On 13 Jun 2014, at 23:22, 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. 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.
Well said.
Bruno
David
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