On 01 Jul 2014, at 14:00, David Nyman wrote:
Whatever its independent merits or demerits, and its inherent
complexity, ISTM that comp gets closer to a way of posing questions
that might in the end yield more satisfying and complete answers. As
it happens, in so doing it rehabilitates earlier attempts in the
tradition stemming from the Greeks and Indians, and from later
exemplars such as Berkeley and Kant. And perhaps most interestingly,
its central motivation originates in, and simultaneously strikes at
the heart of, the tacit assumption of its rivals that perception and
cognition are (somehow) second-order relational phenomena attached to
some putative "virtual level" of an exhaustively "material" reduction.
The problem of the exhaustively material reduction is that it does use
comp, more or less explicitly, without being aware that it does not
work when put together with with materialism.
Comp *is* a problem for the materialist. Aristotle "solved" it by
introducing the metaphysical notion of "primary matter", which might
perhaps (that's not yet proved either) make sense with some strong
special non-comp hypothesis, but up to now the materialist fail to
provide the theory. And that is "so true" that rational materialist
ends up eliminating consciousness and/or first person.
Does comp by itself solves the problem? I think it is technically
promising, if we agree with the "ancient epistemology". It provides
directly the needed quantization to get a stable measure on the
relative computational histories, and it separates well the quanta
from the qualia, or more generally the 3p communicable, the 3p non
communicable, the 1p, etc.
Physics predicts very well eclipses, but still fail completely to
predict the first person experience of the subject verifying the
predicted eclipse. To do this, they need to use some brain-mind
identity thesis, which is violated with comp, and arguably also with
Everett QM.
We could argue that comp is the only rational theory not (yet)
contradicted by the fact, including our consciousness or first person
experiences. Materialism is put in difficulty with the usual evidences
(coming from biology, or from simplicity principle, + consciousness)
for comp.
I agree comp rehabilitates "old thinking", but sometimes the
"mechanist" assumption (unaware of Church thesis and digitalness) was
already there. Well, a form of digitalism (still without Church
thesis) was arguably present in Pythagorus and reappear with the
neoplatonists (unfortunately not all neoplatonist will be as serious
on this as Plotinus).
For this thread I want to insist on the little book by Gerson "Ancient
Epistemology".
http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Epistemology-Key-Themes-Philosophy/dp/0521871395
Using the Plotinus/arithmetic lexicon, you can clarify many points
(and refute some of Gerson's conclusion).
The books by O'Meara on Plotinus, and Myles Burnyeat on the Theaetetus
are quite interesting too.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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