On 13 June 2014 03:52, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > I think you are assuming the point in question, i.e. that all the physical > interactions of brains with the painting and the rest of the world are > irrelevant and that the "physical" description of the painting is *just* the > pigment on the canvas. You take all that other interaction, which also has > both physical and psychological description and leave it out and then you > say the physical description leaves out something essential. That seems to > imply that you believe philosophical zombies are possible?
No, I think it just means that I pushed this particular metaphor beyond its breaking point. You are, of course, correct to say that an adequate physical description must include the relevant context. And I agree that what is relevant in context may be moot. However, my basic point was that, under physicalism, the ultimate goal is to be able to give an exhaustive, contextualised account of a given system exclusively in terms of its *physical relations*. And this is the case whether or not we wish to distinguish one descriptive level as "ontological" and another as "epistemological. In the final analysis it's all - ex hypothesi - physics. We seem to have agreed that physicalism and computationalism rely on different assumptions about what one might call the hierarchy of derivation. So, under physicalism, both computation and mind are assumed to derive from (in the sense of being alternative descriptions of) some ultimately basic formulation of matter (to whatever depths that might have to descend). Under computationalism, by contrast, both matter and mind are assumed to derive from some ultimately basic formulation of computation. The crucial dissimilarity is then that mind is not appealed to, under physicalism, in accounting for the origin of matter (which is basic). This makes it coherent, at least in principle, to ask for an exhaustive physical accounting of any given state of affairs. In the final analysis *everything* must be reducible, by assumption, to one or another description of some basic set of underlying physical relations. Under computationalism, by contrast, the epistemological logic is absolutely central in differentiating the lawful appearances of matter from the exhaustive redundancy of the computational base. Hence on these assumptions, even in principle, no state of affairs above the level of the basic ontology could ever be exhaustively accounted for by any catalogue of descriptions, however sophisticated or multi-levelled, of its merely physical dispositions, absent the selective logic of its epistemology. 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/d/optout.
