On 6/13/2014 2:22 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 13 June 2014 20:44, meekerdb <[email protected]> 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.
So those fundamental entities can be numbers and the relations can be functions in
arithmetic?
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".
I see nothing in your explication that really defines or distinguishes physicalism from
any other 'ism that proposes to explain everything in terms of some fundamental entities.
I tried to give a definition that "physical" meant "sharable" in an operational sense.
Did you reject that definition? In the above you seem to just assume that we know what is
meant by physicalism and physics and we just know it's inadequate.
By contrast, computationalism, as formulated in the UDA, leads to the
hypothesis of an arithmetical ontology resulting in a vastly redundant
computational infinity.
And this is different from string theory because string theory assumes real numbers which
makes it bigger than a computational infinity?
This being the case, there is a dependency
from the outset on a fundamental selective principle
Which is?
in order to
justify the appearance of a lawlike observational physics
The justification of lawlike observation in physics is a topic of research, mostly
centered around hopes that decoherence theory will explain the appearance of the classical
world, which is necessary for observation.
; 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.
You use "singularisation" a lot. I don't know what it means. I don't think said
selective principle exists. It just something Bruno says must exist for his theory to
work. So he assumes is a posteriori instead of a priori.
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.
Only because you have assumed (which was the question) that psychology cannot be realized
on the level of physics. Suppose (as I think happens in one of Smullyan's stories) you
are connected to a brain scanner and this scanner can then predict what you will do,
including such thoughts as you remember, over the next 30sec or some short period over
which you external experience is predictable. Would this imply that your psychology was
reducible to physics? I expect you will object that this isn't *everything* and that
something is missed - but what is it and is it something that can be shared in any
conceivable theory or is it simply ineffable 1p?
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
What's an epistemological state of an arithmetical entity? Sounds like an egregious
confusion of levels to me. :-)
and
their relation to modes of arithmetical truth. Absent those states and
modes, there would be no physics, no observer and nothing to observe.
At least that's Bruno's theory.
Consequently, neither computation, nor the epistemological states it
emulates, are dispensable (i.e. fully reducible) in this schema.
It's not clear what "emulates" means. I think Bruno proposes that arithmetical
computation actually instantiates modal states like belief. But I think that may be
stretching the meaning of "belief". If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act
certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too.
Brent
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