On 17 Dec 2012, at 19:46, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
No, the monads are (inextended) "tokens" of corporeal (extended)
bodies of one part.
But in comp, tokens are simple (nonreductive), ie contain no parts,
while "types" such as are used in Functionalism, has parts on both
ends. So comp. which uses tokens, is not functionalist.
It is. that is why you can replace the number by the combinators or by
the game-of-life patterns, or by quantum topology, etc.
A monad contains a many-parts (functionalistic) description of a
corporeal body of one part, which is therefore nonreductive.
Not sure of this globally, despite locally plausible.
So it is like a type on one end and a token on the other.
I sum up one comp by "no token, only type".
The only token we need are a mechanically enumerable set of
expressions together with some rules or laws making them Turing
universal. Examples, the numbers with the * and + laws, the game of
life patterns with the game-of-life law, the combinators with the K
and S reduction law, etc.
With this you have the phi_i and the W_i, and the 'block mindscape',
or "spirit scape" if you prefer.
Bruno
[Roger Clough], [[email protected]]
12/17/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Craig Weinberg
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-16, 10:38:14
Subject: Re: Are monads tokens ?
On Sunday, December 16, 2012 8:36:55 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Are monads tokens ? I'm going to say yes, because each monad
refers to a corporeal body as a whole (so it is nonreductive at the
physical end)
even though each monad, being specific about what it refers to,
identifies the type of object it refers to.
Monads are self-tokenizing tokenizers but not actually tokens
(tokens of what? other Monads?). Tokens don't 'exist', they are
figures of computation, which is semiosis, a sensory-motive
experience within the cognitive symbolic ranges of awareness.
Craig
Roger Clough], [[email protected]]
12/16/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Roger Clough
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-16, 08:17:27
Subject: Davidson on truth
Donald Davidson on truth
I don't think you can do any better on understanding truth than
studying Donald Davidson.
As I understand him, in
1) he justifies comp (the use of tokens, because they are
nonreductive) as long as we allow for
(a) mental causation of physical events; (b) that there is a strict
exceptionless relation
(iff) between the events; (c) that we use tokens and not types to
relate mental to
physical events
2) He narrows down what form of language can be used.
Not sure but this seems to allow only finite, learnable context-free
expressions only
3) He clarifies the meaning and use of 1p vs 3p. Observed that Hume
accepted only 1p
knowledege, the logical positivists accepted only 3p knowledge,
where 1p is knowledge by
acquaintance and 3p is knowledge by description. I might add that
IMHO 1p is Kierkegaard's
view that truth is subjective, so K is close to Hume.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_%28philosopher%29#Mental_events
"1. Token Mental events ( A justification of token physicalism:
these being comp and purely token functionalism)
In "Mental Events" (1970) Davidson advanced a form of token identity
theory
about the mind: token mental events are identical to token physical
events. One previous difficulty with such a view was that it did not
seem feasible to provide laws relating mental states―for example,
believing that the sky is blue, or wanting a hamburger―to physical
states, such as patterns of neural activity in the brain. Davidson
argued that such a reduction would not be necessary to a token
identity thesis: it is possible that each individual mental event
just is the corresponding physical event, without there being laws
relating types (as opposed to tokens) of mental events to types of
physical events. But, Davidson argued, the fact that we could not
have such a reduction does not entail that the mind is anything more
than the brain. Hence, Davidson called his position anomalous
monism: monism, because it claims that only one thing is at issue in
questions of mental and physical events; anomalous (from a-, "not,"
and omalos, "regular") because mental and physical event types could
not be connected by strict laws (laws without exceptions).
Davidson argued that anomalous monism follows from three plausible
theses. First, he assumes the denial of epiphenomenalism―that is,
the denial of the view that mental events do not cause physical
events. Second, he assumes a nomological view of causation,
according to which one event causes another if (and only if) there
is a strict, exceptionless law governing the relation between the
events. Third, he assumes the principle of the anomalism of the
mental, according to which there are no strict laws that govern the
relationship between mental event types and physical event types. By
these three theses, Davidson argued, it follows that the causal
relations between the mental and the physical hold only between
mental event tokens, but that mental events as types are anomalous.
