On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 4:33 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 6/26/2011 12:58 PM, Rex Allen wrote: >> Possible, but unlikely. The practical benefits of more accurate and >> useful theories should be more than sufficient to keep people >> motivated. >> > > The idea that our theories are approaching some metaphysical truth is > essentially just the same as assuming there is some more comprehensive and > coherent theory.
Which is only important if it has practical consequences, like increased predictive power or reduced computational requirements. > I note that Hawking and Mlodinow recently suggested that > we might accept a kind of patch-work set of theories of the world, rather > than insisting on a single coherent theory. Sounds reasonable to me. >> You're assuming that there is some explanation for consciousness which >> exists beyond consciousness. But this isn't warranted. >> >> Conscious experience is a fact. That I can extrapolate from past >> observations to predict future observations using calculational >> frameworks is a fact. >> >> But there are no further facts beyond this, and none are needed. >> >> What's real is the world of experience. Everything else is (sometimes >> useful) fiction. >> > > Maybe, but that's not a fact. Many times there are "experiences" that are > illusions, dreams, hallucinations, misapprehensions. Of course you can say, > "Well I had an experience of seeing a leprechaun." But then becomes hard to > give this any meaning. It's certainly hard to find any practical use for it. > If we take experience as fundamental then it seems > to imply that "seeing a leprechaun" is a real event even though leprechauns > aren't. That's why we find it easier to work with a model of the world that > we take to be provisionally "real". I think we can ultimately dispense with even this notion of the provisionally real. It's not as essential as it initially seems. I wonder if in countries with more of a Theravadian Buddhist cultural heritage I would meet less resistance on this point? So far at least, trying to account for dream-leprechauns in the same way as we account for rocks and trees and water and lightbulbs and computers seems to make our theories less useful, not more - and so there's no point in expending much effort pursuing that angle, except for purposes of entertainment or religion. Dream-leprechauns seem harmless enough. Probably best to let them be and instead focus on the dream of building better ramjets! > We can never be sure it's real (and in > general it may incoherent patches), but on the other hand we can't be sure > any particular part of it is not real. Right, but asserting that the theories are true of the world doesn't add anything to their usefulness, and so it's a pointless extra step that one is free to take or not take as the whim strikes - or in accordance with your personal psychological/religious/entertainment needs and desires. Logically, I think it's suspect to do so, because if the external world causes our experiences, then what causes the external world? What enforces the external world's order and consistency? And what enforces the enforcement of that? And what enforces the enforcement of the enforcement? And so on. Ultimately, in that view, what exists does so contingently. And so if our theories are true, they are only contingently (i.e., accidentally) true. Bruno's reification of logic is unappealing to me because it still suffers from what seems (to me) to be an unbridgeable explanatory gap between numbers as objectively existing things and the non-numeric "feel" of conscious experience. Rex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
