On 25 Sep 2013, at 23:57, LizR wrote:
On 26 September 2013 08:23, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
There seems to be a lot self-congratulatory bashing of reductive
materialism on this list without noticing that it has provided all
the knowledge of advanced science, while metaphysical Platonism has
provided speculation.
I don't know about any self-congratulation, but I do know that
"reductive materialism" hasn't provided all this knowledge of
advanced science. What has done so is reductionism. Materialism is a
theory about what the fundamental nature of the universe is.
Reductionism is a theory about how the fundamental components,
whatever they may be, relate to each other. It's only reductionism
that has been wildly successful. Materialism remains a metaphysical
speculation, often riding on the coat-tails of reductionism, but in
fact it been looking less and less likely since early in the 20th
century. This happens (mainly) when you look closely at quantum
theory (or even, in my case, not so closely). When you see
supposedly material objects behaving like little pieces of
information, the whole edifice of "matter" starts to look a bit
shaky (for example all electrons are identical except for a few
properties - position, momentum, spin axis, anything else?) Ditto
for space and time, where we find a fixed information contents in
black holes, indeed they often look like large fundamental
"particles" - and the Beckenstein bound, the Holographic principle,
and so on.
The idea that the universe is made of maths and/or information has
been looking more likely for about the last century. (Or, as one
might call it at a pinch, "reductive Platonism" :)
Important nuance. Parfit call "computationalism" reductionism!
In a sense it is quite reductionist and even quite atheist. There is
nothing but numbers. No creator, nor creation!
But it is also a vaccine against eliminativism, as it saves the souls,
heaven, earth and hell, but they appear as persistent relative dreams,
but as dreams, they are very real from the points of view of the
dreamer, and from the point of view of arithmetic, as they are well
defined arithmetical objects.
I can agree with Dennett saying consciousness does not exist, but then
neither matter. I prefer to be clear on the different levels and
meaning of "existence". ExP(x), []Ex’]P(x), etc.
Bruno
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