have spent the last six or seven years, off and on, trying to follow the ramifications of his argument, which goes well beyond the mind-body problem in isolation. In fact, the comp-physics reversal places observation at the axis of the world-problem as a whole, something that is now curiously reflected in recent developments in cosmological theory. But, like any theory, it is permanently open to refutation. I suspect that much of your own opposition to comp (or what you imagine it entails) is, in effect, political and indeed you yourself have sometimes suggested as much. This prior commitment is reflected in your manner of deflecting arguments and questions somewhat in the manner of a lawyer defending his brief, even when they concern the details of your own theory. But frankly, I still don't understand why you wouldn't risk a sip of the Kool-Aid just out of native curiosity. What have you to lose? David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
