On 11 June 2014 00:43, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
>... if we are tempted to see this as a sign that the search for further > explanation is futile, we should first reflect whether we have hit the > buffers of a particular explanatory strategy, rather than the limits > of explanation tout court. > > I do see it as futile, and I think that it is futile under any explanatory > strategy whatsoever. And this is why it is referred to as 1p. I think > you're asking for an explanation that can't exist. But I'm willing to be > shown wrong. Can you say what form such an explanation might take? That is > apparently what you refer to in writing: > > "That is, the emulation of computation and hence the universal machine in > arithmetic could motivate the missing relation to a distinctively > "supernumerary" domain - the modes of arithmetical truth - that is both > irreducible to its base and (possibly) demonstrably coterminous with the > specifics of 1p phenomena." > > But I don't understand it. "distinctively supernumerary" sounds to me like > an explanation in terms of something not 1p and hence having the same > failing in satisfying the demand for explanation as the explanation in terms > of brain physics. Well, I have to cop to a little intentional punning here, in that distinctively supernumerary might imply both a general sense of something distinct from and additional to (though derived from) number relations, as well as, in a looser but somewhat more literal sense, something that is "above the numbers". That it is not, and can never be, "1p itself" is admitted, though you will recall Bruno's contention that this is the 1% (or is it 0.1%) that can be shown to elude any 3p-description. He also argues, as you know, that the machine discourses (i.e. the various logical systems he deploys) place an intrinsic limit to further communicability beyond the remaining 99% (or is it 99.9%), at least in terms of these particular metaphysical posits. That said, I disagree that comp suffers from the same failings as brain physics in satisfying the demand for a deeper explanatory strategy. I think that Bruno himself has argued for this, over time, rather persuasively, as well as much more rigorously, than I can. I would particularly reference for example Kim's post of the most recent English-language formulation of the UDA. That said, my general sense is that comp from the outset seeks first to justify each composite level above the basic arithmetical relations (e.g. computation, the universal machine) by showing how it may be constructed therefrom; i.e. it takes the form of an extensible constructive proof. The deployment of these and subsequent composite principles (e.g. the centrality of self-reference, the relation with the modes of arithmetical truth) can then be justified in terms of the fundamental predictive scope and demands of the over-arching theory, such scope inevitably extending to the cosmological and even theological as well as the psychological and physical. But what now becomes distinctive is that the composites or constructs deployed in the theory, though originally justified in terms of the basic relations of its ontological primitives, have in a certain sense floated free of them, in that they have become indispensable in deriving the *epistemological consequences* (which now extend to the whole of physics!). Perhaps this is the sense Bruno intends when he calls comp a vaccine against reductionism. And these very epistemological consequences, far from being trivially anthropomorphic, turn out to delineate a generalisable path from part to whole - from Many to One - via a computer-theoretic psychology of observation. In the opposite direction - from whole to part - the same explanatory strategy bears on how "the ten thousand things" might be filtered from an everything that is no thing, to lapse further into poetic metaphor. By contrast, reductionism founded on physical, as opposed to digital, mechanism is restricted, ex hypothesi, by the assumption that any higher-level object must always reduce *without loss* to ever more primitive physical mechanisms. Any "higher level" will always be resolvable, under more rigorous examination, into what is in effect a useful fiction; in the final analysis, such levels must always be eliminable without loss from the accounting in strictly physical terms. That said, we might still at this stage wish to point out - and indeed it might seem at first blush to be defensible - that such fictions, or artefacts, could, at least in principle, be redeemable in virtue of their evident epistemological undeniability. Indeed this is FAPP the default a posteriori strategy, though often only tacitly. It might even be persuasive were it not that no first-person epistemological consequence has ever been shown to be predictable or derivable from basic relations defined strictly physically, as distinct from computationally, nor indeed is any such consequence appealed to, ex hypothesi, in accounting rather exhaustively for any state of affairs that is defined strictly physically. (The single candidate I can adduce as a counter example to the latter, by the way, is the collapse hypothesis which, far from being such a consequence, is rather an ad hoc interpolation.) Well, I guess that's my stab for now. David > On 6/10/2014 4:22 PM, David Nyman wrote: > > But to reiterate once more, > if we are tempted to see this as a sign that the search for further > explanation is futile, we should first reflect whether we have hit the > buffers of a particular explanatory strategy, rather than the limits > of explanation tout court. > > > I do see it as futile, and I think that it is futile under any explanatory > strategy whatsoever. And this is why it is referred to as 1p. I think > you're asking for an explanation that can't exist. But I'm willing to be > shown wrong. Can you say what form such an explanation might take? That is > apparently what you refer to in writing: > > "That is, the emulation of computation and hence the universal machine in > arithmetic could motivate the missing relation to a distinctively > "supernumerary" domain - the modes of arithmetical truth - that is both > irreducible to its base and (possibly) demonstrably coterminous with the > specifics of 1p phenomena." > > But I don't understand it. "distinctively supernumerary" sounds to me like > an explanation in terms of something not 1p and hence having the same > failing in satisfying the demand for explanation as the explanation in terms > of brain physics. > > Brent > > -- > 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 [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. 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