On 6/10/2014 4:37 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 10 June 2014 04:09, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
They're "along for the ride" like temperature is alftr on the kinetic
energy of
molecules. Before stat mech, heat was regarded as an immaterial substance.
It was
explained by the motion of molecules; something that is 3p observable but
the
explanation didn't make it vanish or make it illusory.
I would argue that, at the ontological level, the explanation *does indeed* make heat,
or temperature, "illusory". The whole point of the reduction is to show that there could
not, in principle, be any supernumerary something left unaccounted for by an explanation
couched exclusively at the "primordial" level, whatever one takes that to be. Given that
this is the specific goal of explanatory reduction, what we have here is a precise
dis-analogy, in that there *is indeed* a disturbingly irreducible something left behind,
or unaccounted for, in the case of consciousness: i.e. the 1p experience itself.
You're simply assuming it's unaccounted for. The hypothesis was that there might be a
theory which was successful in "reading minds" and "predicting thoughts" based on physical
observation of a brain. I'd say that is all that can be done; to ask for more is just
anthropic prejudice about what an explanation should look like - it's like asking, "But
why does gravity want to pull things together?"
By contrast, there is no need to grant the phenomena of temperature or heat any such
supernumerary reality.
Grant? There's no need to grant anything "reality". It's sort of an honorific we give to
theories we believe (or at least seriously entertain).
One could indeed argue with some force that all such phenomena are themselves, in fine,
specific artefacts, or useful fictions, of consciousness. That is, they are
epistemologically or explanatorily, as distinct from ontologically, relevant. Primordial
matter, as it were, in its doings, need take no account of such intermediate levels,
which, by assumption, reduce without loss to some exhaustive set of primordial entities
and relations.
That sounds very anthropomorphic and psychological - as though primordial matter was
Mother Nature and took account or ignored things. In a straight forward mathematical
description you can look at a certain integral and say, "That's the temperature." and
there isn't any formulation in which such a value does not appear, it's a necessary aspect.
This was the entire point of the argument (focused on steps 7 and 8 of the UDA) that Liz
excerpted: that there is a reduction/elimination impasse that needs somehow to be
bridged by any theory seeking to reconcile consciousness and any primordial substratum
(or, pace Bruno, hypostase) with which it is supposed to be correlated. And hence we
have an unavoidable problem, up to this point, with theories based on
"primordially-explanatory" material entities and processes. The problem is that, in the
final analysis - and it is precisely the *final* analysis that we are considering here -
such theories need take no account of any intermediate level of explanation in order to
qualify as "theories of everything", since any phenomenon whatsoever, on this species of
fundamental accounting, can always be reduced without loss to the basic physical
activity of the system in question.
Or in Bruno's theory, to the basic arithmetical relations.
Brent
"In the first sense, to be a realist about quantum mechanics is simply to think that we
should believe in the entities and structures that subserve its explanatory hypotheses.
Put simply, belief goes along with explanatory success. And must be tempered by
explanatory failure."
--- Adrian Heathcote, Quantum Heterodxy, Science and Education, April, 2003.
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