On 1/24/2014 12:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
In your aristotelian theology. But when working on the mind-body problem, it is better to abandon all prejudices on this. Indeed with comp, it is the concrete laptop which appears as an (unconscious preprogrammed) idealization.
Of course I'd say reifying arithmetic is a prejudice.
For some people, like Hardy, the number 8 is more concrete that the planets you can count. Our brain makes us believe the contrary, but he uses a complex universal machine to fail us on this.
Yes I appreciate this viewpoint. Actually I'm pretty agnostic about what's really real. At any given time it's the ontology of our best theory; where "best" is not sharply defined but is measured by some mixture of predictive power, consilience, scope, definiteness, and accuracy. Comp is great on scope and maybe on definiteness, but it seems very weak on the other measures. That's why I keep hoping you'll be able to come up with some surprising testable prediction. This is just standard science. It's not some Aristotelean prejudice. It's the same thing we ask of string theory and loop-quantum-gravity.
You mention that you think octonion Hilbert space will be found to be more fundamental than complex Hilbert space. Of course many people have speculated that quaternions or octonions will be more fundamental, but nothing definite has been predicted. So if comp showed that the octonions were necessary that would be quite convincing.
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