On 2/2/2014 4:43 PM, David Nyman wrote:
As Brent has remarked, it is still possible to hold on to the hope that the physical appearances, however much they appear to be exhaustive and causally closed, still conceal some truly unexpected nomological necessitation that will suffice to account for conscious phenomena, although the analogies he gives generally tend to elimination of the entire category. Chalmers spends a good deal of effort in TCM to show why he thinks that hope must be indefinitely deferred, unless completely novel "psycho-physical laws" can be discovered. There is little consensus on this, to say the least, but many people can't see how psycho-physical laws would constitute an adequate account of consciousness any more obviously than physical ones.
But they didn't initially see how the motion of atoms could account for temperature or how life could be accounted for by chemical reactions. I don't see that a reductionist explaination entails eliminating anything, explanation =/= elimination. To equate them is the error that Craig and Stephen fall into. There seems to be a certain prejudice against materialism at work; a sort of "Been there, done that. Let's invent something new". And it blinds some people to the fact that Bruno's arithmeticism is reductionist too. I reduces everything to arithmetic instead of particles or strings or whatever is most fundamental in physics (which could be arithmetic).
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