On 16 February 2014 09:39, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > If the foregoing is to make any sense, we are forced to the view that all > references to such dramatis personae are, in the end, merely a manner of > speaking, and that consequently *all* such gross or macroscopic references > are, strictly speaking, epistemological (i.e. they are all internal > references to epiphenomena of some fully-reduced physical ontology). > > > You might be on the track of some contradiction here. It looks like all > "references" becomes meaningless, including the reference on the physics on > which consciousness would be an epiphenomenon on. >
Well, I guess one would have to say that all references (including references to internal representations of "physics") are only *internally* meaningful. The whole schema - "physics" included - would then have to be considered an epiphenomenon of some inaccessible ur-physics. I'm not sure that it's exactly a contradiction just because of that, though, as in practice any putative ontological base - numbers included - must be inaccessible in this sense, except to theory. However, one distinction between arithmetic / computation as an ontology, and some kind of putative ur-physics, is that it is more difficult to discern any principled motivation whatsoever to derive "reference" in a primitive physics. A typical response to this reference problem is to justify CTM by smuggling an ad hoc notion of computation into physics. It is ad hoc in the sense that "physical computation" is still no more than primitive physics, so now computation itself becomes an epiphenomenon of physics and consciousness therefore an epiphenomenon of an epiphenomenon. If not a blatant contradiction, this strikes me as quite close to a reductio. Computation (as emulated in arithmetic) on the other hand offers, at least, a principled system of internally-recursive self-reference that could motivate the layers of connectivity between the ontological base and the level of indexical "physical reality". David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
