On 7/1/2014 1:32 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 1 July 2014 19:24, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
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.
Firstly, I'm not really persuaded by your contention that forces and
matter, to use your example, are merely "elements of a mathematical
model which works well". Rather, in terms of that very model, such
elements are precisely those that (at least in principle) are supposed
to comprise a fully-sufficient bottom-up ontology for the theory as a
whole. The point, again in principle at least, is that nothing *above*
the level of the basic ontology need be taken into account in the
evolution of states defined in terms of it; put simply, there is no
top-down causality.
Actually, causality, except in the no-spacelike influence, doesn't enter into fundamental
physics. Models are generally time-symmetric.
It is for this reason that I've been pointing out
that whatever "levels" are posited above the basic ontology cannot
possess, in terms of the theory, any independent ontological
significance.
And are you saying that is different for comp? That there's top-down causality in comp?
What's "top"?
Rather, what we *can* say is that such macroscopic, or composite,
phenomena as temperature or, for that matter, the neural correlates of
consciousness, are *explanatorily* relevant. We might go so far as to
describe these phenomena as epistemological integrations over the
ontological fundamentals. But if we do that the problem should become
painfully obvious: the theory in which we are working has no explicit
epistemological component.
I think you're confusing "epistemological" and "subjective".
It is in fact explicitly designed to render
a principled account of the relevant phenomena in the absence of any
particular epistemological assumptions.
Secondly, I think you may have missed the distinction I was attempting
to make between a theory having the fundamental goal of "seeking to
explain what appears" and one that "seeks to explain why and how
appearance manifests to its subjects". In the first case the goal is
to create a mathematical model of appearance (i.e. physics), on the
assumption (should this be considered at all) that the phenomena of
perception and cognition will fall out of it at some later stage. In
the second case the goal is to justify from first principles the
existence, in the first place, of perceivers and cognisers and, in the
second place, the appearances that manifest to them; then to show that
the latter constitute, amongst other things, an accurate model of
physics.
Ok, I may have missed that. That's why I say once conscious-like behavior is engineered,
talk about percievers and cognisers will seem to be quaint questions, like "Where is the
elan vital in a virus?" Comp has an explanation of why some questions about consciousness
are unanswerable, on pain of logical contradiction; and in that respect it is an
improvement over more vague philosophizing such as Darwin's musing that if the brain were
simple enough enough to understand itself would not be powerful enough to understand itself.
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.
But I have already said why I think comp can be distinguished from
other theories in this respect. I may well be mistaken, but I don't
see you have actually addressed the points I sought to make.
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.
I don't agree that these alternatives exclude each other.
What's in between explaining everything and leaving somethings unexplained?
In fact,
I've been trying to point out that an exhaustively reductive physical
theory cannot avoid "losing consciousness". Hence the stipulation
"without loss" is only tenable when that unfortunate consequence is
ignored or trivialised. My argument has also been that Bruno's theory,
whatever else its merits or demerits, is not reductive in the relevant
sense; so far I haven't seen you respond directly to these points.
But it does "lose consciousness" in the sense of self-reflective consciousness. That's in
the unprovable truth. And non-self-reflective consciousness can be accounted for by
neurophysiology. I think you have unrealistic ideas of what is explained and what is
"lost". In a sense *nothing* is explained by physics. It provides models that are
successful at prediction. The models may be looked on as "explanations", but that's a
kind of psychological comfort we get form them depending on how familiar we are with the
form of explanation. When people heard Newton's theory of gravity they though it was
missing something because it didn't explain how the force got from here to there. I don't
see that Comp is better.
Brent
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