On 09 Jun 2014, at 08:24, meekerdb wrote:
On 6/8/2014 4:03 PM, LizR wrote:
David Nyman gave a much more rigorous definition of primitive
materialism in another thread (he calls it "primordial").
ISTM that what is supposed to be "primordial" about a specific set
of entities and their relations is precisely that they
*exclusively* underlie (or more correctly, comprise) everything
that is "really real". So the hierarchical structure of everything
we observe thereafter - be it physical, chemical, biological,
physiological, etc. - would be deemed to be underpinned,
exclusively and exhaustively, by such a primordial substratum.
That's a definition of ur-stuff, but it doesn't say anything about
"material". I agree with Bruno that saying the most basic ontology
is "matter" is meaningless because "matter" isn't well defined.
Physicists have regarded it as substances, particle, fields, quantum
fields, strings,...
OK.
And here we can still introduce a distinction between materialism and
physicalism.
But I have quickly another problem, which is that the term
"materialism" is used differently in philosophy of mind and in a
metaphysics, or at least by me when I say "weak materialism". The
problem comes from the fact that the meaning can depend on your
conscious, or not, assumptions.
In philosophy of mind, materialism means "only matter", the rest are
phenomenologies (explained in the term of the structures made possible
from the elementary objects (like particles, or numbers) and the
elementary relations between the elementary objects (like forces for
particles, or addition for the numbers).
A physicalist can still be immaterialist. He remains physicalist if he
claims that some *particular* (turing universal) mathematical
structure is our reality.
With computationalism, I argue that such physicalism becomes an open
problem, or a conjecture.
Theologically, I am not sure that I go as far as the greeks and the
indians, that "matter" is actually "the illusion", "evil", ... It is
a complex problems, like finding the "first arithmetical lies in our
histories".
If it's computation or arithmetic those are just the basic
ontologies of different theories.
OK.
What's really of interest is whether the theory can describe and
predict what happens at level of kicking things and have them kick
back.
I understand the feeling, but I would like the theory to be compatible
with computationalism and thus with computer science (which benefits
from mathematical logic). And I would like it to not eliminate
conscious first person in the name of any particular universal system
(cf the comp vaccine, in my discussion with John Mikes)
*classical* Comp offers a simple "arithmetical" theology which should
introduced a refinement of the physical description, the wave emerging
from the infinities of machines/numbers dreams. Number's swarms!
Bruno
Brent
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