On 7/1/2014 5:00 AM, David Nyman wrote:
Some recent discussions have centred on the (putative) features of
hierarchical-reductionist ontologies, and whether comp (whatever its
intrinsic merits or deficiencies) should be considered as just another
candidate theory in that category, This prompts me to consider what
fundamental question a particular theory is designed to answer. Making
this explicit may help us to see what other questions are, by the same
token (and perhaps only implicitly), treated as subsidiary or, as it
were, merely awaiting resolution in due course in terms of the central
explanatory thrust.
I think it's fair to say that theories centred on an
exhaustively-reducible physical or material ontology seek to answer
the question of "What are the fundamental entities and relations that
underlie and constitute everything that exists and how did things get
to be this way?". Even if this is a rather crude formulation, if
questions such as these are deemed central and definitive, the issue
of "How and why does it *appear* to us that things are this way?"
becomes subsidiary and presumably awaits ultimate elucidation in the
same terms. IOW, both "we" and "what appears to us" will in the end be
explained, exhaustively, as composite phenomena in a physical
hierarchy that can be reduced without loss to the basic entities and
relations.
ISTM however that comp asks different questions from the outset: "How
and why does it APPEAR that certain entities and relations constitute
everything that exists, and what the hell is "appearance" anyway?" To
be sure, in order to deal with such questions comp has to begin with
"How does everything get to be this way?", but the crucial distinction
is that "basic physical entities and relations" are, in this mode of
question-and-answer, a complex by-product of the logic of appearance,
and the subjects of said appearance. A further consequence is that it
is no longer obvious that subjects, or what appears to them, are
reducible in any straightforward way, either to physical entities and
relations, or to the original first-order combinatorial ontology.
I think you have created a strawman "exhaustively-reducible physical or material
ontology". Sure, physicists take "forces" and "matter" as working assumptions - but they
don't say what they are. They are never anything other than "elements of a mathematical
model which works well." And what does it mean to work well? It means to explain
appearances - exactly the same thing you put forward as a uniquely different goal of comp.
Although I think comp is an interesting theory and worthy of study, I think I look at it
differently than Bruno. I look at it as just another mathematical model, one whose
ontology happens to be computations. I think Bruno assumes the ontology first, notes that
it can 'explain everything' - and then sets out to see if 'everything' can be pared down
to what appears.
It is true that we can pose questions in the first way and still say
that we are non-eliminative about consciousness. The problem though is
that because we have already committed ourselves to an exhaustively
reductive mode of explanation, we can't help consigning such
first-person phenomena to a subsidiary status, as an impenetrable
mystery, an essentially irrelevant epiphenomenon, or some sort of
weirdly-anomalous side-effect of basic physical activity. ISTM that
this mode of question-and-answer, from the outset, essentially can't
escape trivialising, ignoring, or rendering unanswerable in principle,
the role of the first person. Consequently, I can't avoid the
suspicion that, despite its phenomenal success (pun intended) it
can't, in the end, be the most helpful way of asking the most
fundamental questions.
As I noted in another post, any explanation is going to be "exhaustively reductive" or
it's going to be "reduction with loss". You can't have it both ways. Bruno's theory
explicitly defines the "loss", i.e. unprovable truths of arithmetic. That may be a
feature, or it may be a bug.
Brent
Whatever its independent merits or demerits, and its inherent
complexity, ISTM that comp gets closer to a way of posing questions
that might in the end yield more satisfying and complete answers. As
it happens, in so doing it rehabilitates earlier attempts in the
tradition stemming from the Greeks and Indians, and from later
exemplars such as Berkeley and Kant. And perhaps most interestingly,
its central motivation originates in, and simultaneously strikes at
the heart of, the tacit assumption of its rivals that perception and
cognition are (somehow) second-order relational phenomena attached to
some putative "virtual level" of an exhaustively "material" reduction.
David
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