On 15 Jul 2016, at 10:10, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 8:23 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net>
wrote:
On 7/14/2016 4:58 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 8:25 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net>
wrote:
On 7/11/2016 10:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 09 Jul 2016, at 18:35, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 6:11 PM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 4:53 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com
>
wrote:
Thanks for illustrating what I just said.
What you just said was:
"
Most sane people sooner or later realize that the only way to
win this
game is not to play it
"
And then I just said:
"If true then the only logical conclusion to make is that
Telmo Menezes
is not sane."
It is also possible that I am an outlier in this regard (most
sane
people...) or that I haven't reached the point where I am sick of
playing the game (sooner or later).
It is further possible that what I mean by "this game" is the
game of
arguing about the validity of the UDA (and please spare me from
your
usual jokes where you go to wikipedia looking for meaning of the
acronym. Yes yes it's super funny).
This is your usual modus operandi and I am sick of it. I say
modus
operandi because, judging from certain contributions you made
to this
mailing list it is quite clear that you do not have the limited
intelligence required to honestly make such mistakes. That
would be
forgivable, but here, and more importantly as you do when
discussing
Bruno's theories, you argue in bad faith.
Finally, yes it could be that I am not sane. Unlike you, I
consider
this possibility. The fact that you do not consider it is
precisely
what makes you a religious fundamentalist. Just because your
religion
has no name, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
I'll spare you the trouble and paste you usual bromide. Here
you go:
"Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never
heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was
12."
This is precisely the sort of manipulative bullshit that
religious
people use. The implicit appeal to common sense. The suggestion
that
your opponent is childish. Anything but directly addressing the
ideas
of your interlocutor.
You argue in bad faith, you destroy honest discussion to score
internet points and you bully people that were nothing but nice
to
you.
Rather accurate description I'm afraid.
I think John Clark's religion has a name, though, it is
Materialism----which includes Weak Materialism: the belief in some
primary
matter and/or its corresponding epistemological version:
Physicalism
(physics is the fundamental science, physics can't be reduced to
anything
else simpler).
I use "weak materialism" for that religion, to oppose it to the
use of
"materialism" in philosophy of mind, which is that not only
matter/force
exists, but only matter/force exists.
Note that mechanism is what makes materialism working well, as
Diderot
and
the modern materialist and Naturalist usually think, but only up
to some
point as materialism stumbles down quickly on the mind/body
problem. I
think
Descartes got the correct (monist) answer, but in his
meditation, he
needs
to assume that God is good, which, even if true, cannot be
assumed in a
scientific derivation. But I think he got the main point though.
Too bad
he
never finished his text "À la Recherche de la Vérité". Too bad he
dismissed
logic and neoplatonism, but there are historical contingencies
which
might
explain this.
Note that it is possible to disbelieve in primary matter and
still be
physicalist. (using a particular or special universal number +
some
oracle).
When we assume mechanism, it is up to the materialist to explain
what is
primary matter and how it get the focus of consciousness, and it
is up
to
the physicalist to explain what is the rôle, for consciousness,
of the
fundamental laws of physics, and why they can't be explained in
term of
the
(infinities of) computations (measure).
Explanation is easy. Prediction is hard.
I think it really depends. For example, it is very easy to predict
that the sun will rise in the morning, but it took humanity a lot of
time to come up with a good explanation of why this is the case.
Or they came up with a lot of explanations and we only count as
"good" those
that give good predictions - like the shadow of the Sun on the Moon
is a
circle.
Right, but the problem with laughing at them is that our current
super-serious scientific theories might be the target of similar
laughter by our descendants 1K years from now -- if we manage to
survive that long, of course.
A more modern set of examples:
- Neural correlates are easy to find, explaining how the brain
actually works is super-hard;
- Epidemiological studies keep predicting all sorts of things about
nutritional habits,
Maybe I didn't express myself precisely enough. Prediction that is
accurate
All of the examples that I gave you are of accurate predictions: the
sun does go up every morning, drinking soda makes you fat and certain
parts of the brain reliably become more active when you look at photos
of nice girls (or boys, let's not be sexist -- although it looks like
we scared off all the women from here long ago :)
Don't forget Samya.
and goes beyond the data in scope is hard.
But what could "going beyond the data in scope" mean other then
"explanation"? If your definition of prediction already includes
explanation, then what you said is trivially true, but not very
meaningful.
Just making a prediction is easy
- Donald Trump predicts he'll be the greatest President every day.
He has a "genius-level IQ" tough.
while we seem quite far from having reasonable
explanations in most cases (too much complexity from metabolic
pathways, epigentic interactions etc etc)
This trend seems to only be more accentuated with certain machine
learning models, that are increasingly good at predicting all
sorts of
things while remaining black boxes for explanatory purposes.
Physicalist can predict that
cutting off oxygen from your brain will cause loss of
consciousness.
Non-physicalists can make the same prediction (in the sense that you
say "loss of consciousness").
OK, so what's the mystics explanation?
I don't know, I never talked to mystics about this issue.
The non-physicalists explanation is the same as yours: an inactive
brain cannot process perceptual data. The disagreements are over other
issues: what is consciousness, and what is closer to the bottom,
consciousness or matter. Again, none of these issues interfere with
the phenomenological world or with empirical scientific results.
Until now. Without QM, I would probably think that computationalism is
refuted, as computationalism predicts we see a trace of the "parallel
computations" when looking close enough to ourselves and that they
obey a non boolean logic. But QM came to the rescue of
computationalism. Digital Mechanism explains the QM facts, and what is
weird in physics is just simply predicted in arithmetic or computer
science, when we take the 1P/3P distinction into account, 'course, as
we do in physics already.
Bruno
What's the problem? The disagreements
might start when you ask questions like: does the universe exist
when
I'm not conscious? But that doesn't affect the phenomenological
world,
no problem.
Explanations in terms of infinities of computations are like
physics
explaining things as "A consequence of the state of the universe
and the
laws of physics."
I have read a few papers from physicists delving into social science
problems, and what they say is not so different from what you state
above :)
And for that reason they are given little credence.
To be fair, statistical physics has made some nice contributions to
social science, namely the Schelling segregation model, and the
application of Ising magnetization models to opinion dynamics and
rumor spreading, as well as certain aspects of network theory. The
problem is when these models are taken too seriously (ignoring that
social realities are highly complex and that these models are just
good for grasping one of the underlying dynamics of what is going on)
Somewhat related: I am enjoying this very recent paper by Max Tegmark
about natural language:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06737v2
Telmo
Brent
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