On 07 Mar 2011, at 21:48, David Nyman wrote:
On 7 March 2011 15:56, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
Reduction is not elimination
<snip>
Ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological
*elimination*, but it does entail ontological *elimination*.
Bruno, this is what I was trying to say some time ago to Peter. Why
"ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological
*elimination*" is of course precisely the question that mustn't be
dodged or begged, which is what I'm convinced Peter is doing by
insisting dogmatically that "reduction is not elimination". The point
is that a primitive-materialist micro-physical theory is implicitly
(if not explicitly) committed to the claim that everything that exists
is *just* some arrangement of ultimate material constituents. That's
literally *all there is*, ex hypothesi. Despite the fact (and, a
fortiori, *because* of the fact) that this is not what any of us, as
observers, actually finds to be the case, we can nonetheless choose to
deny or ignore this "inconvenient truth". But if we do not so choose,
we can perhaps see that here we have the materialist Hard Problem in
perhaps its purest form: why should there be anything at all except an
ensemble of quarks? (or whatever this month's "ultimate constituent of
everything" is supposed to be). And why should any subset of an
ensemble of quarks be localised as "here" or "now"?
Adding "computation" to the materialist mix can't help, because
computation is also just an arrangement of quarks, or whatever, and
talking about emergence, or logical levels etc, can achieve nothing
because after any amount of this logical gyrating *it's still all just
quarks*. Of course, funnily enough, we manage nonetheless to talk
about all these additional things, but then to claim that this talk
can be materially "identical" to the quarks "under some description"
is just to play circular and futile games with words. Plugging the
conclusion into the premise can of course explain nothing, and simply
begs the critical question in the most egregious way.
The crucial difference in your theory, Bruno, to the extent that I've
understood it, is that it is explicitly both analytic AND integrative.
That is, it postulates specific arithmetical-computational "ultimate
components" and their relations, AND it further specifies the local
emergence of conscious first-person viewpoints, and their layers of
composite contents, through an additional subtle filtering and
synthesis of the relational ensemble. Hence, through a kind of
duality of part and whole, it is able to avoid the monistic deathtrap,
and consequently isn't forced to deny, or sweep under the rug, the
categorical orthogonality of mind and body. In such a schema, the
entire domain of the "secondary qualities", including matter, time and
space themselves, is localised and personalised at the intersection of
these analytic and synthetic principles.
I think that you have a clear understanding of that rather subtle and
difficult issue.
The problem with the materialist, once they use comp, and thus does
not "materialize the soul" is that they have to identify a state of
mind with a state of matter. Pain become literally neuronal firing or
quark interaction. But pain is not neuronal firing, pain is a non
pleasant subjective reality lived by person, and to equate pain with
neuronal firing leads the most honest materialist scientist to the
conclusion that pain somehow does not exist (eliminativism). So,
eventually, some realize that if neuron plays a role in pain, they can
only *associate* it to neuronal firing, and this leads to dualism,
which most materialist abhor. That is even truer for monist
materialist who are then force to accept a form of epiphenomenalism.
Prima facie, comp, which is also a form of reductionism, might seems
to be lead to a similar problem, but I think you have understand that
this is not necessarily. First comp gives the main role to the person
and its consciousness at the start. Comp addresses a person and make a
proposition of whether or not she want a digital brain substitution,
when the brain is copy at some, hopefully correct, substitution level,
and then it shows that if such a substitution can work in principle,
the person consciousness will be associated, not to a body or machine
or anything third person describable, but to an unnameable infinity
which formally will have all the attribute of a person. But then the
"price" is big, which is that the mind body problem is made two-times
more difficult than most materialist usually envisage. Indeed, matter
as such needs to be explained from the relation of consciousness with
the logical (and immaterial) 'constituent' of the computations, which
appears to be not even enumerable (due to oracles) and to borrow the
whole insolubility hierarchy of computer science or arithmetic. Indeed
an implicit reference to truth has to be made, and comp can benefit
from the most successful idea of truth, the correspondence theory by
Tarski. And such truth cannot be defined as such by the machine,
making the machine vaccine against any normative or reductionist
theory. This is something which I have often try to explain to John
Mikes, and which is of course very counter-intuitive (and eventually
justified technically by the use of incompleteness à-la Gödel, Löb,
Solovay), and which is the fact that not only comp is not a
reductionism (as materialism+comp is, before being nonsensical by MGA-
like argument), but is literally a vaccine against reductionism. The
Löbian person is really a sort of universal dissident, capable of
defeating any reduction, including the mechanist one. The mechanical
aspect of the 3-body that a (1-) person can believe to own relatively
to his most probable computation, makes the 1-person akin to a non-
machine (the universal soul, the inner god, the Bp & p hypostasis).
Then to get matter, we need a probability measure, or an uncertainty
calculus (Plato and Plotinus called it a bastard calculus) on the
consistent extensions of a machine, and this, can be handled by adding
the "Dp" constraints to the provability (believability) predicate, and
thanks to Gödel's incompleteness phenomenon, this gives rise to
another logic capable of justifying why "matter" seems to obey
superficially in a computable way (we can have 'brain'), but deeply is
not (physical digitalism cannot work). So both mind and matter becomes
protected from reductionism by the comp assumption. Both consciousness
and matter becomes non-being, or non-intelligible being, when being is
used in Plotinus sense. Both play a fundamental role in making a
person able to manifest its consciousness relatively to other relative
universal numbers, but both are emerging from the many possible
internal view of (universal) relative numbers (or combinators, lambda
expression ...).
The 'total 3-outside view' can be said to be still monist (after all
we can describe it as "arithmetical truth", or even as a tiny
effective part of it, the sigma_1 one). But we just cannot live
'there', and from inside, reductionism fails on all level, in all
direction.
The epistemological price is the retrieving of physics from numbers
(better: from number's theology).
There is also a big price for each individual universal (Löbian)
entities, which is that they will never be able to 'name' or define
the truth, the good, nor even their inner goals, except a necessarily
vague self-satisfaction. And they will live on the frontier between
truth and false, good and bad, in a forever risky way. There is no
hope for an eventual win of the good against the bad, only local harm
reduction strategies with a constant hesitation between security and
freedom.
Bruno
On 07 Mar 2011, at 16:41, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 07 Mar 2011, at 16:12, 1Z wrote:
Reduction is not elimination
Ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological
reduction, but it does entail ontological reduction.
Please read:
Ontological reduction does not necessarily entail epistemological
*elimination*, but it does entail ontological *elimination*.
---
I think I wrote "about" instead of "above" in my preceding mail to
'digital
physics'.
---
And I apologize for my random use of the "s", and my fuzzy use of
the past
tense for some verbs.
I am very sorry. Don't hesitate to ask precision when you find my
english
ambiguous.
Bruno
That explains why a lot of honest materialist are keen to try to
eliminate
consciousness, like the Churchland, even Dennett.
Now, as I said often, even before comp, uda, auda, it is easier to
explain
the illusion of matter to a consciousness than an illusion of
consciousness
to matter; if only because the notion of illusionary consciousness
is a non
sense at the start.
Bruno
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the
Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com
.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com
.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-
l...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
