On 03 Feb 2014, at 05:39, meekerdb wrote:
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.
OK. Important point.
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
Only the ontology is reduced.
to arithmetic instead of particles or strings or whatever is most
fundamental in physics (which could be arithmetic).
Computationalism can be said to be reductionist on the ontological
level, but it prevents reductionism at the epistemological level,
which is where we "live". Physics is first person plural, and so even
physics might be protected against reductionism, but up to now that is
an open question.
Bruno
Brent
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