On 26/05/2017 6:53 pm, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 26 May 2017, at 03:26, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On 26/05/2017 9:11 am, David Nyman wrote:
On 25 May 2017 23:18, "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
I have told you my theory of virtuous circular explanations.
"Invoke" is a pejorative attribution. The physical universe is
an */inference /*to explain appearances (and a very successful
one at that).
Vocabulary. The point is, assuming mechanism (and please do tell me
if you're reasoning in a different theory), that the inference is to
a particular *selection* of computations from the computational
plenitude. And why is that? Because they 'explain' the appearances.
But do they really? Are those computations - in and of themselves -
really capable of 'explaining' why or how they, and no others, come
to be uniquely selected for our delectation? Are they really capable
of 'explaining' why or how those selfsame appearances come to be
present to us?
I think you and Brent are using different notions of "explanation".
As I understand your (David's) position, it is a notion of
"explanation" originating with Plato: Plato's theory of Forms offered
at the same time both a systematic explanation of things and also a
connected epistemology of explanation. (Summaries from Jonathan Cohen
in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy.) In other words, the Platonic
ideal is that "Ontology precedes epistemology", to vary Brent's
slogan. In the case of mechanism, the ontology is the natural numbers
(plus arithmetic) and for an explanation to be acceptable, everything
has to follow with the force of logical necessity from this ontology.
As I understand Brent's position (and that is essentially the same as
my position), his concept of "explanation" follows the tradition of
British empirical philosophy, stemming from Bacon, through Hume, to
Russell and others. In this tradition, to explain an observed
characteristic is to show its relationship to a law in accordance
with which the characteristic occurs or can be made to occur, and
there is a hierarchy of such laws -- the more comprehensive laws are
deemed more probable. This leads to the dominant model for
explanation in the natural sciences, which requires the citation of
one or more laws which, when conjoined with the statement of relevant
facts, entail the occurrence of the phenomenon or uniformity that is
to be explained. This does not rely on any assumed ontology; hence,
"Epistemology precedes ontology".
Wherever we want to derive a technology from scientific knowledge, we
shall need to know what causes a desired effect. So we need to
distinguish between different levels of explanation, in that while,
for example, the disappearance of a patient's infection may be
causally explained by his antibiotic injection, the operation of that
causal process is in its turn to be explained by correlational laws
of biochemistry. Hence, the understanding of consciousness in any
effective way will be linked to the creation of effective AI.
This is the paradigm of current scientific practice. Sure, as Bruno
says, this stems ultimately from an Aristotelian approach to science
rather than the Platonic approach. But the history of Western thought
has shown the scientific, or Aristotelian, approach to have been
overwhelmingly more successful, both in developing technology and in
reaching understanding of the nature of reality.
Aristotle's Matter was a good simplifying hypothesis. I agree that it
has led to some success. But that does not make it true,
For the pragmatic instrumentalist, "truth" is not of primary concern.
What is relevant is explanation in terms of predictive success. The
scientific realist might reject instrumentalism, but suggestions about
the underlying ontology have always been shown inadequate in the past --
this being the famous 'negative induction' against scientific realism.
and the price of it has been the burying of many interesting problem
(given away to the clergy). Physicalism simply fail to explain the
apparent existence of the physical reality,
Why should there be an explanation for this? It might, after all, be
just a brute fact that reality is what it is, so the best we can do is
explore and attempt to understand how it works.
and why it hurts. Computationalism does, but with the price that a lot
of work remains for all details. We are at the beginning of the
"reversal" only.
I think there is reason to think that the "reversal" cannot succeed. You
have to get a lot more than you currently have for computationalism to
rival conventional science.
Bruce
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