On 14 Jun 2014, at 01:43, LizR wrote:
On 14 June 2014 10:01, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
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?
It appears so, so far, from observation of how physical theories
that work have been constructed.
E.g.
Physical theory with words: "GOD DID IT"
Physical theory with numbers and so on:
<Untitled.jpg>
Hmm... Liz, how quick you are here. I see the point, but for an
outsider out of context, this will seem unfair.
I guess you will agree that even if God did the "world", "God did it"
is still not acceptable as an explanation.
We would like to know why and how, and what did God, for example.
yet the formula above, which looks like a solution of the SWE for a
particles in some spherical "forces" field, and this is pretty uself,
as it gives the precise amplitude of probability to find a particle
somewhere.
But yes this does not explain better than "God did it" when we ask
about a fundamental equation, where here we will ask why and how are
particles, why that equation and not some others, and where do such
laws come from, and why does it hurt, also.
The fundamental must tackle the origin of the fundamental questions
itself.
Bruno
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