On 13 June 2014 20:44, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: >> 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. > > ?? Too dense for me. > > I think logic can be accounted for in 3p and can be observed in brains, as > in computers.
I'm sorry if it's hard to follow my drift, but I'm also a little flummoxed that we're still flogging this particular horse. Why is such a fundamental distinction between physicalism and computationalism still so contentious after all the to-ing and fro-ing on this very point on this list over the years? We are not debating the correctness of either of the theories under discussion, but rather the distinctively different role that is played by their various conceptual elements. To summarise, then: physicalism is the hypothesis that an exhaustively reduced account of any state of affairs whatsoever can, in principle, be rendered by reference to a particular, restricted class of fundamental entities and relations. Given this scope, it must be true, ex hypothesi, that any and all higher-order derivatives, for example computational or neurological states, are re-descriptions (known or unknown) of the basic entities and relations and hence always fully reducible to them. Consequently such higher-order concepts, though explanatorily indispensible, are ontologically disposable; IOW, it's the basic physics that, by assumption, is "doing all the work". By contrast, computationalism, as formulated in the UDA, leads to the hypothesis of an arithmetical ontology resulting in a vastly redundant computational infinity. This being the case, there is a dependency from the outset on a fundamental selective principle in order to justify the appearance of a lawlike observational physics; IOW before it can advance to the stage that physicalism has already assumed at the outset. That selective principle is a "universal observational psychology", based on the universal digital machine, whose primary role is to justify the singularisation of a particular, lawlike physics that comports with observation. It should be clear, therefore, that the "psychology of observation" is not itself reducible to basic physics in this scheme of things. That would be an egregious confusion of levels. Moreover, it is not straightforwardly reducible to the underlying arithmetical entities and relations, because the selective principle in question *depends" on complex, computationally-instantiated epistemological states and their relation to modes of arithmetical truth. Absent those states and modes, there would be no physics, no observer and nothing to observe. Consequently, neither computation, nor the epistemological states it emulates, are dispensable (i.e. fully reducible) in this schema. 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.