This ultimately secures token physicalism and a supervenience
relation between the mental and the physical, while respecting the
autonomy of the mental (Malpas, 2005, �2).
2. Truth and meaning (A justification of the use of certain types of
language--- I think this might mean context-free (finite) language)
In 1967 Davidson published "Truth and Meaning," in which he argued
that any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even
if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of
expressions―as we may assume that natural human languages are, at
least in principle. If it could not be stated in a finite way then
it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as
the way humans learn their languages. It follows that it must be
possible to give a theoretical semantics for any natural language
which could give the meanings of an infinite number of sentences on
the basis of a finite system of axioms. Following, among others,
Rudolf Carnap (Introduction to Semantics, Harvard 1942, 22) Davidson
also argued that "giving the meaning of a sentence" was equivalent
to stating its truth conditions, so stimulating the modern work on
truth-conditional semantics. In sum, he proposed that it must be
possible to distinguish a finite number of distinct grammatical
features of a language, and for each of them explain its workings in
such a way as to generate trivial (obviously correct) statements of
the truth conditions of all the (infinitely many) sentences making
use of that feature. That is, we can give a finite theory of meaning
for a natural language; the test of its correctness is that it would
generate (if applied to the language in which it was formulated) all
the sentences of the form "'p' is true if and only if p" ("'Snow is
white' is true if and only if snow is white"). (These are called T-
sentences: Davidson derives the idea from Alfred Tarski.)
This work was originally delivered in his John Locke Lectures at
Oxford, and launched a large endeavor by many philosophers to
develop Davidsonian semantical theories for natural language.
Davidson himself contributed many details to such a theory, in
essays on quotation, indirect discourse, and descriptions of action.
3. Knowledge and belief (The difference between 1p and 3p. Also, a
triangulation position on solipsism)
After the 1970s Davidson's philosophy of mind picked up influences
from the work of Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and Keith Donnellan,
all of whom had proposed a number of troubling counter-examples to
what can be generally described as "descriptivist" theories of
content. These views, which roughly originate in Bertrand Russell's
Theory of Descriptions, held that the referent of a name―which
object or person that name refers to―is determined by the beliefs a
person holds about that object. Suppose I believe "Aristotle founded
the Lyceum" and "Aristotle taught Alexander the Great." Whom are my
beliefs about? Aristotle, obviously. But why? Russell would say that
my beliefs are about whatever object makes the greatest number of
them true. If two people taught Alexander, but only one founded the
Lyceum, then my beliefs are about the one who did both. Kripke et
al. argued that this was not a tenable theory, and that in fact whom
or what a person's beliefs were about was in large part (or
entirely) a matter of how they had acquired those beliefs, and those
names, and how if at all the use of those names could be traced
"causally" from their original referents to the current speaker.
Davidson picked up this theory, and his work in the 1980s dealt with
the problems in relating first-person beliefs to second- and third-
person beliefs. It seems that first person beliefs ("I am hungry")
are acquired in very different ways from third person beliefs
(someone else's belief, of me, that "He is hungry") How can it be
that they have the same content?
Davidson approached this question by connecting it with another one:
how can two people have beliefs about the same external object? He
offers, in answer, a picture of triangulation: Beliefs about
oneself, beliefs about other people, and beliefs about the world
come into existence jointly.
Many philosophers throughout history had, arguably, been tempted to
reduce two of these kinds of belief and knowledge to the other one:
Descartes and Hume thought that the only knowledge we start with is
self-knowledge. Some of the logical positivists, (and some would say
Wittgenstein, or Wilfrid Sellars), held that we start with beliefs
only about the external world. (And arguably Friedrich Schelling and
Emmanuel Levinas held that we start with beliefs only about other
people). It is not possible, on Davidson's view, for a person to
have only one of these three kinds of mental content; anyone who has
beliefs of one of the kinds must have beliefs of the other two kinds."
[Roger Clough], [[email protected]]
12/16/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
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