On 13 June 2014 00:23, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 6/12/2014 8:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> 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.) > > But that's an instructive example. It shows that there is no absolute > barrier to such explanation. And with the further development of > decoherence theory it not be so ad hoc. I think the barrier itself is an > illusion engendered by criteria of explanation that are not met even by the > most widely accepted theories.
Actually I wrote the above remarks, not Bruno. I assume you mean that a singularised conscious state might be taken to be a consequence of decoherence. If so, one could indeed consider singularisation to be an epistemological consequence of a "state of affairs defined strictly physically". But that isn't quite what I intended. What I meant was that, in this view, the epistemological consequences, singularised or not, must always be inessential to the basic accounting of the strictly *physical* state of affairs. 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 [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.
