On 6/12/2014 5:42 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 13 June 2014 00:23, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 6/12/2014 8:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
That said, we might still at this stage wish to point out - and
indeed it might seem at first blush to be defensible - that such
fictions, or artefacts, could, at least in principle, be redeemable in
virtue of their evident epistemological undeniability. Indeed this is
FAPP the default a posteriori strategy, though often only tacitly. It
might even be persuasive were it not that no first-person
epistemological consequence has ever been shown to be predictable or
derivable from basic relations defined strictly physically, as
distinct from computationally, nor indeed is any such consequence
appealed to, ex hypothesi, in accounting rather exhaustively for any
state of affairs that is defined strictly physically. (The single
candidate I can adduce as a counter example to the latter, by the way,
is the collapse hypothesis which, far from being such a consequence,
is rather an ad hoc interpolation.)
But that's an instructive example. It shows that there is no absolute
barrier to such explanation. And with the further development of
decoherence theory it not be so ad hoc. I think the barrier itself is an
illusion engendered by criteria of explanation that are not met even by the
most widely accepted theories.
Actually I wrote the above remarks, not Bruno. I assume you mean that
a singularised conscious state might be taken to be a consequence of
decoherence. If so, one could indeed consider singularisation to be an
epistemological consequence of a "state of affairs defined strictly
physically". But that isn't quite what I intended. What I meant was
that, in this view, the epistemological consequences, singularised or
not, must always be inessential to the basic accounting of the
strictly *physical* state of affairs.
But what does "inessential" mean. If the conscious state and the physical state are just
different ways to describe the same thing then to call one "inessential" is just
prejudice. Of course the physical state is bigger and more complex than the conscious
state, but the conscious state can still be a partial description of the state. Simply
because you can give something you call a "basic accounting" of a painting by specifying
the placement of pigments on a canvas doesn't preclude also describing it as a Monet of
water lillies. You've chosen a level and called it "basic" and then complain that it
leaves something out. I'd say it's just incomplete.
Brent
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